Like so many others across the country, Nicole Walmsley’s road to addiction began with prescription pain-killers following surgery.

As reported in the Pacific Standard, Nicole began abusing various prescription pain meds. “I became addicted,” she says. “They didn’t take me off properly and I got bad.” In 2007, a dealer who had been selling Nicole Oxycodones, a different opioid pain pill, hinted at something cheaper: heroin. She was sick; this was remedial.

Months after, cognizant of her self-decline, Nicole gave up custody of Haley to her parents after her first trafficking charge. “It’s not that I didn’t love her,” she says. “I was just gone.”

Now, after being sober for over four years , Nicole has spent the better part of her recovery in what she calls fight mode, driving all across Ohio to save addicts in the midst of the state’s rising opioid epidemic.

Since 2015, when the state’s opioid epidemic hit record numbers, Nicole has been a major figure in a loosely connected coalition of treatment coordinators, police liaisons, and 12-Step program leaders convinced that the only way to remedy Ohio’s public-health emergency is to take action on their own.

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To read more about Nicole Walmsley’s remarkable work fighting the opioid crisis all across Ohio, please visit Pacific Standard.