During breaks between sessions at the Northeast Mississippi Mental Health & Substance Use Recovery Summit, Andy Newsom navigated through the vendor booths, shaking hands and asking about resources. New Orleans-raised Newsom, who stood out among attendees with his head-to-toe Jacksonville Jaguars outfit and colorful tattoos, already knew several of the treatment centers in attendance. One was his former employer, the North Mississippi State Hospital.
That was a meaningful position, he told Mississippi Today, because it’s the same hospital where he finally “got clean.”
“I’ve been in treatment 19 times,” Newsom said. ”You would think I would’ve learned. But see, it took what it took.”
The final time he entered a treatment center, his mother checked him in. It was that “gift of desperation” that allowed him to slowly work toward recovery, Newsom said. After becoming fully sober on Nov. 8, 2017, he started working as a peer support counselor for youth and adults with substance use disorders.
United Way of Northeast Mississippi President Patti Parker started the Health Alliance initiative in 2021, which organized its first summit a year later. The one-day event provides local counselors, social workers and teachers a way to fulfill their mandatory continuing education requirements without having to drive three hours to Jackson.
Walking through the fifth annual summit at Tupelo’s Huntington Bank Conference Center, Tupelo-based counselor Theresa Triplett is grateful that the gathering exists. She earns most of her 15 hours of continuing education requirements a year through a conference in Biloxi, but she said she appreciates having a conference 10 minutes away from her workplace, versus several hours away.
“We’re a one-of-kind conference in north Mississippi,” said Terry Baber, director of the Northeast Mississippi Health Alliance.
Changing responses to addiction
Keynote speaker Christina Dent advocated for health-centered solutions for drug use instead of policies that push for incarceration. She founded the nonprofit organization End it For Good after her perspective on addiction was changed. She and her husband became foster parents in 2015 and then met the child’s birth mother.
Christina Dent, founder of nonprofit education organization End it For Good, gave the keynote address on harm reduction for substance use disorders at the Northeast Mississippi Mental Health & Substance Use Recovery Summit in Tupelo Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026. Credit: Anna Hu/Mississippi TodayBefore attendees seated over black tablecloths, Dent said she realized she had radically misunderstood how to treat addiction after seeing someone struggle with substance use.
“ This was me just with some different experiences and a different path to try to cope with those experiences,” she said.
At the summit, Dent also shared resources and therapies that are currently being studied. One was ibogaine, a psychoactive plant-based compound that some research suggests can rapidly reduce dependence on opioids. Dent said ibogaine helped her friend Juliana Mulligan end an intense opioid addiction after she accessed the treatment, currently illegal in the United States, at a clinic in Guatemala. Earlier in the day, Rep. Sam Creekmore, a Republican from New Albany, shared in his legislative update that Mississippi recently became the second state in the country to fund an ibogaine clinical trial.
During the summit, participants also attended sessions on the complexity of suicide, disability and prevention, and recovering from sexual trauma, among others.
Whitney Watts, left, a community specialist at Friend of God Ministries, shares her journey of recovering from addiction in a conversation moderated by Lindsay Brett, right. Sept 22, 2026. Credit: Anna Hu/Mississippi TodayIshaunna Gully, a consultant from the Jackson-based program Prevention Includes Everyone, was a first-time speaker at the summit. She shared her experiences growing up in Laurel and surviving the domestic violence that led to her becoming a wheelchair user. As her audience listened and reacted to her dramatic story, Gully talked about how mental health and substance use affected her family, from her parents to her romantic partners and herself.
“ You see the chair, you see the paralysis. You know something happened, you don’t know what,” Gully told her audience. “But how many people walk around all day long, where something is happening within you?”
From conference rooms to community
In future conferences, Baber said he hopes to offer training with Narcan, the brand name of the medicine naloxone, that can reverse opioid overdoses within minutes.
Baber said he became interested in counseling and treatment for substance use after his brother died from a stroke that may have been related to fentanyl. Now, he hopes to spread knowledge and reduce stigma for substance use disorders.
Credit: Anna Hu/Mississippi TodayHe hopes to see more families and members of the public at the summit, but he understands it’s hard to get off work. To reach more people, the Health Alliance plans to host its second “Recovery in the Park” from 2-5 p.m. at Ballard Park this Saturday.
The family event will feature free food, a petting zoo and face painting, Baber said, and no one will know who is suffering from addiction and who isn’t.
As a Narcan trainer at the community mental health center Communicare, Newsom goes wherever he can “get a foot in the door,” including into sheriff’s offices. Instead of being questioned about criminal activity, he helps train law enforcement officers in how to administer Narcan.
“ I used to be the one getting Narcan,” he said. “Now I’m telling people about it.”
Newsom said he’s made plenty of mistakes since entering recovery, spends more money than he should and has turned his spare bedroom into a shoe closet with nearly 400 pairs of tennis shoes. But he hasn’t gone back to heroin.
Sporting the Nike’s Air Max 90 shoes in the Jacksonville Jaguars’ teal and gold, he headed off to talk to the next vendor.
This story was produced with support from the Sarah Yelena Haselhorst Fund for Health Journalism.
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