Missy Jellison Beat Meth Working the Program Minnesota Just Defunded

Missy Jellison works the bus terminal in downtown Duluth most days, and she has a line she uses on people who won’t stop walking. “We’re there all day,” she tells them. “Stop by if you want.” No pitch, no clipboard, no follow-up questions about whether they’re ready to change anything. Just an open door and a folding table with naloxone, clean syringes, and a Harm Reduction Sisters hoodie in the Minnesota cold. Two years ago, Jellison was on the other side of that table. Now she’s the one holding it open, and on June 9, the State of Minnesota mailed her employer a letter that put the whole thing in doubt.

A state that spent a decade building a harm reduction infrastructure just proved that infrastructure was never actually stable — and the people running it, most of whom have used the drugs they now hand out supplies for, were the last to find out.

The letter went to eight organizations at once: Harm Reduction Sisters in Duluth, Southside Harm Reduction Services and the Aliveness Project in Minneapolis, the Rural AIDS Action Network, Red Door Clinic, Clinic 555, NorthPoint Health & Wellness, and the Native American Community Clinic. All eight had been drawing on the same HIV Prevention grant pipeline for syringe access, naloxone distribution, and HIV/hepatitis C testing. All eight learned on the same day that the money stops at the end of the month. For Harm Reduction Sisters, the number is $150,000 a year — not a rounding error for an organization that runs on a shoestring, but the difference between a mobile outreach van on the road five days a week and one parked for good.

Sue Purchase, who founded Harm Reduction Sisters in 2018 after moving back to the Duluth-Cloquet area where she grew up, told MinnPost she didn’t see it coming: “I was honestly surprised to hear that they’d made this decision.” Mary McCarthy at the Rural AIDS Action Network was blunter about where things stand: “I’m praying for magic to happen, to be perfectly honest with you.” Brad Ray, a senior researcher at the Research Triangle Institute and a Harm Reduction Sisters board member, named the pattern without softening it: “Support for harm reduction is drying up.” A Minnesota Department of Health spokesperson, Andrea Ahneman, confirmed the state’s hands are tied for now: “Unfortunately it seems like the funding is not available to continue.”

The state didn’t invent this pressure. It caught it from Washington.

Purchase traces the state pullback to something bigger than a Minnesota budget line: federal scrutiny and fraud investigations that have put every dollar flowing through SAMHSA’s harm reduction channel under a microscope, on top of an April 24 SAMHSA “Dear Colleague” letter — signed by acting agency leader Chris Carroll — that told grantees federal money can no longer buy the syringes, pipes, and fentanyl or xylazine test strips that agency leadership now describes as facilitating illegal drug use. That’s not a local story — it’s the same federal current that’s been running through this newsroom’s coverage of test-strip funding all summer, and it’s worth naming the mechanism plainly, since it’s the same mechanism every time: harm reduction supplies are cheap, they’re popular with the people who use them, and they’re the easiest line item for an administration to cut when it wants a visible signal that it is being “tough” on drugs, because nobody who votes in the next election is the one who dies from the cut. $281 million in new SAMHSA funding opportunities got announced the same summer eight Minnesota programs got their supply money pulled — the federal government is not short on money for addiction. It has decided which parts of addiction it will fund.

If that framing sounds familiar, it should — you’ve watched this exact fight before, even if you weren’t born for the first round of it. In 1988, at the height of the AIDS crisis and led by Senator Jesse Helms, Congress banned the use of federal money for syringe exchange programs, on the theory that clean needles would look like the government endorsing drug use. The ban held, almost without interruption, for the next 21 years, while HIV moved through people who inject drugs at rates the rest of the country was managing to bring down. Congress finally lifted it in December 2009 — “ban lifted,” the headlines said, like the fight was over — and then reinstated it in 2011 the moment the House changed hands, because the theory was never really about the evidence. The evidence had been settled since the mid-1990s. The theory was about what a needle exchange looks like to someone who has never needed one. That fight took until 2015 and a rural Indiana HIV outbreak to fully resolve. The current fight has the same shape, a different drug, and a compressed timeline — and the people caught in the compression are, once again, not the ones setting policy.

If that framing sounds familiar, it should — you’ve watched this exact fight before, even if you weren’t born for the first round of it.

Missy Jellison is the argument the policy debate keeps skipping

Here is what gets lost when a funding fight gets covered as a funding fight: the people doing this work are not case studies in a program evaluation. Jellison told MinnPost in May, before any of this funding news broke, exactly what two years off methamphetamine looks like when nobody made you promise to be someone else: “I’ve been off meth for two full years. But I still smoke weed and dabble in mushrooms.” She is not managing a relapse. She is a peer navigator and mobile delivery coordinator who found the thing that worked for her, and the thing that worked for her is now her job. “I loved drugs, but I love helping people, too,” she said. “I’ve put my two loves together with this work, and I’m making a difference.” That sentence is doing something a grant renewal application can’t: it’s telling you that the program isn’t just keeping other people alive, it kept her alive too, and gave her a way to stay that way that a thirty-day abstinence program never offered.

She’s not the only one. Delainey Hardy, another peer navigator at Harm Reduction Sisters, is HIV-positive and was formerly an IV drug user from the Leech Lake reservation. She told MinnPost that Purchase — who is herself in recovery — brought her in when she needed it most: “Sue took me under her wing. I started becoming more open about my status. Without their support, I don’t think I would’ve made it this far.” Hardy calls the work “a calling,” one that lets her serve “not only my Native people and women, but also people living with HIV.” Ry Preap, the program’s director of operations, put the contrast with traditional treatment in the plainest terms available: “When I was dealing with my own drug and alcohol use, everything that was being poured onto me was, ‘You have to stay abstinent.’ But harm reduction takes a different stance: ‘You messed up. Whatever. Let’s move on from here.’”

If you’ve ever been told “you messed up, whatever, let’s move on from here” by someone who meant it, you already know what these eight organizations are actually built out of, and it isn’t syringes. It’s the one piece of the addiction treatment system willing to say the thing that gets you to come back tomorrow instead of the thing that makes a funder feel virtuous. Purchase describes the door policy directly: “If you start using again, I want you to feel like you can come back here. We are not judging you.” That’s not a slogan. For someone who has been discharged from three treatment programs for relapsing, it’s the only door in town that doesn’t lock behind them.

What still stands, and what the reader in Duluth needs tonight

None of this touches naloxone access at the federal level — Narcan remains available and federally funded as an overdose reversal medication regardless of how the HIV Prevention grant fight resolves, and Harm Reduction Sisters has said the mobile outreach continues in some form even as it hunts for replacement funding. The syringe and testing side of the program is what’s actually at risk, not the piece that reverses an overdose in the moment. That distinction matters if you’re the person deciding whether to carry a kit tonight: this is still yours, funded or not.

If you’re a case manager or discharge planner referring clients north of the Twin Cities, this is the week to call ahead rather than assume: confirm which of the eight programs are still running full syringe and testing services versus naloxone-only, because the answer is likely to be different program to program by September. What it can’t promise is the rest of it — the testing, the relationship, the “stop by if you want” that only works because someone shows up with the folding table five days a week. Sue Purchase named the deeper problem in May, months before the letter arrived, in a way that reads now like she saw it coming even while telling MinnPost in August she didn’t: “You can’t really plan on anything. The politics of today impact how people trust or believe in [harm reduction]. And a shifting attitude out of Washington just destabilizes the whole movement.” That instability is the actual cost of this funding model — not just the $150,000, but the fact that an organization built around trust has to keep proving, year over year, on a federal government’s schedule, that trust is worth funding. The treatment and recovery system Rize helps people navigate assumes these programs exist as an on-ramp; when the on-ramp gets a 21-day notice, the whole map changes for the person standing at the bus terminal deciding whether today is the day.

The politics of today impact how people trust or believe in [harm reduction].

Jellison is still going to be at that terminal tomorrow, letter or no letter, because the work she does there is the same work that got her off meth two years ago, and she’s not walking away from either half of that sentence. The question this funding cut actually asks isn’t whether harm reduction works — that argument ended in the 1990s and got re-litigated and re-won a half-dozen times since. It’s whether Minnesota, and the federal government behind it, is willing to fund the version of “getting better” that looks like Missy Jellison instead of the version that looks better in a press release.