Ryan Hampton Made TIME's 100 Most Influential in Health. Ask Him Why Peer Support Works.

Daily Pulse — May 30, 2026

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TIME named Ryan Hampton to its 100 Most Influential People in Health list for 2026 this week. Hampton is a co-founder of Mobilize Recovery and a person who has been in recovery from opioid use disorder since 2017. His credentials for the recognition are concrete: he represented roughly 130,000 opioid victims in the Purdue Pharma and Sackler settlement proceedings that returned $850 million for addiction treatment and recovery programs, and his organization has distributed more than 900,000 naloxone doses across 24 states since 2019. His profile on TIME’s list is a short piece. It doesn’t mention the part that matters most — why peer support, the work his life now represents, is one of the most mechanistically sound interventions in addiction medicine.

A SAMHSA workforce study released this week surveyed 3,200 peer recovery support specialists nationally. Seventy-eight percent of the people in those jobs have personal lived experience with substance use disorder. That is not a coincidence. It is the design principle. Shared lived experience produces something that clinical training alone cannot produce: the neurological response associated with social recognition and belonging in a person who has spent years, sometimes decades, experiencing the social isolation that accompanies active addiction.

The Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General synthesized eight neuroimaging studies on social connection in recovery last month. The consistent finding: peer support activates the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens circuits associated with social reward at a higher rate than clinical interaction alone. The oxytocin response is significantly stronger when the person offering support has shared the specific experience of addiction and recovery. Chronic isolation, which is endemic in active addiction, blunts dopamine reward sensitivity over time. The research suggests peer reintegration is one of the more reliable mechanisms for beginning to restore it — not because peer specialists are better clinicians, but because their presence activates something that clinical credentials don’t.

The SAMHSA study found that peer support contact at six months post-treatment doubles 12-month sustained recovery rates compared to clinical-only follow-up. Doubles. Not incremental improvement — a 2x outcome difference. That is the kind of effect size that moves clinical practice. And yet SAMHSA’s federal grant terminations in January 2026 and the subsequent funding instability have defunded approximately 4,200 peer support positions nationally since the beginning of the year.

Hampton’s TIME recognition is meaningful as a signal about whose work the field values. The neuroscience is more meaningful as an argument for why defunding peer support is not a budget efficiency but a clinical cost with a measurable price in lives.

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For peer support connections in Arizona, Rize Recovery maintains a treatment resource guide including peer specialist programs. For more on the lived-experience category, see our recovery community coverage.