A few weeks ago I was shopping at PROCAM on Ohio Pike for a printer and some story tips. Josh, the manager, had just finished helping me load my new printer into the backseat of my car.
“So you got any tips for me, Josh?” I asked. “Any interesting or notable customers I could do a story on?”
Josh thought about it for a second. His eyes scanned over the traffic on Ohio Pike as his mind sorted through the hundreds of customers he sees in his store. “Shane Reinert comes in here a lot,” he said. “Have you seen his stuff?”
I had not. Eagerly, Josh escorted me back into his store and took me behind the counter where he pulled YouTube up on one of his employee’s computers. He played a video featuring Brandon Novak of MTV’s Jackass fame sitting in front of a black backdrop talking about his struggle with heroin addiction. It was titled, Addiction: Tomorrow is Going to be Better, and the video had over one million views.
Josh clicked though several other videos on Shane’s channel – each one featured a different person sitting in front of that same black backdrop telling their own story of opiate addiction and recovery. The production value of each video was on the high end – great lighting, flawless audio, professional.
“It’s called The Addiction Series,” Josh said. “And it’s powerful stuff.”
Within minutes I found Shane on Facebook and arranged a meeting to learn more about him and his project.
The Filmmaker
We met a few days later at the Hope Community Center in Amelia off Ohio Pike. I rarely find myself that far out on 125, but when I do I am always reminded how closely the commercial landscapes of rural and inner city communities resemble each other.
Communities like Amelia and Avondale may have quite a few differences but their commercial strips look exactly the same: fast food, pay-day loans, gold exchanges, attorneys, liquor stores, pawn shops, and of course pharmacies. Now that I think of it, that’s pretty much everywhere these days. <insert sad face>
Shane created the first installment of his Addiction Series four years ago after he started to notice the impact the opiate epidemic was having around him. Being from Amelia and living in Bethel, Shane was pretty much living at ground zero. “I just kept hearing about all these people overdosing and dying and stealing, and I thought someone has to be getting better out there.” Shane was looking for stories of recovery to counter the hopeless narrative of addiction.
It was Shane’s wife who put him into contact with his first story. “It was on a Saturday and this guy came in and sat in a chair. I had a couple cameras set up and he talked for about 45 minutes. I didn’t edit anything out, we just went straight through, I uploaded it you YouTube and the response was unbelievable.”
Shane’s first video has since received over a hundred thousand views and the man he interviewed has been asked to make speeches in Chicago. Since he started Shane has interviewed more than 80 people and his videos have been viewed in 217 countries.
The formula is simple. Typically, a recovering addict sits in front of Shane’s camera and tells the story of their addiction and eventual recovery. There are no tricks. No dramatic music. No cuts. No script. It’s 100% raw. Just a human being in front of a black back drop talking to a camera about their struggles in life. And it all happens right there in the Hope Community Center.
“Just start with your name and go on from there.” Those are the only directions for Shane’s interviewees. You never hear Shane’s voice in the videos. He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t try to lead them in any direction. He just sits there quietly and listens though a pair of headphones like a therapist DJ.
What could be a more honest and transparent way to tell a story? If you want to know why so many people are eager to share their tragic stories with Shane, it’s because they trust him. Shane had people as far away as New York travel all the way to Amelia to share their story with him.
The Activist
The Addiction Series videos seem to be therapeutic for both the speaker and the listener. Shane gets emails and messages everyday from people who want to thank him for sharing his stories. Many have claimed his series saved their lives. Reading the comments on Shane’s videos, you can see people implying how the videos inspired their own recoveries.
Shane has been contacted by people from as far as Iran and Nigeria. As the opiate epidemic spreads to other nations less equipped or less willing to handle the problem, Shane is told his videos are the only source of inspiration some can find to see that recovery is possible.
But perhaps more organic than Shane’s stories is Shane himself. Shane used to run Anderson Community Television station before it shut down. Today, when he’s not producing videos for his Addiction Series, Shane delivers pizzas for Dominoes near Eight Mile. He and his wife are raising two sons.
The grassroots nature of Shane and his project make it all the more real. The fact that the Addiction Series isn’t run by some media corporation based out of Virginia, but rather a modest working class man right here on the east side is inspiring.
The Challenges
The Addiction Series is 100% voluntary. Shane makes no profit for his efforts, so he depends on donations of funds and equipment to keep his series going. In one surprising gesture, PROCAM allowed Shane to purchase much of his equipment at cost to lighten the burden for him.
But to make things harder for Shane, YouTube permanently demonetized his channel as part of a controversial cost saving effort that recently went into effect.
They told Shane he can’t make money off ads because they detected suspicious clicking on his account. The only thing Shane can think of is because he would click on his own videos from time to time to see how his lighting setup would display on different devices that YouTube may have thought he was trying to up his own view count – or at least that was their excuse.
But Shane shrugged off YouTube’s penny pinching and just kept going. After all, YouTube isn’t the only way he can get his stories out there; he’s already made it to the big screen. The Midway Theater in Bethel showed two of Shane’s stories in an event they called a Night of Hope. There, people who suffer from addiction and/or their families were invited to gather together to watch Shane’s stories of recovery. Typically, the person featured in the story will be present to answer questions from the audience after the screening.
“It’s great to be able to make those kinds of connections that way,” Shane told me. “You always dream of having your stuff on the big screen and to be able to do that and help people at the same time is just phenomenal.”
Events like the Night of Hope were such a success that Shane was offered to take the show to other cities, however, it seems like many people and organizations expect Shane to foot the bill. This has forced Shane to miss opportunities in places like Georgia and an Indian reservation in North Dakota due to financial restraints. Nonetheless, Shane keeps pressing on while holding on to his principles and the integrity of his project.
After several pitches to various production companies and networks, one company expressed interest in working with Shane, but required him to depict addicts actively using drugs in his videos, presumably to add cheap shock content to entice viewership. Staying true to his own vision and with a refusal to exploit the people he features, Shane passed on the offer.
“I just can’t do that,” Shane said. “I don’t think that’s what I’m meant to do. I’ve got doctors using my videos in their practices, teachers using them in their classrooms, and people even tell me they’ve seen my videos in prison.”
That makes sense because there is certainly an educational side to Shane’s project. When former addicts tell their stories of struggle in such a raw, unscripted format, little pieces of truth leak out – some of which expose parts of a broken system.
For example, check out Bri’s story below where she talks about the practice of body brokering, or patient brokering. It’s an unfortunately common practice, especially in Florida and California, where addicts who seek therapy are targeted and sold as investments to unethical treatment centers who then max out their insurance coverage for often bogus or insufficient therapy. Just when you thought addicts couldn’t have it any worse.
Determination
The more I talked to Shane, the more I couldn’t ignore his genuine desire to see his work help people. As a man of faith, it drives him and gives him purpose. “God has a plan for me,” Shane said. “I’ll work 60-70 hours some weeks between this and delivering pizzas. Sometime I forget what sleep is.”
But there are other risks for Shane besides losing sleep. He must also watch out for those who seek to take advantage of him. Although Shane is always looking for someone to collaborate with, he is aware that addiction has created an industry that many are attempting to cash in on. For Shane, his project is not about self-promotion or sensationalism, but he runs into people who clearly have those motivations.
“I need to be careful to not get pulled into someone’s game,” Shane told me. “I don’t want to be famous. I don’t love the attention. I just want to help people, but I have to avoid people who just want to use me and the series to promote themselves – and that is becoming more and more prevalent.”
I think a man with a vision who is on a path he believes has been laid out before him can be unstoppable. Where others may have sold out already or given up all together, Shane stays on course. That is not to say he doesn’t see room for growth or improvement. “I’m excited for what this year will bring,” Shane told me. “I think the series is going to go in a direction that it has not gone in before.”
I wish nothing but the best for Shane. The opiate epidemic has always been a much larger problem than anyone wanted to admit. Someday we’ll all look back and wonder how so many people were taken away so easily and without protection. Around 50,000 people died from opiate overdoses in 2017 alone. The reaction? Practical silence. People like Shane who amplify the voices of those who have survived and are ringing the alarms should be commended.
Shane has also recently started work on a documentary about human trafficking – a topic that dovetails directly with the opiate epidemic. If you want to know how you can help support Shane and his projects, you can contact him through his Facebook page by following the link here.
Related article: Anderson is Disconnected and Disengaged: Here’s How We Could Fix That and Save Lives
Did you miss the previous Beechmont Story: Watch Your Head at the Lake? Read it right here.
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