The Work, The Fight,
and The Road Ahead
Two pieces of legislation. One clinical model. All driven by the same conviction: the system that wounds people owes them a way back.
George Doyle Faris III
Founder, Enoch Engine. Born in Charleston, South Carolina. After losing his mentor to fentanyl and Jimmy Newton Ubernosky to a custodial medical emergency, George built Enoch Engine to give attorneys the tools to hold systems accountable. He is currently drafting Jimmy's Law (federal) and the GA-ARRA (Georgia state) — legislation that addresses both the failure to recognize medical emergencies in custody and the addiction crisis treated as a crime instead of a condition.
Legislative Bills
Two bills. Federal accountability and state recovery.
Jimmy's Law
Jimmy Newton Ubernosky Custodial Medical Emergency Act
FederalFederal legislation mandating medical emergency recognition training for all custodial officers, zero-delay EMS dispatch protocols, and independent oversight in custodial deaths.
Key Provisions
Dedicated to
Jimmy Newton Ubernosky, 75th Ranger Regiment
GA-ARRA
Georgia Addiction Rehabilitation and Recovery Act
State — GeorgiaComprehensive Georgia state legislation that decriminalizes simple possession, replaces prosecution with a four-stage medical standard of care, and argues the federal government should bear the cost of treating injuries from substances it has designated as weapons of mass destruction.
Key Provisions
Dedicated to
Every Georgian written off as gone. Built to come back.
"The federal government has declared fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. It has sent the Navy after it."
"It has not sent a dollar to the Americans it has already wounded."
Georgia is not waiting for that dollar to arrive — but Georgia is going to send the bill.
The Lazarus Model
A Four-Stage Model for Treating Addiction — the clinical framework behind GA-ARRA
Interruption without integration
is what kills people.
The dominant approach treats addiction as a chemistry problem you can flush out and be done with. Break the physical dependence, discharge the patient, move on. That approach has a body count — and the mechanism is not mysterious.
The Problem This Names
Chronic opioid exposure drives the body into an adapted state. Receptors downregulate; the cell compensates. Detox removes the drug and lets that adaptation reverse — and it reverses fast. Receptor-level tolerance resets in days to weeks.
What does not reset in days to weeks is everything that drove the use. The pain. The patterns. The isolation. The absence of anything worth staying for. Those reverse over months to years, if they reverse at all.
That gap is the kill mechanism. A person leaves detox with a body that has forgotten how to survive their old dose, and a life that has not changed at all. When they use again — and most do — the dose that was survivable in March is lethal in June.
The detox itself sets up the fatal overdose.
The Five Stages
Assessment
What is actually wrong
Substance use disorder rarely arrives alone. Co-occurring psychiatric conditions — depression, PTSD, bipolar, ADHD, anxiety — are the norm, not the exception.
In many cases the substance came after the condition and was doing a job. Self-medicating an untreated illness has a reason no detox touches.
Full psychiatric and medical evaluation at intake: diagnostic assessment, trauma history, cognitive and neurological screening, medication review, cardiac screening.
Two-point assessment: initial screen at intake for safety and suicidality, then a definitive diagnostic evaluation after stabilization (4-6 weeks). Diagnoses during acute withdrawal are provisional.
Treatment is concurrent, not sequential. The psychiatric condition and the substance use disorder are treated together, by the same team, from the start.
Interruption
The body
Medically supervised withdrawal management. Goal: get the person safely out from under the drug's acute physical grip — never alone, never rushed.
Standard is buprenorphine. Partial agonism gives it a ceiling on respiratory depression — harder to die on than methadone or the opioid being left behind. Decades of outcome data. No cardiac monitoring needed.
Naltrexone has its place once withdrawal is complete — full blocker, nothing to overdose on — but real-world failure mode is adherence.
Ibogaine stays in the research column only, under continuous cardiac monitoring, with hERG/QT risk named. Its selling point is speed — but speed is the trap this model exists to correct.
Stage One buys time. It does not buy recovery. Treating it as the finish line is the error this entire model exists to correct.
Restoration
The brain — the stage everyone skips
Detox leaves the brain in a documented neuroadaptive state called hyperkatifeia — blunted dopamine (nothing feels good) and activated anti-reward stress signaling (everything feels worse).
This is the "flat, joyless, high-relapse window." It is not a failure of willpower. It is a measurable brain state that lasts weeks to months.
Sleep restoration is mechanism, not comfort. Disrupted sleep degrades prefrontal function, which is what supplies inhibitory control. Restoring sleep is restoring the brake.
Defined program: continued MAT held steady (not tapered early), structured sleep restoration, nutritional and metabolic repair (thiamine, magnesium), clinical contact at 2-week, 1-month, and 3-month marks.
Outcome measure: reduction in overdose and all-cause mortality across the first 90 days. That is what a legislator is buying — a measurable drop in the first-ninety-day death rate.
Integration
The reckoning
Stages One and Two return a person to functional baseline. Neither addresses why the use began. Stage Three is the concentrated therapeutic work of facing that.
For most: sustained psychotherapy — trauma-focused work, cognitive and behavioral therapy, family repair.
For some: supervised acute experience that compresses the same reckoning into a shorter window, strictly inside the research and clinical-trials pathway — screened, monitored, never improvised.
Stage Three opens the door. It does not walk anyone through it. The insight it produces is real and perishable. What determines whether it holds is Stage Four.
Continuation
The long walk — the load-bearing wall
Cue-driven craving does not fade after detox. It intensifies. This is called incubation of craving — conditioned associations get more powerful over the first months of abstinence, not less.
No molecule erases a conditioned association. Extinction and new contextual learning require repeated lived experience in a changed environment, over time. That is not a pharmacological process. It cannot be administered.
Stage Four is the only stage in which the learning that actually prevents relapse can physically occur.
The delivery mechanism is a person: the credible messenger, the life guide. Someone who has made the same crossing and keeps showing up — the one who turns a revelation into a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday.
This is not decoration on the model. It determines whether the first three stages hold — and it is the stage the entire field underfunds.
The Timeline — Why It Is The Whole Point
Stage 1 — Interruption
Days to 2 weeks
Stage 2 — Restoration
2 weeks to 3 months
Stage 3 — Integration
Weeks to months
Stage 4 — Continuation
6 months to years
The body resets in weeks. The life resets in years. Every week of that gap is a week a person is walking around with a body that has forgotten its old dose and a life that has not yet changed. A model that funds only the first two weeks has funded the opening of the gap and none of its closing.
Established
- Post-detox mortality gap is real and documented
- Medication-assisted treatment has strong evidence
- Sustained aftercare and peer support reduce relapse
- Nothing in the Lazarus thesis requires a single unproven claim
Open
- Novel and psychedelic-assisted interventions are a genuine research frontier
- Real medical risk and still-developing evidence base
- Ibogaine: hERG/QT cardiac risk, Schedule I, deaths in unsupervised settings
- Texas committed $50M ($100M expanding) — MS, CO, OK, TN following
Why Now
States are appropriating serious public money for addiction interruption. Texas, Mississippi, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have all moved in the last eighteen months — and the political coalition is unusually broad: veterans' organizations and rural conservative legislators.
Every one of those appropriations funds Stage One.
A state that spends tens of millions interrupting withdrawal and then discharges people into nothing has bought itself the mortality gap at scale. Georgia has not yet moved on any of this — that is an opportunity to build the model correctly the first time.
Written off as gone.
Built to come back.
Enoch Engine — Truth Through Analysis. Justice Through Evidence.
In honor of Jimmy Newton Ubernosky, 75th Ranger Regiment. Gone too soon. Never forgotten.