Bob Garrett

Bob Garrett is the director of the Bristol Recovery Center, a faith-based treatment program built through sustained collaboration among local institutions. His work helped turn a donated former nursing home into a 240-bed facility, while his changing views on medication-assisted treatment made him an advocate for evidence-based care in communities where addiction was often treated as a moral failing.

Building the Bristol Recovery Center

Garrett spent three years forging partnerships with local courts, police, churches, and social-service agencies to bring the former nursing home into use as a treatment center. The facility was designed to house people recovering from addiction, veterans, young people aging out of foster care, and people leaving jail. Its model joined treatment with practical support: participants would eventually pay to live at the center after finding jobs with help from its staff.

The center’s design connected recovery to the conditions of life after treatment. Housing, employment assistance, and institutional collaboration were part of the plan, rather than treatment being treated as an isolated clinical episode. Garrett’s work thus offered one local response to the gaps between health care, criminal justice, and social support described elsewhere in the book.

A Change in Approach to Medication

Garrett initially planned to prohibit medication-assisted treatment. His position changed after he served on a community coalition led by Robert Pack, a public-health professor at East Tennessee State University. The reversal mattered in a setting where some recovery volunteers remained divided over whether addiction should be treated with medication, despite evidence supporting it.

After changing his mind, Garrett began promoting evidence-based treatment in churches across the state through dinners and presentations on addiction. He emphasized communicating care for people with addiction and challenging the assumption that they were bad people or that addiction could be adequately addressed by calling it a sin. His public advocacy connected the center’s practical approach with an effort to change how congregations understood the people seeking help.

Narrative Role and Significance

Garrett appears as an example of how a community-based partnership could overcome rigid institutional boundaries and indifference. The book presents the Bristol center alongside other emerging recovery efforts as a sign that cooperation among public agencies, faith communities, and treatment providers could produce alternatives to a system in which people repeatedly moved between jail and inadequate care.

His importance lies not in a solitary act of leadership but in the combination of persistence and revision: he helped assemble a broad local coalition, and he altered the center’s treatment policy when new collaboration changed his understanding of care. The result was a program that paired housing and job support with an increasingly evidence-based view of addiction.