Cheri Hartman—Jamie Waldrop

Cheri Hartman and Jamie Waldrop’s relationship was a local partnership aimed at getting people with opioid addiction into treatment instead of jail. In 2016, they joined psychologist Hartman, civic leader Waldrop, Janine Underwood, and local police officers in an effort to bridge the divide between the criminal justice and health care systems. The account establishes the initiative’s purpose and the obstacles around it, but does not specify its procedures or report a measurable outcome.

Participants and Context

Jamie Waldrop brought civic involvement as well as personal experience of addiction in her family. She was a community leader whose two children had become addicted, first to pills and then to heroin. Her work with Hartman took place amid a broader pattern in which families struggled to find support and to make institutions respond to the crisis.

The book describes those institutional gaps as especially consequential for families trying to keep an addicted loved one alive while navigating systems focused on either health care or criminal justice. Shame could keep families’ experiences private, while the people seeking help faced the practical challenge of reaching care. Waldrop and Hartman’s collaboration addressed that divide through an explicit attempt to redirect people from incarceration to treatment.

The 2016 Diversion Effort

In 2016, Hartman teamed up with Waldrop, Underwood, and local police officers to try to divert Roanoke users from jail into treatment. The partnership connected community advocates and health professionals with law enforcement around a shared referral goal. Its significance lies in that cross-system approach: rather than treating arrest and treatment as unrelated responses, the effort sought a route from police contact to care.

The available account does not detail particular referrals, eligibility rules, or individual cases handled by the team. It therefore supports describing the partnership as an attempt to build a diversion pathway, not as a program whose success or reach is established in the text.

Barriers to Treatment

Hartman and her husband, psychiatrist David Hartman, encountered bureaucratic logjams and political indifference while working to address opioid-use disorder. Stigma surrounding Buprenorphine treatment presented another obstacle. That stigma could complicate access to a treatment approach even when the broader aim was to move people away from jail and toward health care.

The book shows how stigma also appeared in peer-support settings: people taking Buprenorphine could be treated as not truly abstinent, despite Medication-assisted treatment’s acceptance in an organization’s official policy. That example concerns another person’s experience, not a documented outcome of Hartman and Waldrop’s partnership, but it illustrates the wider cultural resistance their treatment-oriented work confronted.

Significance of the Partnership

Hartman and Waldrop’s collaboration represents a practical response to the separation between criminal justice and health care that the book identifies as a recurring feature of the epidemic. Its stated aim was to divert people from jail into treatment; the account also makes clear that referrals alone operated within a landscape shaped by administrative obstacles, limited political support, and contested views of medication-based care.

The partnership is therefore presented as an effort to connect institutions that often worked at cross-purposes, rather than as a completed solution to the region’s treatment-access problems. The evidence records who joined the effort, what it sought to do, and the resistance surrounding treatment, while leaving its eventual results unspecified.