Today, Brawley helps lead a drug-recovery program in hopes of reducing overdose deaths from prescription drugs and heroin. Photo by Travis Long/ says she’s been off drugs for two years now.
I’ve done 10 a day.” Samantha Brawley, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, right, hugs a woman who was celebrating a milestone in her addiction recovery during a peer support group at Webster Baptist Church in Sylva last year. “I began taking two or three a day for a year, maybe two years,” said Brawley, 30, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Samantha Brawley got hooked on painkillers after high school, an addiction that stole nearly a decade and cost her most of the savings that were supposed to help improve her life.įinding her next Percocet, and the next, was easy on the Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee reservation home to roughly 8,000 people in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina.
