The Pain Clinic · Story · The Civic Commons

Portsmouth, Ohio — ground zero of the opioid epidemic — found its way back through a Saturday morning CrossFit workout called "the Pain Clinic." A play on the pill mills, it became a gathering space where millionaires worked out alongside people from trailers, and people in recovery joined as community members, not pa…

Portsmouth, Ohio was ground zero of the opioid epidemic — the town where pill mills were invented. Factories had shut down, high-potency opioids were flooding in, and the community was devastated. By the mid-2000s, street corners were dangerous and hope was scarce.

Dale King grew up in Portsmouth, joined the Army after 9/11, did two tours in Iraq as a Special Forces intelligence officer, and came back around 2007. He opened a Saturday morning CrossFit workout he called "the Pain Clinic" — a play on the pill mills. Instead of coming in for oxy, you came in to throw kettlebells and barbells around. A different sort of pain.

At first, it wasn't about recovery. It was about giving people hope through something hard and shared. People from all different backgrounds — older, younger, wealthy, working-class — started showing up. The gym became a gathering space that happened to involve exercise.

Then Billy Dever appeared. Billy was a highly educated lawyer, the chief legal officer of a major recovery center in the region, a former addict himself, and an incredible athlete. He had an idea: what if the gym — which was already building community and purpose — could serve people in recovery? Billy led the charge of bringing CrossFit into the recovery center's in-patient treatment. People who had overdosed on Friday were doing workouts by Monday.

The documentary Small Town Strong, directed by veteran filmmaker Chase Millsap, captured what happened next. They filmed characters going through their transformation — from day zero in treatment, to getting sober, to getting jobs, becoming community leaders, and competing as athletes. Sarah Wilson, who had overdosed nine times, tells her own story of transformation through CrossFit and community across the film.

What made Dale's gym different was the radical mixing. Millionaires worked out alongside people who lived in trailers. People coming out of treatment joined the community gym rather than staying in recovery-only spaces. The stigma of "I used to be an addict, I can't come here" dissolved. People were no longer perceived as addicts but as members of the community. As Dale tells it, it doesn't matter where you came from — it's that you're here now, you're clean, you're sober, and you're healthy.

The tragic loss of Billy Dever to an accidental fentanyl overdose during the filming deepened the urgency of the story. Billy had been so instrumental in the community's comeback that the filmmakers knew they couldn't let it go untold.

What made Portsmouth's recovery remarkable was that the solution didn't come from Washington. Nobody from outside showed up with an answer. The town that invented the pill mills invented a way out, too. As Dale put it, you have to care that somebody in your neighborhood is dying. If you can start there, you can start seeing that we all have a responsibility for this whole thing. Community starts with a willingness to do something hard alongside someone — and saying "hi" after.