“I’ve been dealing with this on and off for six years, so watching [people] I grew up with go through it was really hard for me,” Khari says.

Emma is another Perry kid, one I knew through mutual friends, who turned to heroin after high school. She started smoking weed at age 12; by 15, she and her friends were taking Oxycodone. At 17, her boyfriend taught her how to shoot up heroin, saying that he was protecting her by showing her how to do it safely. When her friends left for college, she moved into her boyfriend’s grandmother’s basement, and she says that’s when things turned for the worse. She felt like she didn’t have anything to look forward to, as if she was doing nothing with her life.

“I remember the day all my friends left for college,” she says. “I was stuck in Perry and it just made me want to get high even more.”

For the next six years, Emma was in and out of relatives’ basements, friends’ couches, and rehab centers in California and Florida for months at a time. Once, on a binge while in treatment in California, she crashed the car of her employer into the car of the owner of the rehab center. She was kicked out, and moved back to Perry to attempt to start her life over … again. She relapsed in 10 days, spending the next two months getting high and using up the entire $6,000 she had saved.

Now seven months sober at a different rehab center in California, she has been posting her progress on Facebook routinely: “90 days sober!” received over 200 likes and comments.

“There’s people [commenting] that I haven’t seen in years, people that knew me from I was little,” she says. “My mom’s friends are saying ‘I remember when you were little’ and saying that they are proud of me.” She says seeing people from her childhood showing that they care helps keep her accountable for her sobriety. The feedback confirms that a community cares about her recovery. “It makes me feel really good, you know?”

Foster, the rehab-center executive, says the shield of the screen may make people feel more comfortable admitting they’ve been an addict than they would be in real life. “It’s safer than going in to a room and saying ‘Hi, I’m Rich and I’m an addict,’” he says.

But Angela, another classmate who popped back on my timeline last year with an announcement of newfound sobriety, is more skeptical of the role social media can play in recovery. She says that while the encouragement from Facebook can be uplifting, it doesn’t help people understand the intensity of addiction.

“Liking someone’s status about clean time is a good way to remain supportive without too much risk, especially for people you’ve been close to who have been hurt by broken promises and relapse,” she says, but posting about her problems in the throes of addiction would likely scare people away from reaching out. “You can’t tell people, ‘I’m so sick, I’m dying, please give me money so I don’t have to go fuck the dope boy or go rob somebody.’”