GoKawiilErin McNulty had been missing for weeks when her mother, Linda, sat down on a chair in her living room, exhausted. Linda had put in her usual seven-day workweek at the antiques shop she runs near Burlington, Vermont. She’d spent her free evenings driving around, trying to track down her daughter. Erin, 45 at the time, had been using methamphetamine for years.
Her substance use started in high school—first alcohol, then marijuana, and eventually heroin. Erin’s brother used heroin, too. When Linda found out, she started driving her kids to a methadone clinic three hours away in Massachusetts. The methadone helped, but it made Erin feel tired all the time, so she started using cocaine to stay awake. There were stretches of sobriety—she had her daughter during one of them, in 2008. The family took trips to the Great Escape waterpark in New York and Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. There were also several overdoses and attempts at rehab. Eventually, Erin switched to suboxone and stopped using heroin. But when a friend introduced her to meth, Linda says, “Erin was gone.”
Linda turned on the TV and was flipping through the channels when a 60 Minutes segment caught her attention. It was early 2024, and the show focused on a procedure that might help people with substance use disorders. Linda immediately thought of her daughter. The procedure involved beaming ultrasound through the skull to treat the brain. Researchers at West Virginia University were testing it on people with Alzheimer’s disease and addiction.
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The neurosurgeon behind the procedure, Ali Rezai, was a pioneer in the field of deep brain stimulation, which involves cutting into the skull to implant electrodes that can reach neurons deep in the brain. He was excited by the ability of ultrasound—the imaging tool best known for observing fetal development during pregnancy—to reach into the same brain structures without breaking the skin. There would be no drilling into the skull, no poking or prodding the brain’s delicate tissue. The ultrasound could be delivered in 20 minutes, and patients could go home the same day.
Linda couldn’t believe what she was seeing on TV. She yelled out to her teenage granddaughter, Erin’s child, to come watch. “Look at this doctor,” she said. “They’re fixing people!” It didn’t matter that the trial was happening more than 600 miles away. She was going to get Erin to West Virginia. But first she had to find her.
Rezai, who was born in Iran, grew up in Los Angeles, and completed his neurosurgical training in New York, never expected to end up in West Virginia. “My colleagues said, ‘You’re committing academic suicide,’” he says. But Rezai saw an opportunity to pursue new treatments at the epicenter of the US addiction crisis. Almost 45 million Americans meet the criteria for a substance use disorder, and although drug overdose deaths in the US have been declining for the past three years, there were nearly 70,000 such deaths in 2025. West Virginia has the highest rate of overdose deaths in the country by population, more than double the national average.