SPOTLIGHT RACE: Ryan Hampton for NV-AD04
Home truly means Nevada for Ryan. It’s where he started his small business in 2019 and married his husband Sean in 2023, where he frequents dog parks with his two-year-old puppy Quincy, and where he is always on the lookout for local restaurants or ice cream parlors to frequent. It’s also where he started a nonprofit organization advocating for people with addiction and mental health challenges.
Ryan knows firsthand the challenges that families face around kitchen tables every night. He and his youngest sister were raised by his mother, a public-school teacher who often took on second or third jobs to support their family. She would come home at 10pm, exhausted from working night school after teaching all day. Year-round, she kept a sign over the mantle that sparkled with the word: Believe.
Ryan sat next to his mother at the kitchen table while she juggled the bills—her, balancing the checkbook and him, diligently finishing his homework after making sure his little sister got hers squared away, too. At that table, Ryan learned that it isn’t what you have that matters. It’s what you care about that is priceless.
With his father absent during his teenage years, Ryan’s mother and grandmother taught him what do-your-part resilience looks like. They worked together as a family, each person pitching in to help the others. Ryan often picked up his youngest sister at school on his bike and cared for her in the afternoons. It was a hard road. Many days, it seemed like the strain would be never-ending.
But Ryan also learned from his mother and grandmother how to believe in people before they believe in themselves. At one of his lowest moments, Ryan’s mother took the Believe sign off the wall and handed it to him. She said, “This is why I know you will be okay. Just take the next right step and believe.” Ryan passes on that same spark of belief within the communities he works with every day.
From the strong role models of his mother and grandmother, Ryan has built on the foundation of faith in people. His resilience has been tested many times. However, each challenge has brought new victories—and new joys to share with his community and loved ones.
Like many in our state and across the country, in his twenties, Ryan went through a period of addiction after being prescribed painkillers for a hiking injury. To get healthy again, he learned to navigate a complex and unfriendly healthcare system. He saw from the inside how insurance companies harmed his friends and family, many of whom were the victims of large corporations making a profit from people’s pain. He was determined to stop this fatal cycle and save his own life, and the lives of those he loved and cared about.
Upon his entry into recovery in 2015, Ryan began organizing. Within three years, he had met thousands of people who shared their experiences about how addiction impacted their communities. He traveled across the United States to talk with families and people, learning about the gaps in our healthcare system and how we can fix them. He was inspired to work for change at a higher level by lifting these many voices. What started as a whisper became a roar. Ryan’s belief in big ideas helped him lead a team of bipartisan advocates around the country, who successfully championed hundreds of pieces of legislation to offer addiction support services. And after losing one of his closest friends to a preventable overdose, he helped to bring corporations and nonprofits together to offer 800,000 lifesaving units of the overdose medication Naloxone in 24 states at zero cost.
In 2018, Ryan connected online with a mother whose son died of an overdose. They put their heads together to organize a large-scale action at Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin. Together, they organized over 500 people outside of Purdue to demand accountability, share their stories, push for resources to end overdoses in their communities, and stand in solidarity with survivors.
This was only one milestone on Ryan’s journey. As a prominent face and voice of recovery advocacy, he kept pushing forward. He helped to write lifesaving legislation to protect consumers, testified at state legislatures and at congress, and participated in court depositions on behalf of families and survivors. In 2019, he was appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to represent over 120,000 victims in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case. It wasn’t about politics or party lines for Ryan: victims and families’ interests were foremost, as he worked with (and against) both Republican and Democratic Attorneys General to make sure people’s needs came before government needs.
Nevada is a “can-do” state where big ideas are possible—and Ryan has the experience to bring kitchen-table wisdom to our State Assembly. He knows how to combat toxic politics. And he knows that small changes add up to visionary transformations. Like fighting insurance companies for mental health parity, to ensure that mental health is treated as health. Or making sure that housing and healthcare are accessible to everyone.
Creating change means balancing Nevada’s checkbook so that there’s enough to go around—from creating jobs and supporting our small businesses to taking care of our veterans, investing in our students and teachers, and ending our mental health and overdose crisis. Together, we can address the challenges that impact our community instead of sweeping people under the rug. Ryan believes all of this is possible. And he has the grit, know how, and passion to get things done—for us.
https://www.ryanfornevada.com/