Acton’s childhood reads like a Dickensian nightmare set in Youngstown: parents divorced at three, sexual abuse by her stepfather, a basement below an antique shop for a home, a tent for a winter roof. Yet she rose – accelerated medical programme, public health leadership, compassion burnished by lived trauma. When Republican Governor Mike DeWine, a Bush-era conservative, picked her in 2019 to tackle Ohio’s opioid crisis, neither realised she’d soon lead a war on a silent, mutating enemy. Acton’s childhood reads like a Dickensian nightmare set in Youngstown: parents divorced at three, sexual abuse by her stepfather, a basement below an antique shop for a home, a tent for a winter roof. Yet she rose – accelerated medical programme, public health leadership, compassion burnished by lived trauma. When Republican Governor Mike DeWine, a Bush-era conservative, picked her in 2019 to tackle Ohio’s opioid crisis, neither realised she’d soon lead a war on a silent, mutating enemy.
