WRAL Documentary: Searching for a Fix
The following program is shot in 4k high dynamic range and broadcast in high
definition from Capitol Broadcasting Company.
Aiden is the spitting image of Michael He is definitely the one that has said a
lot more you know I missed my dad, I miss my dad. We worry about Mary Grace because
she doesn't talk about it as much, But they're both very bright. They're doing
great in school and they both love the water. It's something to see that really
take to the water. They are in a loving family now and I think that we're gonna
show them love them continue to show them love as they get older and be
honest about about their father's death.
it was an accidental overdose.
In North Carolina last year there were 10 million prescriptions for opioids written.
That's one for every man woman and child in the state North Carolina.
They get hooked. They can't get any more of those pills so they go on the street, they get heroin
which is cheaper and more plentiful.
The power of the narcotic over the person is unbelievable. We're seeing
overdoses from the age of 17 to 70 with heroin and heroin derivatives in this community.
It is everywhere.
North Carolina is losing about a thousand people a year due to opiate overdoses
It's impacting families. It's impacting individuals and it's having a great
impact on our community.
I'm Jim Gray Michael Tabor Gray's father. I'm Sandy Tabor gray and I'm the mom of Michael.
Michael was an extremely happy baby.
He loved his brother and sister. He tried every sport that there was.
He loves soccer. We live by the lake so he was a
wakeboarder and you know loved to swim and loved to be with his friends.
We have a tree house out back that Jim and he had worked on and built.
He broke his arm severely when he was like 15. He was prescribed opiates and
then I think it was just getting it however he could, so he was getting it
from other other kids. He was taking it from other kids parents medicine
cabinets without them knowing. And then he was buying it. You know when those
options were gone. It involved stealing stealing and selling whatever
he could to to support the habit. One night Jim and I had been out to dinner
and we we got home late and I noticed something was different in my bedroom.
And I opened up my jewelry armoire and all of my gold was gone. And of course I
knew right away what had happened to it. And I asked him and he started crying.
And I said I will help you get to treatment but you are not coming back to this house.
By mid afternoon we were off to Tennessee to take him to treatment.
And that is where he met the woman. Before he was even 19 years old, he found
out that she was pregnant with twins. He was a very proud father and he did the
best he could with what skills he had as a 19 year old. Somewhere at this time is when
he was introduced to heroin. The heroin was so much more affordable and he chose
to you know start injecting, injecting heroin. He couldn't really keep a job he
wasn't making enough money spending it on other stuff. I think she was doing the
same thing. We made arrangements to go to another treatment center and after he
got out of treatment. It was recommended that he go into aftercare he wound up in
a halfway house in Asheville. So Michael came home on the weekends. We'd had a
great day then he asked if he could go out and meet up with some friends and go
to a meeting and come home later. And he came home right when he said he would he
kissed me goodnight, hugged me and he loved me like you always did and
he went upstairs to bed and then I went to bed. The next morning was Sunday.
I could hear the kids out upstairs. They were yelling you know for their dad and
got him out of their cribs. We'd all go traipsing in there they're calling dad
and I'm, you know Michael, and he didn't move and honestly I didn't think too
much about it because he's a very sound sleeper.
So I walked over to the bed to gently you know touch him and he was cold.
Autopsy results came back after several weeks and it was ruled an accidental
overdose of heroin. And there was fentanyl in there.
They asked about you know now why how did daddy die? And you know I
explained it as you know he was sick and that his body just quit working.
As the children grow they're going to ask those questions and they're gonna be more
specific questions. It's not a matter of if we tell them the truth of his overdose.
It's just how and when. I don't want them
to think they have anything to be embarrassed about. What their dad because
it is a disease.
I'm Trinlie Yeaman and Zoe was my daughter. An amazing child, absolutely
gorgeous. As a young child she was very mothering, very nurturing. She was very
smart, talented, played sports. She was very, very diligent student. She was a
really amazing, amazing kid. She and I were just two peas in a pod.
Her first real boyfriend, his father had cancer and he was giving
his son the pain pills. His father was giving them to him and then
he was giving him to Zoe. She was coming home
you know, she was just not acting right. One night she was really upset,
couldn't really talk to me and then she pulled her sleeves up and when she
pulled her sleeves up I solved the marks. And I I fell to the ground and cried.
I mean it was devastating. Got her into a rehab. They wouldn't treat
her because she wasn't detoxed and so then I started looking for rehabs.
And there was nothing. Everything was private. There is no rehab
that's affordable for adolescents. So I decided oh I'm gonna go to the
courthouse and get an involuntary commitment. Sitting in the office of the
secretary that would give me the papers to fill out the IVC
she said no, she's not a candidate for an IVC. And I was really depressed. I was
trying so hard to get this child help and there was there was nothing.
Zoe suffered from depression and anxiety. She flipped out in front of her dad and he
called me and I said let's take her to the hospital.
She was there for almost a week and she turned 18 while she was in there.
I talked to him and I said can you please now that she's 18 I've got her on a list
for a bed because she's considered an adult now. And I said can you all please
hold her until the bed becomes open. It's going to be two weeks maximum and they
said no. This is this is is the mental health ward, not addiction facility, and
she's stable mentally, so we're gonna have to release her. She came back home
with me I did not leave her alone I wouldn't let her go to the bathroom
with the door closed. She had been with me for about a week and a half and on a
Tuesday she said I wouldn't want to go see Dad. She already had set up with her
ex-boyfriend, the one that got her addicted.
The phone rang and it was her dad and he was hysterical because he went in to
wake Zoey up. And was probably about 6 or 6:30 in the morning and she was not alive.
The house was just overcome with EMTs of the police officers.
They had her out on the floor doing CPR on her.
I asked if I could just hold her hand, you know maybe if she knew that I was
there maybe she would come back. So my last memory of my daughter is laying on
the floor next to her, and I grabbed her head. I remember grabbing her hand and trying to warm her up.
This cuff bracelet, I gave to her and then I had one.
And she never took it off. Before they took her away, I took this
off and put it on my arm and I have not taken it off since. Three hours after
they took her body away. the rehab called me and said they had a bed for her.
A parent should not be left dangling out alone on their own. There should be more
resources. I mean she had so much to offer this world and and then we're not
gonna get to see it
My name is Warren Gintis, father of Drew Cantus and I'm Marsha Gintis and Drew's mom.
Easiest kid in the world growing up. Happy-go-lucky. Very happy. You can't find a picture I'm without a smile.
Loved baseball. Had lots of friends. He was the one that made people laugh
and made his friends laugh and he was the jokester and the comic.
When he was in middle school he loved to skateboard. Played guitar for a little while.
Was in a youth group. Loved video games like any kid his age. Pretty typical childhood.
In high school he started to wrestle and that became his passion. I can remember
the match where the opponent was obviously better than he was and it was
obvious Drew was going to lose but he wasn't going to get pinned and he
fought it, fought it, fought it, when he could have laid down and got pinned and
gone on. But he separated his shoulder in that and things were never the same,
never the same in his life or our life after that one match. He said he lost his
identity when he was not wrestling. Drugs got involved somewhere there and
by his senior year you know he just quit going to school. He had teachers that
went to bat for him, everybody went to bat for him, everybody but but Drew
went to bat for Drew. Addiction is is a monster and it changes families, it ruins
lives, you know. That wasn't Drew.
Rehab did not go well for him. You've got to warn it and he didn't want it.
We wanted it, everybody else wanted it, but he didn't want it. And that was that was
the problem. We tried everything. We went from wilderness to rehab in California
to the Healing Place here in Raleigh to rehab in Wilmington to an Oxford House.
He knew someone from rehab that was out in Florida and he went down there.
And we thought he was doing okay. We planned a trip out there, We'd bring down
his surfboard and a car. And we got down there we were supposed to meet him for
dinner and he didn't he didn't show up. Now we thought, Drew, you know what are
you doing? We were about to leave the hotel that's the morning and got a phone
call from the detective who had his phone. And and he didn't want to tell me
over the phone and he and I just kept asking, you know is, he okay, is he okay?
I said, no, I'm very sorry.
The coroner found that the cause of death was fentanyl and bath salts.
He was not shooting at that time. He was snorting. You're just totally numb. I mean life
just drains from you. You don't have a reaction. It just stops. We just stopped.
We drove all the way back from Florida, two of us, and I don't think we said a word.
You always think you know what could youhave done differently?
How could you have done this differently?
He was 21 years old. He lost his whole life.
My name is Patti West and Paxton West is my son.
I'm Gary West and I am Paxton's father. When I think about Paxton as a child,
I think about this little blonde headed boy with a head full of curls with cowboy
boots on. And he was the happiest child you have ever seen. He played baseball,
karate, soccer, wrestling, football, all of the sports. He just loved life and got
into it, laughed, was funny, good sense of humor, very compassionate.
When he was a freshman in high school he had a serious knee injury and that was
his first time taking opiates. His junior year in high school he and his sister
had their wisdom teeth taken out. He was prescribed medication percocet or
something similar to that. It's almost like that's when the addiction really
began to kick in. That, that's when he started seeking more drugs. That's when
he started stealing to support his habit. Paxton's statement is addiction what
causes you to sell your own mother to get money. His habit had developed to the
point that he was needing about 275 to 300 dollars worth of opiates a day to
keep going. From my understanding that's when he switched to heroin because
heroin could be bought much cheaper. He could spend between forty and sixty
dollars a day. Gosh, talk about being in denial.
We had no idea that that his addiction was to the degree that it was.
Ideally we come down and visit Paxton once every six weeks. I miss him so much
and I miss I miss him being the part of the family.
Miss him terribly. It's what keeps me from completely going under.
To be able to see him, to be able to touch him, to be able to hold his hand.
I get a little anxious when I see that razor wire. The nature of my child having
to be behind a fence like that, that keeps him in, that he will get out from
behind for a long long time.
Most of my crimes were property crimes, breaking and entering, larceny,
felony larceny, obtaining property by false pretenses, and that kind of thing.
I went to prison the first time on February 14th 2014. I ended up here at
Pender Correctional Center because I got out of prison the first time went
home I was doing well for the first couple months and then you know ran into
that old crowd. I relapsed and ended up stealing and doing those same things.
And came right back within six months. I hid it from my parents by you know wearing
long sleeves a lot of times you know even if it was the dead of summer 100
degrees to cover up the needle marks. I've been a treatment I've been to
28-day rehabs. I've been to outpatient treatment. I've also done the suboxone
treatment plan I've done it all.
Most of the time when I went to treatment I went because somebody else wanted me to go to treatment.
I wasn't ready to get clean. You have to want to get clean for
yourself and you want to better your own life. And I wasn't doing that.
When I get out you know it's a gonna be a process, some sort of schooling and job.
I ultimately want to help people that are like me, social worker, certified
substance abuse counselor, just anything of that nature. He knows now that he's
clean what he needs to do It's just if he can maintain that.
Once he is released, we will support him. We will never give up on him. My parents
support has meant the world to me because you know being behind this fence
I've seen a lot of guys that don't have any support whatsoever, and being that my
parents are here and supporting me and helping me through that I mean it means
the world to me. They could have turned their backs on
me a long long time ago but they haven't.
The prescription opioid and prescription medication issue that we are seen in
Guilford County is really unprecedented. The instance of occurrence of response
to opioids used to be something that was a once or twice a week event.
We're seeing it now multiple times a day. We've had as many as seven overdoses in a single day.
All of the providers within this system
carry naloxone. So that is the reversal agent
and they can be administered by law enforcement officers, by firefighters, or
by paramedics. 28 year-old male, lethargic, semi responsive, inside a laundromat.
Talking to us initially
basically denied any drug use. However his pupils were pinpoint,
respirations were continually slowing, so definite heroin overdose, known user.
Fixing to administer narcan, respiratory rates about six a minute right now.
Talk to me! Hey, bub! Open your eyes!
I'm talking. I'm fine.
You're talking, you're fine. Yeah. Yeah, you went out on me. I went out on you? Yeah. Wow.
not really, I mean, I've been pretty much...
Remember everything happened? Yeah. So you remember stop breathing? No, I...
Okay, you remember us putting a tube down your nose? Uh, yes. One of the things about
opioids is that they depress the central nervous system and as such they're
immediately life-threatening because people do not breathe adequately when
they overdose. Okay, listen partner, you're not in trouble.
I just need to know because I had to give you a narcan to get you breathing again.
Okay, so be straight I need you shoot straight with me.
When's the last time you used? Haven't. Eventually he did admit to using what
they call a straight five bag or a five dollar bag stated is from his typical
supplier, was his typical dose but evidently had been cut with something
different than what he was used to. When people transcend over to the illicit
market they simply are not aware of the strength of what they are purchasing.
It's a combination of heroin it's a combination of a crystalline heroin also
known as fentanyl. You're willing to accept the risk that you could possibly
die from this. Yes, I do but I'm not going to, They're like any other patient.
They have the right to refuse any further care, which he did. So you willing
to take that risk? Yes. Near ninety nine percent of them
will refuse every time on their willing to accept that risk. There's always a
question whether naloxone facilitates continued narcotic use. I've never had
have narcan used on you? In no way do I think it facilitates narcotic use. What I
think it does is prolongs the opportunity for life for the patient
until we can get them into treatment.
Go finish your laundry. Good luck to you. There's a lot of help out there for you. Alright. Go look for it.
I don't want to be too late one day.
Are we just enabling this? Well the data, the research doesn't show that that's
the reality. Naloxone when it's used to bring somebody back from an overdose is
not a pleasant experience. When someone's in an overdose state and they're brought
out of it quickly by a naloxone, it actually is uncomfortable. It can be
painful. It's not something that is fun. This is something they they would rather
not go through but the reality is in that situation, you're saving a life.
fFom 2013 to 2016 our calls have gone up 263 percent for overdoses. One of the
first times I came across naloxone as an officer was when the EMS responded to
our middle school and there was a 12 year old girl that was found in the
locker room and she was unresponsive. EMS administered naloxone and within a few
minutes she woke up and was back. And this is a 12 year old girl in the middle school.
So that was an eye-opener for me. We had our first overdose reversal in January
of 2015. We were the first law enforcement agency in the state to
reverse an opiate overdose. This is our overdose kit which is issued to all of
our officers. This is your vial of naloxone and this is your syringe
applicator. Take the top off the locks on vial put them together and you take out
your mucosal atomizer and put it on the front. And then you have your syringe
ready to administer this internally anytime there's a person in crisis.
That's where we need to be and certainly in the last couple of years this has
been one of our greater crises. And for law enforcement that may not be the
historical avenue by which you do your work but certainly in the last 10 or 15
years that's how the job has changed. We are very much involved with the
addiction crisis and the resulting overdose crisis. A lot of people don't
realize Wilmington North Carolina is the number one city in the U.S. for opioid abuse.
So I know you got some dirties for me. Okay I got around 250. Alright so we
got 250 coming in and one empty. Yeah. My name is Michael page and for the
Harm Reduction Coalition. I run the mobile syringe exchange and I
am an outreach worker. You're gonna take two grab bags yeah and
then some naloxone. How many naloxones do you want? Give me two.
We have a phone number that's in all of our grab bags and people can call
that number, let me know where they are in town and
either myself or another volunteer we'll go out meet them. We collect the dirty
syringes that they may have. we give them clean syringes as well as other things
that will prevent have seen HIV and we also give them resources like referrals
for mental health needs or substance abuse needs. You know about the harbor if
you need to get into detox. You know I've got access to treatment if you want
treatment. It was very attractive to me because I am in recovery and the
principles and things that Harm Reduction works towards
we're dear to my heart specifically naloxone distribution as naloxone to
saved my life numerous times. And also syringe exchange as during my active
addiction I contracted Hep C so these are both things that I could relate to
and wanted to prevent others from having to go through. So if someone comes to me
and says, hey Mike, I just need a grab bag, I have grab bag set up and each one of
these bags is gonna have syringes cookers cottons and resources. They also
get a referral sheet. This is going to have opioid treatment referrals and
resources. So also when they get a grab bag they're gonna be offered a sharps
container because we do want to collect our sharps back, keep them off the
streets. And they're also going to be offered naloxone. I do get frequent phone
calls from people saying oh you're enabling or all you're adding to the
problem. Yeah I'm enabling them to be HIV and Hep
C free. Sure I'll own that. I would also say to them that 8% of the
people that I engage with have sought recovery because of the resources and
referrals that they've gotten through our syringe exchange program. I would say
to them that we've collected close to 30,000 sharps off the streets of this
county where people are playing where kids are playing. So Don, I just wanted
to make sure you have adequate supplies for you and your crew for the week, so
I've got 300 clean insulin syringes. HIV decreases by 80%, Hep C decreases by
50%, crime actually goes down by 11% because people are getting resources.
Did you have any dirties to turn in today? Yeah.
I think what Mike does for this area is great.
Yeah and you've got one loose one so watch yourself down there. Keeps the
trash off the streets, keeps people from sharing, this keeps you safe. My name is
Donald Lawrence and I live in Wilmington, North Carolina. A lady friend of mine
introduced a little different things to me and you know I tried a little of this
and a little of that. Mostly it was with her it was pills. You know she liked the
different prescription meds. It kind of went from there. Everything went dry and
heroin is just, you get the same effects from and it was more readily available
and cheaper. It is a daily thing for me. An addict this person that I say,
I mean physically addicted. Ao you know when you stop you suffer the you know
various withdrawal symptoms. So yeah I definitely would have withdrawal
symptoms. I would say my heroin uses probably has
affected my relationships with family with non using friends, that has
distanced those relationships. I think about quitting every now and again.
It doesn't really bother me a lot. There's some people who beat themselves up over
usage, their addiction. With me after like I use because I want to use and I
really feel like if I wanted to quit I would quit because I wanted to. I can't
see myself as a grandfather you know bouncing my grandkids on my knee being an
active heroin user. So you know I'm hoping that you know my my attitude will
change towards it you know sooner rather than later.
When I was sleeping in the Walmart parking lot and I I knew that, I was like this is not sustainable.
This is happening to your neighbor. This is happening in your house. This is
happening to your family.
My name is Ethan Buck. I am 20 years old. I'm from Greenville North Carolina. I had
a family member that it went through a surgery and I saw another family a
member of mine begin to take medications from them and I've repeated the behavior.
I was 12 years old when I first did this. Prescription pills were usually opioids.
It snowballed. I had a friend of mine you know he would always bring around heroin.
When I use it I realized that it wasn't any different than the prescription
pills. The feeling was the same, there's a
little stronger but it wasn't any different. It was a lot easier to get a
hold of. It's a little bit cheaper. It was just that one of those things where I
tried it and I was like I really like this you know, I like the whole aspect of
snorting and everything. And that eventually evolved into using an IV and
the real only reason I like that have you just because it was a faster means
of injection. I never thought of myself as an addict at that point. What I did
think of myself was I don't want to tell anybody what I was doing, that I was
ashamed of what I was doing because I knew there wasn't right. I definitely
knew that I had crossed a line. I definitely knew that I had done
something that was gonna be very hard to stop but I would always tell myself that
I could stop whenever I wanted to. But I just didn't want to yet.
Really destroyed my relationships with my family. When I was sleeping in the
Walmart parking lot, I knew that I was like this is not sustainable. I think the one
turning point was that I realized that I was never going to be able to amount
anything with the way I was going. And I decided you know that I had to do
something and that's when I made a call to a friend who took me to detox.
Addiction is a disease that is always in treatment. Individuals with alcohol and
other drug problems or substance use disorders, these problems often are
lifelong conditions and treatment and management of those conditions need to
reflect a kind of continuing care model. And historically what we've done is we
will put somebody in a short-term program and then expect that that single
intervention is going to produce lifelong change. And the gold standard
would be that any individual with substance use disorder would get five
years of continuing care and checkups following the treatment episode. People
often have trouble staying in recovery or initiate recovery and then return to
using frequently because there's an inadequate dose and duration of services.
All individuals with an alcohol or other drug problem are deserving of support
compassion care and not just simply a criminal justice response.
It's not always beneficial to, for lack of a better word, hook them and book them
and throw them in jail for drug violations. It's not helping anyone.
It really is it's not helping the individual and it's not helping law
enforcement. LEAD is the Law Enforcement Assistance Diversion program.
The Fayetteville Police Department was the first agency to implement LEAD within
North Carolina. It pretty much tries to divert low-level
drug offenses and sex workers from the court systems and from getting charged.
The officer should engage them in conversation to determine why they were
being arrested. And once they determine that it was because of a drug addiction
then the officer can give them options as far as learning how to get help with
the drug addiction. If you participate in this program and follow your treatment
stuff right you're not going to be charged. Locking them up is not the
answer. Ninety-nine percent of the people that
are incarcerated come back into the community right, so would you rather have
that individual on the program or would you rather have them out in the street,
just running to lose committing crimes? The goal of the lead program is to actually
better the community, give people opportunity to you to better themselves.
As far as getting help they need. Well this particular epidemic didn't just
happen overnight. If you ask any police officer why they got into police work in
the first place eventually they're gonna get around to saying because I want to
help people.
To me it's pretty clear that arresting someone for possession of a drug, user
amount, putting them in jail and going through that cycle over and over again
is not doing anything. If I can get them out of the criminal justice system and
into a recovery so that they can become productive citizens again, then I think
that I am truly helping someone. Hey, I need to talk to somebody about the Hope Initiative. The Hope Initiative is program where
an individual can come to the Nashville Police Department. They can ask to get
into recovery or seek help for their substance use disorder. If they have
drugs or paraphernalia on them at the time, we don't charge them with any crime.
We're gonna first take you down to the hospital and they will start the detox
protocol. And so then we work with them to get them started in their recovery
process. And getting those people out of the criminal justice system saves a lot
of money. It really does cost about a third or less to get somebody into
treatment. And then to keep them out of the criminal justice system as it does, to
house them in a jail or prison, we know that what we were doing before by
arresting people putting them in jail wasn't working, it wasn't happening any impact
whatsoever. Things continually got worse. Obviously because we've been doing that
for years decades. We need more facilities to concentrate
on treatment of individuals because there's so many people out there that
need to go to a treatment program. One of the missing elements for folks is hope.
You know and we can help provide hope when I say we, society can, the media can,
by emphasizing that recovery is a real thing, that people do get into recovery
and it benefits everyone, and it's something that's worth investing in.
Recently I've been a writing a blog, working with wood, going to school, and I
figured out what I want to do in my life so I really been a spend a lot of time
in like self-reflection. My clean date is
September the 20th of 2015. I remember the day that out that I walked away from
there. The the director of the treatment center took me to one of their recovery
homes and I got in there and I remember thinking maybe this is, this is what it's
all about you know. And I was able to get in with a group of guys that I found,
that I found love for, that I found a relationship with. I had seen what it was
like to really enjoy and live life and not just go through it and just looking
for something. I wasn't looking for anything anymore. I had found it.
Everyday four North Carolinians die from a medication or drug overdose.
The number of statewide opioid overdose deaths has grown by nearly 400% in seven
years. Drug overdose is now the number one
cause of accidental death surpassing vehicle crashes. If you look
at the number of people who are dying, each year it keeps going up and up and
it's going up at an alarming rate. Started out where pharmaceutical
companies were advertising that opioids were not addictive. When it turns out
clearly they are quite addictive, there was a cultural, societal movement to
trying to address pain and minimizing pain for patients. Doctors have fairly
generously prescribed these opioids over time, and so over the last ten to fifteen
years all of these things coming together have resulted in a growing
number of people who are addicted to opioids. In North Carolina last year
there were ten million prescriptions for opioids written That's one for every man
woman and child in the state of North Carolina, a total of over 700 million
pills. So that means that there are hundreds of millions of unused pills in
folks' medicine cabinets. The crisis requires us to have a public health
approach, to have a mental health approach, to have a law enforcement
approach. The goal of the Strengthen Opioid Misuse Prevention Act or STOP act
is to ensure smarter prescribing and dispensing of highly addictive
prescription drugs. The STOP act will reduce the number of people who become
addicted in the first place because it will encourage smarter prescribing
practices by doctors and dentists. It also requires use of a database called
the Controlled Substances Reporting Service, which is important to eliminate
doctor shopping doctor shopping has been a problem
in North Carolina because what they'll do is they can go to one doctor and get
a prescription, go to an emergency room and get a prescription, go to another
doctor and get a prescription to feed their their habit. Only 27% of doctors in
North Carolina use this database. The CSRS which is a database that includes
every prescription written for an opiate. If doctors aren't using the
database, they have no way of knowing whether someone's doctor shopping.
The STOP act as introduced had 20 million dollars over two years for
community-based treatment and recovery services. We as a state, we as a community,
we simply have not prioritized having sufficient treatment facilities to help
people get healthy. If you don't have insurance or the ability to to private
pay, how do you get the funding for it, you know where does that funding come
from to get services and again to get services that are of adequate dose and
duration? One of the things that's missing is a lot of community-based
supports and community-based resources, and resources that will be there to
support people in engaging in recovery and sustaining their recovery.
North Carolina law must give law enforcement the tools it needs to hold drug
traffickers accountable. That is exactly what the Synthetic Opioid Control Act
does. The Synthetic Opioid Control Act takes aim at dozens of these known
fentanyl ingredients by classifying them as controlled substances. Last year there
was a type of fentanyl, these chemically created opiates, that was responsible for
at least 77 deaths, 77 deaths that we know about in North Carolina that is not an
illegal substance in North Carolina. So if law enforcement had found the
traffickers who brought that agent of death into North Carolina and they had
pounds of it, we wouldn't have been able to charge them with a crime. So we have
to update North Carolina law to make sure that it reflects the dangers that
exist in our state. And so the Synthetic Opioid Control Act will help close that
loophole for the drug traffickers who were importing these products into North
Carolina. The heroin and the fentanyl that is killing our people and they're
making millions those folks need to be in jail for the rest of their lives.
But if your crime is simply the fact that you're sick and you have an illness
substance use disorder in a changed brain chemistry and you're just using an
illegal substance, I question whether jail is the best way to deal with that person.
We lost a beautiful vibrant absolutely wonderful son to this
epidemic and it started because of an automobile accident where he broke a
couple of bones he was given a vial of these horrid horrid addictive drugs and
he started a downhill spiral that ended up with the loss of his life. There's a
lot of attention on this issue because it's impacting middle-class white
families. When a problem hits closer to home it's harder to assign stereotypes
and I think one of the biggest misconceptions that exists out there is
that individuals with alcohol and other drug problems have chosen to have that
problem. Even when you talk to folks who kind of say, yeah I think that you know
addiction is similar to hypertension but the difference is the person with
hypertension didn't choose to have hypertension, the person diabetes didn't
choose to have that. Overlooking kind of the voluntary choices around diet
exercise the environmental factors and things like that. That issue of choice,
that this is kind of a willful thing separates this condition from other
conditions. And so when it's looked at that way there's a tendency to not have
as much compassion or sympathy.
My dad as a minister also a professor at the college teaching religion classes,
and my mother is now the executive director of a homeless shelter, and I
just wanted to be known that it just goes to show that that the disease of
addiction does not discriminate.
We've got to find some way to reduce the stigma related to this. :ots of folks
still want to make it a moral issue. They can be very judgmental. Because I'm out
of a church background, I wish the pulpit would address it more, that churches would
address it more, and other community groups. It is something that that people
don't want to talk about. It's embarrassing. Drug addicts are not bad
people. They have a bad disease, they have a bad problem that causes them to do bad
things. But I really feel like that the best
thing we can do is to reach out to them and let them know that they're cared
about, even if they're still using, while they're still using because, maybe just
maybe you're gonna offer that place that they feel safe enough to start that
process of wanting to turn it around.
Drew the person was way different than Drew the addict. Drew the person was great.
Drew the addict was not so good. If our son was diabetic, you know we could talk
on the street about him being diabetic. But when you talk about drug addiction,
it's it's well, he should never start in the first place, which is true but you
know, it is a disease. The addict needs to get help. the family of the addict needs
to get help. It's a family disease. It's a family disease. Just don't be afraid to
get help. You can't hide this. You can't put it in a closet and say it'll go away.
It won't. There's still that segment of the population that looks at us and say, wow
they're bad parents. It wouldn't happen in our family, but it can happen to
anybody.
The stigma that's attached to drug addicts and to parents that have raised
children that turn into drug addicts, that stigma is definitely there. I have a
lot of people that have a lot of compassion for me, but then I have other
people that look at me and, you know, they you can tell that they are thinking, that
I was bad parent. And I really tried to do everything I could to save her.
People need to talk more about the issues people need to be open with what
they're going through. My parents asked me what what do you want us to say to
people, what should we say when we go to church? I said you say what happened.
You say that she had a drug overdose, and I said you you talk about it. It needs to
be talked about openly. I mean this is something that is killing the next
generation that's coming up behind us, this this epidemic,
it's killing them.
I've probably known six other kids that have died since Michael. I mean I
personally known them, not just I've heard of them. I personally known them.
I don't think there's a silver bullet. You know there's not just one thing that can
be done. I think there's there's a whole multitude of things that need to happen.
Education awareness, breaking down that stigma so people aren't afraid to talk
about that it's happening. Everybody's got a part and I think that's what
people need to realize is that this isn't happening over there
on the other side of the tracks or in downtown or this is happening to your
neighbor. This is happening in your house. This is happening to your family. This is
happening in your schools. This is happening at your workplace.
This is everywhere. We talk a lot about Michael.
You know, just memories. It's fun to keep Michael alive in their eyes like that.
They are in a loving family now and I think that we're gonna show them love
and continue to show them love as they get older and be honest about their
father's death. I can only think about what influence that might have in their
little lives. Maybe it won't have any. I just think there's so much negativity
around us that I think when it comes out I think they'll have to come to terms
with it and hopefully be able to be honest about to others who ask well how
did your father die?
you