“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” -Margaret Mead
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A powerful new story in People Magazine this week lays it all out; we are in the midst of an unprecedented public health and criminal justice emergency in this country.
Prescription painkillers (including, and especially methadone) are clearly being pushed out into our communities by entities knowingly making a profit by actively encouraging and facilitating abuse of these uniquely dangerous substances. And simply put, these profit-driven activities and the real people behind them are quietly killing our friends, neighbors, coworkers, sisters, brothers, parents and children at a rate this nation has never before seen.
They killed my teenage son, Henry two years ago.
The individuals running various pill-pushing businesses – ranging from many mom and pop “pain management clinics” to some multinational pharma corporations are intentionally working every day to “grow the market” for their product. The pool of consumers with legitimate, major, medical pain relief needs is necessarily slow-growing, if not ultimately finite. However, the pool of potential opiate abusers and addicts is vast and expandable.
And, it seems, expendable.
Fighting this epidemic requires active and contemporaneous efforts on two discrete fronts. We must make high quality addiction education and treatment readily available to every American who needs it. But we must also do what it really takes to shut down the profit-motivated pill pushers, from the corporate boardrooms to the streetcorners.
In memory of my son, our family launched Henry’s Fund, a non-profit that provides funding for high quality treatment for young drug addicts. Since Henry’s death on May 31, 2010, Henry’s Fund has raised and distributed nearly $30,000 to our first partnering addiction treatment programs. In 2013, those of us who volunteer our time and dollars to Henry’s Fund hope to take our fledgling non-profit’s work to the next level, with plans to help many, many more kids like Henry to get the help they need, when they need it.
Also in 2013, I, along with other parents who have lost their children and other loved ones to prescription drug addiction and overdose will be launching an entirely new and passionate advocacy effort to directly and strategically address the second part of what it will really take to end this epidemic. The time has come, and we are ready to do this work, together, just as the bereaved parents who pioneered anti-drunk driving efforts a generation ago decided that the time had come, and that enough was enough.
I hope that the local “pain clinics,” as well as the larger corporate entities making enormous profits by intentionally pumping an ever-growing flood of these uniquely risky medical products into our communities are ready to hear from those of us who are now ready to organize, to stand up for our dead children and say, “enough,” because 2013 is the year when that’s going to happen.
The time has come when parents of overdose victims will no longer be silenced and encouraged to hide our children’s overdose deaths in shame. The pill profiteers count on our shame and silence to prevent us from finding one another, and more importantly, from organizing for change. But starting this year, those who have depended on our individual and collective silence to shield their unethical and illegal actions will no longer be able to use victimized families in this way.
Additionally, we will be letting law enforcement agencies, medical examiners and prosecutors know that we expect them to begin fully investigating overdose deaths within their jurisdictions as the potential drug-induced homicides that both federal law and most states’ criminal statutes unequivocally define drug distribution resulting in death to be. We are no longer willing to be told that these criminal statutes don’t exist or that they are unemployable, and we are no longer willing to allow these public servants to treat overdose deaths as private, shameful family matters, when in fact, overdose deaths by the numbers now represent the most urgent public safety issue facing our criminal justice system.
As I share more information about this new advocacy movement in the coming months, I hope that many of you reading this will choose to join us in the fight to put this fire out before it ravages this nation any further. Let’s make 2013 the year that marks the beginning of the end for the prescription pill overdose epidemic. Together, we can do this.
And we will.
Please do what you can to help share this important “opening salvo” with others in your own neighborhoods and communities.
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Additional Info: Center for Disease Control Reveals That 20% of All Prescribers Write the Prescriptions for 80% of All Rx Opiates in U.S.
I want to help
@Julie -
Thank you! I really appreciate it, and I’ll be sharing more info for how everyone who wants to get involved can within the next 6 months. Let me know if you have any questions I can answer. Feel free to email me at katie.granju@gmail.com
Warmly,
Katie
Count me in Katie! It’s time to put an end to the murdering pushers including the drig companies.
thank you SO much Joel. I know that thru the work you and your family have done in our community for the last 25 years, you’ve seen firsthand the way the escalating pill epidemic has fundamentally changed the landscape of at-risk children’s lives in just the past decade.
Do you have the status of non profit yet?
@Char -
Do you mean for Henry’s Fund or for the new entirely separate advocacy organization that other parents and I are planning to launch?
Henry’s Fund is very honored and lucky to be a Donor Advised Affiliate Fund of the East Tennessee Foundation (http://www.easttennesseefoundation.org/give/explore_our_funds/donor_advised.aspx ) This means that all HF funds are overseen by the ETF Board, and the philanthropy experts within ETF are guiding HF at every step toward being ready to gain standalone non-profit status, likely sometime in 2013.
As for the entirely separate (from HF) group of parents of which I am a part, planning to launch a new advocacy organization in 2013, we havent yet begun the process of gaining formal non-profit status. For the moment, we are an informal working group planning a launch strategy for sometime in the next 4-12 months.
Thanks for your interest. Let me know if I can answer any other questions.
Warmly,
Katie
By corporate entities, do you mean the pharmaceutical companies? I’m just wondering how they are to blame, if they are producing drugs that are legal prescription drugs, but then customers are misusing them (by selling them, taking too many, etc)? I’m not in love with Big Pharma, by any means; but it seems that you are saying it is their fault people abuse drugs. Am I misunderstanding you?
@SC -
Here’s the thing; the number of prescription painkillers being marketed and sold in the U.S. has exploded year over year for the past decade. Do the companies making a killing by selling ever greater numbers of these pills every year truly believe that the enormous growth in sales is due to exploding numbers of patients with pain so severe that only narcotic pain relief will relieve it? I would posit that companies benefiting from exploding sales of painkillers know damn well that a large proportion of the new customer base they are gaining each year is made up of new abusers and addicts. Additionally, why is it that so many storefront “pain clinics” have begun opening all over the country in the past ten years? Is it because there was a huge wave of new patients with chronic or major pain that legitimate medical practices refused to see or treat? No. While a percentage of “pain clinic” patients may fall into that category, the great majority – and larger numbers of them every year – are people who are seeking opiates for abuse or for resale to people who are abusing them.
Here are some resources that delve into these issues:
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-big-pharma-hooked-america-on-legal-heroin
http://seattletimes.com/flatpages/specialreports/methadone/methadoneandthepoliticsofpain.html
http://www.propublica.org/article/the-champion-of-painkillers
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-01-29/oxycodone/52876120/1
http://m.statesman.com/news/news/local-military/critics-say-firms-spurred-painkiller-prescriptions/nSPNL/
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2009-05-17/news/0905160204_1_clinics-pain-pill-operators
Let me be clear that I respect and understand the role that narcotic pain relief plays in practicing legitimate medicine. However, that’s not what is behind the exploding sales of these uniquely addictive medications. And sadly, all the abuse and all the shady businesses creating customers by illicit sales and marketing are actually making it *harder* for patients who truly need to have the major pain relief that these powerful meds provide because it’s making many honest, conscientious and well-intentioned physicians extreme wary of *ever* prescribing them. Everyone is losing here except the drug dealers.
Thanks for being part of this conversation.
Katie
Bravo and well said!
Some of it is big pharma lobbying for expanded indications for their products so more people can be prescribed the very addictive ones (it used to be just severe, malignant pain needed an opioid, then moderate to severe pain of any cause for example). More indications, more prescriptions, more money for them. Some of it is big pharma lecturing and misleading prescribers about how addictive the drugs are. I’d blame big pharma for lobbying against tighter regulation of prescription pain pills as well as coming out with new and more powerful pain medications that are consequently more deadly when misused.
My daughter OD’d on 5/7/12 in a room full of people by her friends w/her friends…I am now trying to get involved as much as I can..and just signed up to volunteer also in my community w/ drug prevention program..what can I do to get on board…I can share Mikhaila’s story also…her father also has his own blog regarding her on chasing Mikhaila …pls let me know…!!! we need to scream this from rooftops, send smoke signals, go to schools,,broadcast….it’s killing our kids!
Oh Sarah
My heart hurts for you. I am so, so, so very sorry about your beautiful girl. Thank you so much for sharing her story and I am so glad that you and her Dad might be willing to get involved with this effort. I will email you directly with more info when I have it, and please feel free to contact me *any* time at katie.granju@gmail.com
With love,
Katie, Henry’s Mama
I agree. We have to break our silence and educate the public ! I sent you a personal email with with an idea I think will help accomplish this. Thanks for all you do.
@Tonya,
You are a HUGE part of making this change, and I hope so much that you will want to be part of this new, coordinated advocacy effort. I will look forward to reading your email. I’m going to hit the sack momentarily, so I may not get a chance to respond tonight, but absolutely will tomorrow.
With love,
Katie
I agree. We have to break our silence and educate the public ! I sent you a personal email with with an idea I think will help accomplish this. Thanks for all you do.
You know you can count on my support, Katie.
I am in the trenches with you. Please see my Facebook page. I have an ENDLESS supply of kids who need treatment. We have kids dying because we have NO beds when they need them. We need CRISIS centers. We need HELP!! I need HELP!
We lost our beautiful daughter to a substance overdose 15 months ago at the age of 23. This is an epidemic in the suburbs of Chicago and around our country. I would like to get involved in memory of my loving daughter.
Debbie, if you are in the Chicago, suburban area, look at our Facebook page, open hearts, open eyes. You might already be on there, but we are trying to get some change going in our area, but I see that this is a nationwide issue. As far as breaking the silence, I just finished taping with 48 hours. They are doing a special on the heroin epidemic in Chicago and interviewed me as I too, lost my son last summer to overdose. First thing we need to do is break the silence and end the stigma. We can’t fix anything until we can talk about it.
Please write back to this blog when that 48 Hours will be aired. I would like to watch it (or feel free to send me a message).
Check out my website where you’ll find information for bereaved parents, including blogs and videos by parents whose children died from overdoses.
I’m also going to add Chasing Mikhaila and Stop Methadone Deaths, both of which I just found today thanks to these comments.
Also, Katie, count me in. I want to help.
Since my son’s father past away from a drug overdose I have been working with a nonprofit called Robby’s voice. visit their website. Together we are “breaking the Silence” They also have a fb page. they are amazing people who lost their son and have brought sooo much good from it already!
Thanks for telling everyone about Robby’s voice. I’ve added their site to my website http://www.scoop.it/t/grief-and-loss
When the economy gets better and people can get jobs they won’t have to sell their pills to pay rent , I’m see they don’t like going to jail or living in fear .I was a addict for tens years and I can say no one made me do it … addicts trick doctors into thinking we really need it . If they start saying no then people who may really need it may not get it . Because addicts lie really well …,that don’t mean stop believing everyone. Doctors have to give you the benifit of the doubt
@Danielle -
Thanks for adding your perspective on this. In my view, preventing opiate overdose deaths involves addressing an abuser or addict’s own desire for the drug (demand) by increasing access to high quality treatment and aftercare programs, but also necessarily involves addressing the supply issue. If we reduce supply, it doesn’t matter how curious a particular person might be to try OxyContin or heroin or methadone for the first time, or how much he might have the desire to abuse opiates on an ongoing basis after realizing that the pain pills gave him a buzz when he had surgery; the less readily available these drugs are to him in his community, the lower his risk of dying of a drug overdose becomes. The simple fact is that you cannot die of an overdose from a drug you aren’t able to access.
Katie, since you’ve just brought up the appeal of the ‘buzz after surgery’ I would like to say that your jokes about being buzzed after your dental surgery last week left me VERY confused. Is that really the message you want to give your children? That those drugs, meant to make surgery more bearable, can be an opportunity for Fun Times and oh, how wacky is it to get high and act stupid? Really?
I can’t believe that you thought that was appropriate.
@S
A fair observation. I hope, however, that the point of my story was about how an in-office, semi-anesthetic administered *during* surgery made me act stupid and lose several hours, not something that I would assume anyone else would find appealing. Perhaps I am wrong, though.
Katie
Sincere best wishes to you and others with this endeavor.
You know I am here to support you in whatever you all need, so count me in.
I would like to know, and I posed this question in an unrelated post back in the fall, how do you feel about the two states that have recently made smoking marijuana for recreational purposes legal? And just so we don’t get hung up on the continual pointless conversation of “pot isn’t anything compared to prescription drugs” or “alcohol is a drug and that is legal, so pot should be legal” because once the conversation takes that route it is lost in a baseless discussion over which drug is “better” than the next thus creating a justification for using one over another… When really they are ALL bad. What I am most concerned about is what this says about us as a society? What does this say about our culture that we are now saying, yes, here is your right to use and access a drug, that for many, IS the gateway drug to the next step of addiction? I know you said it is where Henry started.
Just wondering what you and your reader’s thoughts are on the last two questions and if you think the legalizing of marijuana will have an effect on the overall fight you have undertaken on the drug epidemic in this country.
Thanks.
Crickets….lol! Probably because none of this is connected to the big picture, right? Oh well.
@Stacie -
Do you mean crickets from me on marijuana legalization? Or some other kind of crickets?
xo,
Katie
Hi Katie,
I am so sorry for the loss of your beautiful and most precious son Henry. I found Henry’s Page and am very familiar with your story. I am so proud to see the positive changes you are making in the name of love’s sake, for that of your son and all the other children who have and will potentially fall victim to this devastating and life altering addiction and disease by people who could care less about the children and their families as long as they are making a buck. We lost our beloved son Andrew in March 2011 to a heroin overdose, which as we all know, was proceeded by and with the use of pills. As the pills became more expensive, heroin was readily available and so inexpensive. He had always been such a wonderful son, he graduated in 2007 from high school and had been a role model to many. His drug use did not begin until the age of 19, he passed away at 21. Needless to say, we are still in shock, but have not let the voice of shame silence us because we care about the children in our community who could just as easily fall victim to these pill pushers. I have been working on several things to hopefully help make our city a better and safer place and have plans to introduce some of those things to our community within the next few months. I would love to talk with you. You can e-mail me at jjaksjohnston@yahoo.com. Again, I am so very sorry for your loss, thank you for the public awareness you are raising and for sharing your story so others may be saved.
Slightly off topic, but what’s the status on Henry’s episode of Dateline? I’ve been really looking forward to watching it.
@Emily,
The producer and I continue to work together on the episode. I just heard from her Friday, actually. Because there is a significant new development underway in my push for a proper investigation and prosecutions, she wants to wait to tell the story until this element plays out to wherever it ends up going. Suffice it to say that I have some major, professional help now, and I never had that before November 2012.
Thanks so much for asking, and for remembering Henry’s case.
Katie
Hi Katie,
My son Matthew died a little over a year ago from methadone pill that was given out by someone who got it from a methadone clinic. I would like to help you with this cause, I can do graphic design work. I love your article, it is well written, your son is so handsome, I hope it impacts a lot of people in People magazine. Hugs Monika
@Monika -
I am so very sorry about your beloved Matthew. My son also died as the result of methadone given to him by a pair of long term methadone clinic patients who were diverting the drug for abuse and resale. The largely unregulated & *hugely profitable* methadone clinic industry is behind a large percentage of this nation’s opiate deaths, but they are flying largely under the radar. This industry and its lobbyists and political allies should also be on notice that our advocacy efforts will no longer allow them to hide behind the “we’re only *treating* opiate addiction” excuse. Methadone and suboxone clearly have some role to play in treating opiate addiction for some people, but the way the clinics are run will no longer cut it. I suspect that we are losing more people to diverted and abused methadone from clinic disbursement than the number of people whom the clinics as they are run now are actually helping to eventually live in meaningful recovery from opiate addiction.
Thank you for speaking up. Much love to you,
Katie
Hi Katie, Thanks so much. I cannot believe this is going on giving methadone to addicts and so many deaths result of their corporate greed. You should read this article from a actual addict and how they used to sell their pills. It is a joke they have methadone clinics. http://voices.yahoo.com/are-methadone-clinics-good-thing-former-methadone-594872.html?cat=71
An friend of mine from years ago lost her beautiful daughter pretty much the same way Amber Bllizzard died. She and her husband pushed through changes in laws in Florida regarding pain pillls but have been very distressed at the final form of the billl which does affect accessibliity of pain products that are also favorites of the illegal market. For those in constant, chronic, severe pain, these sort of measures can doom them to a hell on earth. It is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Illegal, dangerous drug trafficking is a severe problem everywhere, but I’ve yet so see a good solution to it. I’d like to see some.
I’m sorry that you feel that methadone clinics are a joke. If it weren’t for a clinic opening up in my area I don’t know where I would be!!!
I agree, not all Methadone clinics are bad or the people running them. I have seen several success stories come out of them alive, healthy and productive members of society.
For the person above who wasn’t sure how “corporate interests” figured into this, I was clicking around on some of these links and then googling various terms prescription drug misuse and the like.
Found this: http://updates.pain-topics.org/2013/01/rx-pain-reliever-misuse-declining.html
Read that through and be amazed at some of the things they talk about (you know, “youngsters” sometimes just “borrow” a few pain pills because, you know they have so much pain at that age…
Then look over in the right hand column to see who gives them “educational grants” to maintain that website.
:-p
for-profit corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. punto. it sucks, but that’s the way it is. whatever the company makes: tires, or sheets, or addictive drugs. their fiduciary duty lies with their shareholders. So. what to do. Perhaps, we can create a second tier of incorporation… one where if the company manufactures substances that impact health…public health…need to be answerable to the public. Health insurance companies, like BC/BS are for profit…they shouldn’t be. Likewise, pharmaceutial companies shouldn’t be for-profit…pharmaceutical companies aren’t *evil*–per se…I’m grateful that they created the drugs that have kept me cancer-free for 7 years…but so long as they’re for-profit, nothing will change…at the same time, we need to look at the world we live in…why are so many of us trying to escape…why are we looking for magic…
I heard this segment on Morning Edition today and thought of you. Heartbreaking. Thanks for your answer to my question up there. I guess I’m still wondering what exactly we can do to stem the tide, without taking away the drugs from the people who need them.
Also, I (like that commenter up there) am curious to know what you think about some states legalizing marijuana.
Non-profit pharmaceutical companies mean no research and development for new drugs, new treatments and less attention paid to rare diseases that require medications. If the companies don’t make a profit, they won’t be able to spend any money on research.