They’ll be gathering along the shores of the Delaware River around the fire pit eating s’mores and swapping stories Saturday night.
Just like any Saturday night in eastern Pennsylvania, my friends from so long ago will be gathered to enjoy each other’s company; but this time, one of them will be missing.
It’s a tragic story, one that’s repeated across the United States far too often. Heck, I know it’s happened right here in Marion County.
You see, my old friends will be gathered to say goodbye to someone who passed before his time. A young man with his future before him died last week of a heroin overdose.
I’d written about this particular young man before. The day his dad had found him upstairs not breathing from a heroin overdose. Paramedics revived him that day with Narcan. When we awoke, he was combative and didn’t believe his dad that he was dead for a few minutes.
It’s a problem that is nationwide – opioid and heroin overdoses. As a matter of fact, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood recently helped host a two-day summit in Madison focusing on the state’s opioid and heroin problems.
Mississippi is a leading prescriber of opioid painkillers with the equivalent of approximately 70 pills for every man, woman and child in 2016. The number of painkiller prescriptions in Mississippi makes us the fifth highest per capita in the nation with 1.07 prescriptions per person. State statistics showed Marion County with at least 12 overdose deaths between 2012 and 2014. There are likely more deaths than we know. Heroin and opioids are fast becoming the silent killer that many don’t want to talk about.
Recently, my friends at the Cincinnati Enquirer put together a multimedia piece titled “Seven Days of Heroin.” More than 60 journalists teamed up to focus on seven counties in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky. The photos and videos were edited by an old friend and the main story was written by a college classmate. The stories were not only compelling, but shocking.
In one week, in the seven-county area they covered, there were 18 deaths, 180 overdoses, 200 heroin users in jail and 15 babies born with heroin-related medical problems.
Here in Mississippi, law enforcement, health professionals and others are seeking to reverse the trend before it is too late, but the meetings here and in other states were past due for my friends.
As I scrolled the pictures they had posted of their son on Facebook, I thought of the young man that I known since nearly two decades ago. At his fifth birthday party, our children laughed and played at Chuck-E-Cheese’s. My young son and theirs frolicked in the arcade as we sat in the corner and watched and laughed. Never in a million years did any of us suspect it would end like this. My son, Brian, just turned 21 a few months ago. Sadly, their son won’t make that mark – his 21st birthday would have been celebrated in October.
The opioid and heroin crisis is real; it’s real in Mississippi, it’s real in Ohio, it’s real in Pennsylvania and across the country. It’s time we all work together to solve it before we lose a generation to addiction and hopelessness.
They’ll gather around the shores of the Delaware River Saturday night for a fire and s’mores, unfortunately, I won’t be there, but sadly, neither will a young man who loved nothing more in life than his parents, his brother and sister, his girlfriend, and his chocolate lab, Mandy.
Rest in peace, Brandon, your family and friends will miss you.
