National Overdose Awareness Day brings attention to the impacts of addiction.

Pam Marino here, on the eve of National Overdose Awareness Day, sobered by the lives lost to substance abuse, leaving too many grieving families and friends behind. Since 2018, Monterey County has seen an eight-fold increase in overdoses, as the scourge of fentanyl has spread, mostly among young people, according to the Prescribe Safe Initiative through the Montage Health Foundation.

Planted on the Colton Hall lawn this morning were more than 1,500 flags in black, red and white, many decorated by loved ones. Black flags represented those who have died in recent years in Monterey County, red represented family and friends impacted by addiction and white celebrated those in recovery.

It was a visual representation for a press conference about the frustrating challenge families, health professionals and law enforcement have been grappling with in trying to prevent more people from overdosing and dying due to the medical condition of addiction.

The press conference, led by Monterey City Councilmember Ed Smith, included doctors, educators, law enforcement, a parent who lost her son to a fentanyl overdose and others involved in helping people recover. They came together to bring public awareness and publicize a special resource event open to the public tomorrow at the Monterey Conference Center.

“I’d like to begin by congratulating drugs for winning the war on drugs,” said Reb Close, an emergency room doctor at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, and co-founder of Prescribe Safe. “Our traditional approaches to drug use in America have just been unsuccessful, despite decades of work and billions of dollars spent fighting drugs. We’ve only seen ever-increasing numbers of drug overdose deaths.”

Over 100,000 people have lost their lives in the U.S. in the last year, she said. According to Prescribe Safe, 65 people in Monterey County in 2020 and 2021 died from opioid-related overdoses. The proliferation of fentanyl, 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, is behind many of these deaths. It’s found in counterfeit drugs masquerading as other drugs, or cut into illegal street drugs, including cannabis. 

Michelle Henderson of Carmel Valley lost her 20-year-old son Tom to counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl in May 2020. At the press conference, she painfully recounted how her son went from using prescription painkillers after a skiing accident and surgery in February that year to street drugs to addiction and death just three months later.

Henderson said she wished she had naloxone on hand, an antidote that counters the effects of an opioid overdose, on the morning she found Tom unresponsive. She told parents to lock up their prescription pills to protect their children. She also wished she had confiscated Tom’s smartphone, which he used to communicate with his drug dealer.

Krista Reuther of Ohana, the Montage youth mental health treatment center, expressed the importance of parents talking to their children often about pills and other items they might be offered, and practicing how to decline. 

Most of all, speakers urged the community to erase the stigma of addiction and to understand that it is a medical condition that needs compassionate treatment, not condemnation. 

They also invited everyone to the Overdose Awareness Day Resource Fair, from 3-5pm, tomorrow, Aug. 31, in the Monterey Conference Center, 1 Portola Plaza, Monterey. Free naloxone will be distributed, and there will be information from a variety of organizations provided. 

If you’re the least bit interested, I hope you will go. “It’s going to take a community for us to make an effect,” said Pastor Mike Casey of the Bridge Restoration Ministry. “There are so many people working so hard to prevent any more of these flags.”

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Grappling with the impacts of addiction. A sporadic local salmon season has ended. Wine at the mall.