ChatterBox247 On Overdose Awareness Day, we remember Tiarra, Jonathan, Alec, and millions of others.

to my daughter Tiara is fa her 28 she lost her life on May 17th of 2020 she always made you feel warm it always made you feel happy but when she was prescribed opian she was immediately dependent it's almost like witnessing your child disappear before your very eyes Tiara was stigmatized in so many ways by her own family by the Health Care System part of the Stig is that there is an assumption that substance use disorder is a choice yes no one would suggest that diabetes is a choice so we um you know have Addison was misdiagnosed as being attention deficit prescribed Aderall started self-medicating with alcohol to come down at night from that uh and then moved on to other drugs and we lost him on his fourth day in college we decided that rather than crawl into a little ball of anger grief and shame that there was something we could do to help one of those is public awareness to get rid of uh Public Enemy Number One which is of course stigma and you and the president are are uh doing incredibly important work whenever you say anything about this and I think until you're tired of hearing yourself say it publicly you're not saying it enough uh because people will listen to you and uh the stigma piece is so important Alec was just he would like you he would walk into a room and just light it up as a child he suffered and teenager he suffered from depression and a mild form of bipolar my biggest fear was always that before we could get him on a permanent path to recovery that the fentol would find him every day since then has been very hard for us what makes it impossible to Bear vice president Harris is that over half a million people have died since then half a million people since our son passed away out of the grief of your personal loss what you've done to dedicate your your time and and your work to this issue on behalf of parents you've not met and children you may never meet and as I think all of you know my background was as a prosecutor and I was the Attorney General of California for two terms a lot of the work I did was around focusing on transnational criminal organizations but also what we need to do to think about this in the context of Public Health because it is a Public Health crisis as much as anything and I don't need to tell you each that much stay involved I promise you