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Commentary
My only child died of a drug overdose. She's one of 1.1 million Americans lost since 2000
The significance of August 31 is more than the 22,000 purple flags planted on the lawn outside the Massachusetts State House commemorating the state's lost residents. This day is more than the celebrities we've lost: John Belushi, Heath Ledger, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Prince, Tom Petty, to name only a few. International Overdose Awareness Day, recognized annually on August 31, is part of a campaign to “end overdose, remember without stigma those who have died and acknowledge the grief of family and friends left behind.”
In the United States, the number of opioid overdose deaths has gone up every year since 1999 except 2018, when it declined slightly before going up again. We have lost more than 1.1 million people to drug overdoses since 2000. That's more than 1 million people who were not famous at all; people who had parents, siblings, grandparents, children of their own, friends, neighbors and colleagues. One million people who struggled and had families who struggled along with them.
I am one of them. I lost my daughter Kathleen, my only child, 10 years ago. She was on the right track in many visible ways — a National Merit semifinalist, she had a prestigious Beckman Scholars fellowship for research and a 3.9 GPA after three years at the University of Chicago, as well as friends and family who loved her. Privately, she was on the wrong track in ways that she hid for many years — at first taking pills recreationally, then smoking and snorting heroin and ultimately injecting heroin. Kathleen wanted everyone to be proud of her. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone, including herself, by admitting she needed help. Isolation, reluctance to seek treatment and secrecy are common shame responses to stigmatized illnesses like substance use disorder. In this way, my overachieving daughter was just like so many others.
Before Kathleen became hooked on heroin and cocaine in college, she was hooked on “Breaking Bad” as a high schooler. Walter White, a cooler version of her favorite chemistry teacher, was her hero, a smart guy breaking the rules by cooking methamphetamine to fund his cancer treatments. He had nothing to lose. After her death, I learned that Kathleen, a biochemistry major, cooked her own morphine from poppies she grew in the closet of her college apartment. She helped a boyfriend put his drug business online. But unlike Walter White, she had everything to lose.
Popular culture informed Kathleen’s behaviors through its portrayal of invincibility in TV shows like “Breaking Bad” and movies like “Pulp Fiction.” The latter came out 30 years ago this past spring, just two years after Kathleen’s birth. She was born into a culture that venerates drugs without realistically depicting their ugly realities and dangers.
In the immensely popular, award-winning film, a drug dealer, Lance, makes a prescient pronouncement: “Coke is f—ing dead as … dead. Heroin is coming back in a big f—ing way,” as he sells his “best” product to John Travolta’s character, Vincent. Later, we see Uma Thurman’s character snort heroin, thinking it’s cocaine, which results in an accidental overdose. The dramatic scene is punctuated by Travolta plunging a lifesaving adrenaline injection into her heart — she’s instantly resuscitated.
This isn’t cool or entertaining. But more importantly, it doesn’t reflect reality. Narcan, which rapidly reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, is now available without a prescription, but most addicts — like my daughter — die alone, with no one to save them.
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Thanks to the greed of the Sackler family and the empire they created through Purdue Pharma, the opioid epidemic began with OxyContin abuse. But the Sackler’s ostensibly legal prescription pain pill empire ultimately drove addicted users to the illicit, but more accessible and affordable heroin. Now heroin deaths are on the decline, and synthetic opioids like fentanyl drive the body count.
A recent study reveals that more than 40% of Americans (an estimated 125 million adults) personally knew someone who died of overdose and one-third of those people say their lives were disrupted by these deaths. Substance use disorder is incredibly common — 16.5% of Americans battle it — yet the disease remains stigmatized. We idolize and glorify drug culture while reviling people who struggle with addiction. They brought it on themselves, people say. It was their choice.
According to the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more than half of people over the age of 12 report experimenting with illicit drugs at some point during their lifetimes and most avoid addiction. But for too many, drug use turns into physical dependence. No one chooses addiction, but once they're in it, they're often powerless to find a way out. People battling addiction need support and understanding, not condemnation. They are someone’s child, sibling, parent or friend, not a TV or movie character. Most importantly, addiction does not define them. They are more than this problem.
After her only attempt at sobriety, Kathleen returned to college for her final year filled with hope and a strong belief in the promise of recovery. She wanted to help others by sharing her experience. She distributed clean needles and Narcan to users she knew. For a few months, she maintained her sobriety, but relapse is common in nearly every recovery journey — including hers.
Kathleen’s father and I vividly remember her as a cheerful 5-year-old in our tiny backyard, swinging as high as she could on her redwood swing set. With an enormous grin, she gleefully shouted to the world, “I’m aware! I’m aware!” as the swing reached its zenith. She was a precocious little girl exuding unbridled joy. We still wonder what might have been on her mind at such a young age to prompt her to make such a profound announcement to the world.
When Kathleen died a decade ago, I knew little about the opioid epidemic. I wish I had been aware that addiction is a disease rather than a choice, that pop culture has a profound impact on young people, that stigma is a barrier to the gargantuan feat of recovery. Now, I am all too aware of the millions of mourners whose lives, like my own, will never be the same.
