It's Overdose Awareness week. Franklin County Coroner Nathan Overmire hosted an event this week memorializing people who have died from an accidental overdose.
Nearly 700 people died from accidental drug overdoses in Franklin County in 2023, according to coroner's data. That number is lower than the annual figures from 2020-2022, but is still higher than the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when 566 died.
Guest speaker and Boston author David Sheff wrote "Beautiful Boy," a book turned movie with Steve Carrel and Timothy Chalamet, about raising a son that suffered for years with addiction.
Sheff said there is still a problem with the way the culture in the United States perceives substance use disorder — as a moral deficit, that "somehow they only care about themselves. They don't care about anybody else. They don't care about who they hurt."
But that's wrong, Sheff said.
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Sheff found out his son, Nic Sheff, tried drugs when he was only 11.
"I got a call from a teacher who told me that they had found some marijuana in his backpack, and I was completely surprised. I was shocked and and really sad," Sheff said.
They had talked about drugs, and Sheff thought he was on the right track.
"We had a very close relationship, but I had no idea what was going on between, Nic and his friends, and they were already using some drugs," he said.
The middle school told Scheff not to worry about it.
"And what they told me was, 'Nic is a great kid, he's fine, he's a good student, you're involved, he's an athlete, has friends. Drugs are out there. It's a rite of passage for many kids, there's a social scene going on, kids use because of peer pressure. They want to be cool.' And basically told me not to worry about it," Sheff said.
Now, he warns, that wasn't the right strategy.
He said what the school should have told him was the "earlier a person starts using drugs, the more likely he or she will become addicted."
A better approach is to address the issue head on, he said.
"Let's have a conversation about what's going on with this child who is 11 years old and is already getting high and addressing, fix what's going on, or at least doing everything we can to fix what's going on," Sheff said.
A few years later, Nic was addicted to drugs and overdosed numerous times.
After 12 years of addiction and failed treatments, a doctor tested Nic and diagnosed him with depression and bipolar disorder. Sheff wished he had known sooner.
"Based on the evaluation, this doctor put him on medications. He went into therapy. And that was not the last time Nic relapsed. But his relapses were less extreme after that. And he ultimately did survive," he said.
Sheff said many kids, like Nic, find temporary relief from anxiety with drugs because of an undiagnosed or untreated issue.
He wants parents to know that they shouldn't ignore early drug use because early interventions like therapy and finding the root of a child's anxiety can stop addiction from taking hold.
