State lawmakers channel grief into opioids fight

ST. PAUL, Minn. — In statehouses across the country, lawmakers with loved ones who fell victim to drugs are leading the fight against the nation’s deadly opioid-abuse crisis, drawing on tragic personal experience to attack the problem.

A Minnesota state senator whose daughter died of a heroin overdose in a Burger King parking lot — a friend hid the needles instead of calling for help — spearheaded a law that grants immunity to 911 callers. In Wisconsin, a state representative has introduced more than a dozen opioid-related bills in the years since his daughter went from painkillers to heroin to prison. A Pennsylvania lawmaker whose son is a recovering heroin addict championed a state law that expanded availability of an antidote that can reverse an overdose.

“We’re all here because we have this empty void in our lives,” said Minnesota state Rep. Dave Baker, whose son started out taking prescription drugs for back pain and died of a heroin overdose in 2011.

The lawmakers’ personal stories have lent weight to the effort to combat what public health officials have deemed a fullblown epidemic that is fast approaching the severity of the AIDS outbreak of the 1980s and ’90s.

More than 52,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2015, and roughly twothirds of them had used prescription opioids such as OxyContin or Vicodin or illegal drugs such as heroin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those overdoses have jumped 33 percent in the past five years alone, with some states reporting the death toll had doubled or more.

“It drives what I do,” state Sen. Chris Eaton, a Minnesota Democrat whose daughter, Ariel, died almost 10 years ago, said Tuesday. “It’s a crisis. We’re losing a generation.”