I lost my child to fentanyl poisoning: Help me educate other families
Nothing you have ever experienced can prepare you for losing a child. This loss is like no other, and losing an only child renders entry to the most uncommon group of survivors worldwide.
On Nov. 4, 2021, I entered this association upon opening my son’s bedroom door to wake him up for work, as was my routine. Tristan, 26, was a hard sleeper, and it appeared he fell out of his desk chair and passed out cold. But Tristan wasn’t asleep; he was dead. And when I turned him over and saw his purple-dotted face, a trickle of blood ran from his nose, and the last of his breath exhaled from his body, so many emotions electrified me all at once: shock, panic, disbelief, worry and sadness.
I thought he could be saved if I moved quickly. But that was not the case because, unlike any time before, Tristan had obtained a drug laced with fentanyl.
In the months to follow, I, like so many other bereaved parents, would learn that fentanyl has been killing young Americans for years, and there were few reports on the news and little being done about it. I felt strongly that many other parents like me were struggling with their children through substance use, not knowing that one pill, one line, one shot, one time could kill them.
Why didn’t anyone familiar with my struggles warn me? Why didn’t the recovery center he had just emerged from one month earlier warn me? How could we shut down the entire country for a public health issue, but no one was talking about this public health issue?
And so, only a few short months after his death, I, a mother from Florida who lost her only child, founded The Blue Plaid Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness and educating the public about the fentanyl poisoning crisis across the country.
Every parent, child and young adult must know that the illicit drug landscape has changed.
Heroin and cocaine are agriculturally based products that require a tremendous effort to grow and process into street drugs. Fentanyl is synthetic, and with the support of Chinese transnational criminal organizations supplying the precursor chemicals, Mexican cartels use fentanyl to press pills made to look like prescription medication and sprinkle it into loose powders to drive addiction. Fentanyl manufacturing is pennies on the dollar compared to agricultural-based drugs heroin and cocaine. They adopted a new business model that makes sense for them but costs more than 100,000 American lives each year.
It’s no longer don’t take drugs because you can get addicted and ruin your life. The message now is don’t take any drug because you don’t know if it’s a counterfeit pill or a loose powder laced with fentanyl, and you could be lethally poisoned and lose your life.
When drunk driving became an unacceptable problem, a national effort was born from a group of mad mothers.
The time has come again. In 2023, Blue Plaid hopes to continue to expand its reach, working toward the ultimate goal of mass communication and education about fentanyl poisoning to all.
Suzy Pereira is founder of the Blue Plaid Society, a Florida-based nonprofit organization. She resides in Brevard County.