Portland residents march for heroin abuse awareness
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) – Walking the streets of Portland there are a sea of faces affected by heroin marching together in a poignant display of those left behind.
“He was my best friend. He was the love of my life and he’s not just a number. He’s a person,” Jessica Biszmaier said.
Biszmaier lost her boyfriend Donald Jackson to heroin. She now has to raise their 3-year-old daughter Emilee on her own.
“I have to look at her every day and see him and it sucks,” she said. “I just told her daddy’s up there with the angels and he’s watching over us. She loved him very much.”
Jackson’s mother Lauretta buried her son just one month ago.
Standing alongside Jessica, she’s joining a very personal fight to raise awareness about heroin abuse. They’re begging neighbors not to ignore the warning signs.
“If you’re looking at your neighbor and you’re seeing 50 to 60 people coming in and out, you know what’s going on. Make a call,” she said. “It’s a bad epidemic down here and no one should ever have to bury their child. Donald was my baby – my youngest and you shouldn’t have to do that.”
The body of 4-month-old Natallya Rich, missing for several days, was found in her grandmother’s basement.VPC
Jessica and Lauretta’s wounds are still fresh but they’re finding comfort walking alongside others who understand the depth of their grief. Almost everyone who attended the event has lost a loved one to heroin abuse.
“It helps because we all love each other in some kind of way or we loved him or we loved whoever is lost by this,” Biszmaier said.
“It’s a shame too that this drug has made us a family but it’s a family that can go strong and help each other,” Biszmaier’s sister Ashley said.
With every sign, step and honk they hope to raise awareness and remember the many lives gone too soon.
Last year the Center for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing in just two years, between 2010 and 2012, deaths from heroin overdoses doubled in the U.S.
Here in Kentuckiana, the extremely addictive drug remains a major problems local officials continue to evaluate.
Filed under: General Problems
Heroin is not a party drug, nor a drug of choice, like alcohol or marijuana. It is a drug that you take when you want to feel better — about yourself. There’s a reason that the word “anguish” is not used with physical pain — mental anguish can be just as debilitating as physical pain. And there aren’t too many drugs that can touch this kind of pain. So, whether it was the first time Donald used heroin or not, he was obviously self-medicating.
The thing about heroin is that after the first time you use it, you continually have to use more to get that same feeling. To me, that’s addiction. I wouldn’t put opioids in the same class, but the feeling for some can obviously trigger an addiction. The relief of pain — whether physical or mental — is a feeling of freedom. And freedom from pain can be addictive, especially if drugs are the only thing you’re using to relieve it.
Blaming loved ones for not noticing or being unable to help someone suffering from depression or PTSD is not helpful either. Many who suffer from mental illness take great pains to appear normal on the outside and hide their suffering.
And you can’t compare those with a sensitivity to addiction with the rest of the population. Also, while some people handle grief better than others, it’s usually when that grief is compounded by other things that some people start to think of suicide.
“Biszmaier lost her boyfriend Donald Jackson to heroin.”
No, it wasn’t the drug. It was addiction, and the cause for that is usually a past trauma. So the real reasons these families lose their loved ones are depression, PTSD, and other mental illnesses, not the drugs.
It’s a shame that grief gets in the way of logic, and it’s a shame that politicians react by creating laws that make other people suffer.
No where in that article did it say Jackson was addicted. Might have been his first time using it and it might have been too much that he took or the other ingredients in it. I’m sorry but we can’t assume people are addicts. And I’m not saying heroin is okay, certainly it is not. But if any of those people were in chronic pain and were not being adequately treated, we have to consider that a person can only bear so much pain for so long, before they will search for relief. And I agree that it is much more likely that more people have become to heroin and other street drugs because of an emotional illness, but if those people had an emotional illness so bad that they would turn to heroin, then why weren’t their loved ones trying to find them help and support for that? My point to that statement is this: It is less painful to blame someone else. Perhaps some of those people told that loved one to ‘snap out of it’, ‘get a hobby’, ‘go to church’, and never offered one iota of support that they really needed nor encouraged them to go get mental health treatment. Or as the media would have it – probably those people were given some opiates for some sort of pain and they got addicted to heroin as a result. I can show you one organization that claims even a few pain pills after dental surgery can result in heroin addiction. So I suppose if the war goes on, eventually we’ll be going to the dentist and have dental surgery without any numbing and without any pain medication for a few days later, because somebody made up a story and said – I was on pain meds for dental surgery and when the pills were gone, I turned to heroin.
But what’s more important to me is that the people in that story don’t say their loved one was on opiates first, which apparently according to all these agencies and news reports and even social media group is the reason most end up on heroin. They get a prescription or 2 of some opiate, legitimately for pain albeit acute or chronic and wham – they are addicted and if they can’t get more of those pills, they might turn to the street and get heroin and then die.
And I agree that grief gets in the way of logic, and when it does those who are grieving are going through trauma and at my age, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t lost a loved one, but they aren’t on heroin or any other street drug, etc. I lost my mother to cancer when I was in my 20’s.. As a young adult, it took me years and years to understand that though my grief was a very harsh pain that half a life time later I still deal with, it was nothing like the pain and other symptoms she endured. However, I am thankful that doctors did keep her comfortable as they could – back in the mid 80’s when compassion and common sense were still alive and well. With things the way they are now, I’m thankful that she isn’t here now and suffering with the same thing, because it is unlikely that her pain and other symptoms would be treated like they were then.
Why is it that virtually every article I read about heroin or opiate abuse use statistics from 2012 and earlier? How can these articles be taken seriously with severely outdated stats? Why not use recent information? Are they hiding something?