Parents share stories of pain, hope in Napa Valley: ‘I had never heard of fentanyl’

When Dr. Colleen Townsend told the audience at a fentanyl education forum that she now gives an opioid-overdose antidote as a high school graduation gift, there was a round of appreciative applause.

Someone even called out, “Great idea!”

And when an audience member raised her hand and told the crowd that she was two years into recovery from opioid addiction, that she understood intimately the dangers of fentanyl, and would like to be a part of future expert panels, she, too, was cheered.

And when doctors on the panel, including Townsend, acknowledged that experimentation is normal for young people but that experimenting with drugs in the current landscape can be deadly, heads nodded in agreement.

That hunger for information and support led to a nearly packed house Wednesday night at Cameo Cinema in St. Helena for a panel discussion hosted by Song for Charlie, a Pasadena-based nonprofit created to raise awareness of counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl.

Part of the evening was devoted to a screening of a 30-minute film created by Song for Charlie in partnership with the California Department of Health Care Services, “The New Drug Talk.”

What is happening in the illicit drug trade today is far different from what people may have understood from just a decade or two ago, panelists said.

Pills sold on the street, via social media or passed along by friends, are made to look like legitimate prescription medications such as Percocet, OxyContin, Xanax or Adderall. But these pills are increasingly sophisticated fakes, made on the cheap and laced with fentanyl, a synthetic drug that can be 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more than morphine, according to the California Department of Public Health.

A buyer wanting a Xanax to take the edge off could end up with a lethal dose of an opioid vastly stronger than heroin, panelists said.

“Unfortunately, the substances that are available to youth who are just experimenting today can be deadly,” said Townsend, a doctor and the regional medical director of the health services department of Partnership Health Plan of California. “One trial may be an overdose level of a substance from which you may not survive.”

Laura Didier’s son Zach experimented and did not survive.

Didier, an outreach coordinator for Song for Charlie, was a panelist Wednesday and told the story of her youngest son, a soccer player and Eagle Scout, who died two days after Christmas 2020 at the family home in Rocklin.

A online search history done after his death indicated that Zach thought he was buying Percocet.

What he got was fentanyl.

“His dad found him on the 27th of December,” she said. “The first time I heard ‘fentanyl’ was when the coroner came and said ‘We suspect that fentanyl killed your son.’ It made no sense to me, I had never heard of fentanyl, I had certainly never heard of counterfeit pills.”

Awash in grief, but driven to help educate other young people and their parents, Didier joined Song for Charlie.

“You just got a lesson that my son never got,” Didier said at the close of the film. “His story does not have to be your story.”

Next to her on stage was Michelle Leopold, whose son Trevor died in 2019 during his freshman year at Sonoma State University.

Trevor, who had long struggled with marijuana use disorder, thought he had purchased Oxycodone, a pain medication, Leopold said.

It, too, was fentanyl.

After her son’s death, Leopold joined Song for Charlie.

She gave a talk at Sonoma State that led to the school’s establishment of its first End Overdose chapter.

She speaks to students in schools around the North Bay not only about the value in carrying Narcan but for students and parents alike to understand the dramatically altered landscape of recreational drug use.

“Back then, you would experiment and you would learn from your experience. Now people are dying,” she said. “It’s a whole different landscape.”

In the film, Song for Charlie co-founder Ed Ternan describes the current landscape not as a road to discovery that many young people travel, but a minefield that can end in death.

His son Charlie died in 2020, three weeks before his college graduation, after taking what he thought was a Percocet. He was 22.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 220 people died of opioid overdoses every day in 2021 — an increase of 16% over the year prior.

In the wake of the surging deaths, the Federal Drug Administration last year approved the over-the-counter use of Naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan.

Rachel Banks of Sebastopol was the audience member who raised her hand and asked for an invitation to future talks.

“I could just be a real life example,” she said after the presentation.

Banks said she became addicted to OxyContin as a teen and entered a rehabilitation program at 19.

Banks said she was moved by the mothers’ stories, but that voices of young people that have experimented, become addicted and come out the other side, would be another powerful tool in educating young people.

“It’s important to be able to see someone who is like you and who was successful in escaping something that is frowned upon, to break the stigma that they are a junkie or a failure or not going to go to college,” she said.

Mid-sentence, Banks was interrupted by another audience member eager to thank her for her honesty and bravery.

Banks, two years sober, said comments like that buoy her belief in the power of life after pills. She now attends Santa Rosa Junior College.

Townsend, the physician who now gives out Narcan as gifts, said this crisis is as personal as can be.

It’s here, it’s now, it’s us.

“So what you see in the movie as a big landscape has not escaped Northern California, it hasn’t escaped the North Bay and it has not escaped Napa,” she said. “All of those people that you saw in that video are us.”

The column has been updated.

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.