it is truly only such an important topic that will bring us all together your attention and your respect are appreciated at this time i would like to  media at that point we will go off the record so cameras off hands down and we'll go off the record at that point so your question answers for the senator and for the panel will be completely off the record i just want to thank some folks that we have here joining us in the room today community health centers of burlington turning point of county spectrum youth services and lines they all have tables in the back and they've got a bunch of great information for you senator sanders office also has a table in the back that has a bunch of information on how our office can help you as well as if you want to send a message to the senator have a problem we can help you with or a bunch of information on upcoming youth services and events that our office is doing so with that i want to introduce senator sand mostly i want to thank each and every one of you being here today now the reason that i am here and the reason that all of us  is that i am worried your parents and your grandchildren all word governor in the state legislature are worried and many of you are all word about an epidemic an epidemic that is sweeping our country and sweeping the state of vermont and that of course is the very significant increase that we are seeing in when addiction and in fatal drug overdoses now i know that it is hard for kids your age to listen to an older generation believe it or one not we were once your age and believe it or not when older people came before we were saying why do we have to sit here we've got other things that we would like to do with our lives and you know what's this all about and we know that you as well as every of the young generation in history has always done exactly the opposite of what your parents suggested that you do and we know that when your teacher tells you something as often as not you're going to think what do they know right nothing new about that and with that reality in mind you are sitting here now in and no doubt many of you ot thinking why do i have to be healed there are other things i'd rather be doing and so if some of you get bored and wish you were elsewhere i understand that but the reason that we are here today dealing with this very serious matter is that we need your help now in the united states senate i sit on a committee it's called the help of education labor and pensions committee it is the committee that deals with all of health care issues and education issues and we hear from some of the smallest and most knowledgeable people in the united states of america and in fact from all over the world they come and they testify before our committee but on this issue opioid and heroin addiction the issue of why so many young people ought turning to drugs and how we can prevent but it turns out that you probably know a lot more than the experts you might know more than anyone else what it is like to have and live in a family where your mother or your father is hooked on drugs and i expect that some of you here today are living that reality you might know  than experts from harvard or yale what kind of pressure exists when your best friends are experimenting with pills and they want to know why you want not cool why you want not doing what they are doing what's the matter with you if you're not experimenting with pills you might know how if perhaps you broke your leg skiing or you got some athletic injury or even if you had a mole or a tooth extracted by your dentist how kind of nice that feeling was after you took those pain killers that was a nice feeling maybe i  and how tempting it might be to continue taking them you might also know more than your teachers what it's like to be young in a very crazy world when you're dealing with anxiety or depression and you're watching the t v and you're seeing all kinds of weird things going on all over this world you know that experience better than any of us here and better than your parents so after this panel is  it will be your turn to tell us what you think about the problem and how we can best solve it i need your help not only for vermont but for the entire country you can also ask any questions that you want and the media will not be recording any of this so you can say what's on your mind there is no question that it's not a smart question i don't care if anyone thinks it's a dumb question if it's something that you feel we want to hear your question and we want to hear your thoughts and here is the main point that i want to make regarding opioids and heroin you know everybody goes through life and every single day we all make mistakes i make was likes you make mistakes sometimes we say something to somebody we insult them we heard them we don't mean to do it sometimes maybe we're not really we screw up right here in this gym on the basketball court my son played on the basketball team you're bankable stay the team loses you feel terrible sometimes you're hanging out with your friends you're on the phone too much you don't study for an exam you failed your exam and you feel like a jerk maybe you're a senior you're not paying attention to what kind of college you might want to go to a what kind of job you may want to get if you're not going to college everybody heroin will literally take over your life it will no longer up be your life and it will prevent you from living in any sense of the word a normal life it will likely lead you the attorney general will talk to this into criminal activity because you'll suddenly need money to feed your habit it will also in some cases lead to your death in vermont last year are a hundred and twelve thousand vermonters died from drug overdoses alone three times as many as died in two thousand and ten nationally last year we lost more than sixty eight thousand americans to drug overdoses that is more people in one year than died in the vietnam war and what is especially tragic is that a significant percentage of the people who are getting addicted and dying are young people and let me also be very clear drug addiction is hitting people from every walk of life doesn't matter if you're rich or you're poor you're younger you're old male or female black or white famous or nothingness it doesn't matter if you live in new york city or rural vermont no one is immune in a few minutes kelly will tell you her story about how to hard she has had to fight to overcome addiction about how the father of her child died from an overdose about what drugs have done to her and her family and i hope you will listen closely to what kelly has to say because kelly's story is the story of thousands of people in our state and millions of people all over the country and let me also say that the kelly and anyone else who is dealing or has dealt with addiction this is not an easy thing to talk about nobody wants to get up in front of other people and talk about some of the big a serious problems that you have to overcome in your life and too often people are ashamed or they are  d or they're trying to hide addiction issues because they feel the stigma of their experience but kelly hopes and she can tell you the source of that  the community health center on riverside ever knew and what doctors find does every single day is deal with people who are addicted and what cheers walked on to talk to you about is the physiology of addiction what does it mean when you are addicted can you suddenly walk away and say you know what this is not good i'm not going to do drugs that he well well and i think that easy because especially for young minds state will talk about the relationship between drugs and crime and how a very high percentage of people today in jail in vermont and around this country are there because of some drug related issue and the attorney general like all of us up here understands that addiction is a sickness and must be treated as a medical problem nonetheless many many lives have been destroyed and are being destroyed today and let me conclude by saying that i know that some of you sitting here today have personal experiences on this issue you might have a parent an aunt or not a little sister or brother who has struggled with addiction some of you may even know someone who has died from an overdose and some of you may have used drugs yourself this is heavy stop not easy and it might be hard to hear about it and it might be hard to talk about it but my hope is that the compensation today is helpful because if we do not have the courage to talk about this issue if you think we can just hide it we are never never going to solve that last point is that the slate of vermont has been more aggressive and i think more effective than most states and trying to address this crisis and today we have with us a number of agencies in the treatment county area who are all working on the problem and after all meeting ends please feel free to walk over to all these tables that are out front and get as much information as you can also the state has a number that you can call to one one with the help they may need so you can get some information today and let me know introduce when senator sanders office contacted the turning point to find someone to speak about their experience of course i jumped at the opportunity as you mentioned i was a nurse i was a professional in the community and i worked in long term care for twelve years and when i was in high school i was very aware of my family dynamic and system and  i thought that i was a i was smart enough to know that if i experimented with drugs or without a hollow that i might be at rest because i saw other family members who were dealing with us  and when i was a senior in high school i was a basketball player and i had an injury i had an e c l tear and reconstruction and that was my first experience taking opiates it was a very painful procedure  i needed to be on pain medication for quite a while and i was able to rehab from that but after having experience with addiction issues now i know that that was the turning point for  me i liked them a lot they made me feel better it wasn't just for the pain of my injury and there was something in the back of my had that that told me these make you feel better these make you feel normal  after high school i went to college went to feed to see you graduated from the nursing program and realized that i had chronic pain issues i have a condition called fibromyalgia which my body and my nerves tell me i'm in pain when there is no injury and over the years being smart and being a nurse i knew that if it got to that point where i say the physical therapy wasn't working the chiropractic wasn't working that i would take some pain medication you know to get over that hump i always  directed i didn't abuse it but this was a pattern over a couple of years and after a series of tragedies and trauma is in a very short period of time in my  life my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer i was pregnant with my first child i lost my mother three months after i had my son and the relationship that i had with my son's father crumbled and then i had an incident at work where i had a seizure and fell and fractured my skull had a traumatic brain injury and was in the hospital for a week more pain medication came and much stronger medication and going through all of these emotional traumas having opiates at this time i didn't even as smart as i was i didn't notice what the pain medication had started to mean to me i was starting to use the pain medication when i didn't have pain to get through the day i had an infant son and i was tired and i was recovering from this injury yet i was still taking  i won't go into how much but a fantastic amount of pain medication which was called delighted which is a synthetic form of heroin it is an opiate that the health care system uses that was derived from heroin that is used as a very strong in all g s explore such injuries as the one that i had having gone through some counseling and realizing that this is the pattern that i had gone into i actually went to my doctor myself the first time and said look you know i think i'm i'm taking this medication when i'm not having pain i'm taking it when i have other things going on and to get through the day and my doctor actually worked with me over a period of a month and a half to taper me off of this medication and i thought i was doing ok you know i ratted myself i told my doctor i had a problem right this is that this is going to resolve itself and you know again as as educated as i was on this issue i didn't know what switching substances man and a month later after having never really used alcohol at all even you know the occasional dinner with family or a glass of wine i was drinking from down to dusk and within a month i was blackout drinking every day with my infant son and by myself  i had started a new relationship about four months after my injury and this was my my daughter's father and he had a  lifelong issue with alcohol and drugs and we were very honest and open about that and we both thought that we were doing ok a hit my drinking from him you know the relationship was toxic from the start and when i started having pain issues again after having gone to my doctor and told them that i had an issue with opiates i was in for a scribed any more and when i did have legitimate pain so what i started doing was buying pills on the street when i needed them i was self medicating i had returned to nursing at this point and i was working in local nursing homes and i started diverting medications from my patients i was working eight hour shifts in a local nursing home and whatever i needed i was taking out of the medicine box and that was extremely easy and i've only recently begun to admit because the honesty of that act i hope will grab someone's attention what happened in my family system i was hiding the fact that i was diverting medication we were still getting it off the street this of course triggered  addiction issues that my daughter's father had and we were just in this pattern of toxicity thinking we were normal we were a suburban family i was working he was working and we were both addicted to opiates when i ended up losing both of my jobs i became pregnant with my daughter and still was using opiates while i was pregnant with my daughter i was not honest with my o i had gestational diabetes which will cause a fetus to grow very largely i only came to thirteen pounds during this pregnancy despite having gestational diabetes luckily my daughter was born healthy but at that moment when she was born she was born with ritual symptoms and that was the first time that i actually admitted to someone when they confronted me with the fact that she had these symptoms i told the pediatrician yes i had been using however somehow i was able to do when they were called saying it wasn't all the time issue i was able to convince them that my household was save that my daughter was an at risk i had visited nurses coming into my house and was still able to convince these professionals that i was ok when clearly i was one hundred ten pounds after having a baby girl and just a mass a few years later  you know pills just absolutely took over our lives when i first started realizing hearing that voice in the back of my head saying you know you're life is a mess you're not paying your bills you don't have money to get food for your children you're about to lose your apartment you can't pay rent there was a little voice in the back of my head that simple maybe it's the balance i know that that's not the problem we became homeless i had an aunt that took us in  for a few months and i went back to drinking we couldn't afford the pills and immediately started binge drinking again and with my children my daughter's father was working at the time and we were we were still trying to maintain i was absolutely depressed and we ended up living in a one bedroom apartment with a friend of his that i had just met with my two children my son and my daughter who had just turned one in the living room of this one bedroom apartment and that the friend was an alcoholic less than a month later is when i first tried heroin i was absolutely at my bottom i was in so much emotional pain that it manifested more physically i just i could not get through the day and i cannot stress enough or be honest more than to tell you the first time that i used heroin and that was it took over my mind more than the pills more than the opiates i already had the obsession going on from my addiction telling my mind was telling me that's what i needed that was the fix that's what i wanted the minute i tried heroin that is all i could think about i was working a twelve hour shift job at that point i was able to maintain that for only a few months and that completely took over our lives he started using we started dealing to support our habit there was an incident of assault with the person that we were staying with against me and we became homeless and went into the hotel room system that has four families who are homeless which children and or cold weather situations you might have seen on the news or have seen within the community that for months the four and for four months we use the system to bring dealers into her mind with our infant daughter my son's father had taken temporary custody of him thank god to keep him safe and that is what we did and that is the reality of what happened in our lives with addiction we had dealers in our hotel room with our baby daughter to support our happy i mean there's no there's no sugarcoating that at all you know it  got to the point where that was our lives and it was ok and looking back on that just you know man so we ended up having members of his family take us and at that point the state would no longer put us up and they are in long term recovery his family unfortunately was riddled with this disease and had dealt with it and it came down to the point where we were in severe withdrawal one time and i convinced him to walk up the stairs with me hand in hand and they were the first people that i admitted that i had a problem and that the beginning of our recovery and that was the summer of two thousand and thirteen i went to our twenty talks for a week that's here and for like ten and went up to me for twenty five days and after know he's the program i on the price got an apartment and he was still in and out of rehab struggling he was unable to just stick to sobriety for more than a couple of months at a time and i really struggled with trying to be a single mom and trying to reconnect with my son who had lost contact with and it was just extremely difficult despite all of the support that i had i had the lens and i had a clinician and i had a family educator and i had my little girl and i was a single mom for the first time and i didn't have my son and i ended up having a relapse eight months later it was very brief thank god and with the support and the recovery in the twelve step programs i had been doing luckily i was strong enough to call them up and say hey i need to come back because this isn't going well i relapse i'm using again i need some help and they were able to get me back in within a month upon returning to the line and really digging in that time realizing how addiction had changed my thinking the more work that i needed to do to get back to a healthy lifestyle the way that i was still up to spy on my work obsessing that that was the answer constantly i was able to really take and  i used my clinicians help my daughter's father was struggling just back and forth back and forth and i stop making excuses for him and i think with a five month period of time he had returned to rehab three or four times and i was able to break away from that situation he wasn't healthy and to keep my my daughter and myself safe because if i had any contact with him i know i would have started using again so  robbing convenience stores and pharmacies and this that and the other that he was found in south burlington in the woods by himself of an accidental overdose and again that reality in saying that out loud just the impact that it has had it not only on my recovery but my family and his family this is the mess when i met with senator sanders i saw how messy do you want me to get because i can make it look real ugly that's the ugly my daughter doesn't have her father and i have to stay sober and i have to help her through that and i have to be strong enough to get us through that in a healthy way and it's because of the law because of the sports that i have and because of the turning point recovery center that i have been able to do that i have been sober almost three years now and a year past my daughter's father's passing of an overdose i have no idea other than being able to ask for help and reaching out for sports that i have been able to do that because i tell you what my brain tells me regularly but that's the answer despite all of the work that i've done so we need to start telling the truth i hope that something that i've said today has made sense to some of your situations the things that you've seen maybe not in your family or in your own family but your friends family your peers what they're struggling with we need your help to find a solution i can only share with my solution is then we need to stop this now i don't want any of you to have to feel the pain that my family has felt that his family has felt that my daughter and my son have i urge you if you have ever been asked to try and yet for whatever reason even your doctor please be careful you have a choice now and i thought of choice for three years because of what i've done but after you have it in your system you might not have a choice ever well so my name is heather steinem a family doctor which means i get the chance to take care of people from birth to death at home family i'm originally from west virginia and then moved up here in vermont and a lot of what i do in my regular practice now is screening people for and a lot of treating people for addiction mostly into narcotics and opiates now i see many people in my clothing have been touched by drug abuse and dependence i suspect a lot of you have as well i won't make you folks raise your hands but i suspect many of you know someone personally who's lost a job lost their kids for a period of time lost someone they love because of narcotics over two hundred fifty thousand kids a year use opioids for some reason and there it in pain and there are a lot of different drugs that can time they're just trying it out probably with friends or even family for many others they're using it to feel normal because their bodies are dependent on the drug i wish there was a way that i could do a blood test or an online quiz to predict when you are going to be the ones who are going to struggle with addiction you might be the person who tries it once and says oh i hate the way that makes me feel  never going to do that again but you might not you might be the person who says that felt better i feel normal i feel good for the first time in a while and it would be great if we knew that beforehand because that second person the person who feels great or normal they're the person who's really at risk to having their lives be completely taken over by these drugs i do know that the earlier you first use any substance that can be addictive the more likely you are to become addicted to it and you can say that's not fair but i can say it's not fair that you know how to use your phone that i write better than i do  technology comes out and you're all over it and your parents and grandparents are looking at you like how did you do that you could probably learn a new language twice as fast as me right so it kind of makes sense that your brain is going to become hooked on something that's really powerful faster than somebody who is twice your age i treated a young man who is about nineteen years old and he'd been using for several years and during a relapse of heroin when he was still coming in to see me he said you know i feel like the truest version of myself when i've got heroin in my system but this is a small town so i could walk downtown and i could see this young man and i saw what he looked like when he was using and he didn't look like the best version of anything he was unshowered his eyes were red and he didn't recognize me he was staring ahead with a glazed expression he looked like he had no place to go and no resources in the world even though i knew he was a wealthy college student from a good family and you guys know you know this from school and you know this from your personal experience you know this from t v on the radio that the worst thing that can happen is not looking terrible when you run into somebody downtown it starts with being a little bit distracted because you're super focused on this one thing your friends and family might notice that you're not paying attention to the things that you normally care about maybe your green start to slip from the moment you wake up your first thought is of getting opioid sick you feel right instead of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning told yourself what you would end up doing later in life you would have either laughed or gotten angry certainly not believe that it was possible if you aren't able to get what you need you'll start feeling physically sick right withdraw just a little restless and irritable to start with soon the sweating and the ready nose will kick in muscle aches diarrhea people will start asking you if you're feeling well or if you have the flu and of course there are other risks especially if you're snorting or using through a needle you can get infections in your heart the discs in your back your blood your skin blood clots hepatitis c h i mean even if you manage to get through the winter all for a few days you realize it's not the same as before you started using t that hockey goal getting some of these phone number instead of feeling a rash you feel nothing opioids also take away the ability to deal with life what do you need with coping skills when you have a narcotic anger fear insecurity pain they all go away when you have an opioid in your system and your brain in your body forget how to manage the sensations never know what i'm talking about today i hope that none of you ever come to see me for help for this because you can stuff you think of course i'll help you if you do it's a rewarding work to get people their lives back but they are changed forever because of their history and i hope that you all don't carry those scars if you do and don't be afraid to either get help for yourself or help your friends and family as well i do see people who are able to turn it around like kelly they often require their medications lots of office visits and lots of time but there is hope and the sooner you get help the easier  in life it was me i don't have a clue and i can remember in this building i mean an enormous anxiety a normal about a lot of different stuff one i remember in particular was that he doesn't teach anymore but he's a great teacher and also in this there's a lot of teachers at this school in a row in the public schools made a big difference in mr mr mcgrath taught me history ninth grade and he used to have to read out loud in class and i can read and i can speak out loud and i can articulate a lot of the words i just remember that dread that anxiety of the fear of having to read out loud and so i compensate in different ways i wasn't a bad kid  arrested and i'll tell you what made the difference in my life and gave me a second chance and that's not even true either it's more like a third fourth fifth chance was the community was  and i'm really lucky that i grew up in a time that we didn't have the challenges you guys have nothing like heroin nothing like opiates was even in the zone of possibility when i was growing up i was no better than anybody else i just had a lot of different opportunities a lot of different second chances and i grew my guys and i grew up with we went on and you guys you know find out as you go into life a lot of you're going to take a lot of different twists and turns in life and one guy particular played football was a fullback in our team great kid good looking kid one here who was smart charismatic and we lost  we don't have to say anything we know that there's a lot in this guy particular we lost touch then out of the blue i got this random message from trouble and he asked me for help and i can tell from the message that it was a message of desperation you know what to do and do anything i felt like a lawyer i think like a regular person you know in my previous job the state's attorney here in china kelly and one of the greatest privileges of that job was to be in a position of authority in the community which you grew up in and you dealt with a lot of folks who you grew up where they dealt with a lot of folks who you knew and i always knew that they were good people here i can think of another guy that i went to school with is here a year ahead today got into drugs and i mean i said this well you can't judge about how this stuff starts it starts and all of a sudden it just takes off on you and you don't recognize yourself and the point about this guy was i didn't recogniz this addiction which is a disease and yes it kills people we know that for a fact but it kills people souls and i remember seeing this kid know like all the kid out ostracized that you don't feel part of the community this takes a tremendous toll on people takes a tremendous toll on this community and what we've done in the criminal justice system we don't know a lot of good  senator sanders has said in this issue on the fight on opiates we don't know we've done well we need to do better but what we haven't always done well is deal with you know a lot of people are good people one have been jailed and i mean i think kelly said this well you start doing these extraordinarily dangerous think desperation this is how powerful this addiction is iraq when you're stealing you're breaking into people's homes and public safety is always going to come first but one of the challenges i think we have in this fight in reforming our criminal justice justice system is this that when you come out of the criminal justice system it comes out that criminal record is  arrested it's going to impact your ability to get a job you know where that scarlet letter on he'll get a job get an education housing all the basic fundamentals that we all expect you you know i'm sure you expect him yourselves to chase it's really really about the american dream what we're talking about and the loss of that american dream because this disease i think part of the answer going forward and we have a good job but i see my friend mike moore from the growing police department here in jail lawson and other members of the p d we really change the way we do business along force when it comes to the issue of the diction i've done a good job with the force and we've done a good job with intervention we've done a good job with treatment but when it comes down to is prevention  thinking has evolved in the in this changed in how do we create a community where we address these issues of trauma where we address these issues of mental illness where we address the issues of poverty give people a safe place where we wash away other to give each other a second chance and to lift people up with her and to speak out when we see somebody who's at risk that made the difference in my life you guys face a lot more challenges than i ever did but i want you to know this we