good morning and welcome to what's going on my name is bob feldman and i'll be your host today we're privileged to have with us in our studio kate genevese of webern mass who's written a very compelling sad wonderful book we're guiding her son's addiction to opioids welcome kate thanks  as you know so well and as a lot of the public now knows opioid addiction has swept the country in effect and resides in every small town every state in the united states when you first aware of your son's problem with opioid drugs how old was he at that point well when we knew it was serious because it hit it for a while he was about twenty seven but he i had gone a private high school he lived away and he had a hockey scholarship and then he went on to college so during that time he had six surgeries and the surgeries were all during college or knowledge and and i ended up in school so he got prescriptions from the doctors prescribed by the dutch dr for the pain resulting from a strum the the for the surgery and so they freely gave them out which i didn't know that and i was aware that when he was a junior he had an injury for a shoulder and he came home for the weekend and on the ride home he said i have to stop at the hospital and see the doctor and get another prescription but he had had the surgery a month before so i said you know you need to get off this what do you mean you know you know more and he was giving me the riot act like of course i needed my shoulders killing me now you're just an intrepid you're a nurse right and you've been a course he was away most of the time at as not seeing him daily so i didn't know what was going on so i went in with him i worked at the hospital where he went no that no the doctor and so i confronted him and i said do you medication and i said well i live i need to let you know that addiction runs in my family and i'm worried about this and because at the time we had i have another nephew that  deep into heroin is older than gino but very very sick and eventually overdosed themselves and he was a heroin addict at the time but was he had had he been an athlete or time and was he doing other things like stealing to feed his habit i was he getting the money to buy the heroin my nephew to yeah yeah he was he was stealing did a lot of stealing right he did a lot of jail time too so i of course i'm nervous i don't want my friend end up like that right and i didn't think he had the disease of addiction i just did not think geno did but the doctor said to me very painful he needs the prescription he said he's not an addict i could tell if you are an addict is not one so i felt very intimidated when you're relying on the doctor yeah yeah but in my head i said i gotta do something else about so i drove back to school brought them in a dorm when to the nurse and told  eventually so he called me that night angry why did you have to do that you know so whatever too bad the nurse you know gave a talk but on he goes to college and he has surgeries on and off although he i mean he still played a lot because he would still be in pain and be popping the pills and going on the  husband you know shoulders popped out again and my husband was denial no we didn't he just sort of of of the ice is tired and i said look at the pushing his shoulder back and i can see it i could see t so right so he just said leave him alone and he you know then he goes back right on the ice and finishes the game so that's what it was like for the four years in college i could not wait for it  what about when he'd come home for christmas or easter or whatever the say an extended holiday of ten days or whatever did you were you were particularly noticing anything about his behavioral change or i knew he was talking part we always have a big party at my brother's christmas night in the young kids all go down the basement you know they're drinking a little bit and probably smoking pot but you know you know i never saw him out of control and during the holidays hockey is in season they don't get to stay home they have to stay at school and practice and they have games during that time so he was it was invisible to me i would see him you know after the games in this and that now is building up a tolerance t he lands a very good job i thought everything was fine he had a girlfriend off of college heather and they stayed together so a year or two before he died she just couldn't take his you know his addiction so she in their relationship you found out later i assume was witnessing him taking pills or a lot of them knew before we did you know because a way in their college another twenty five twenty six years old i mean you know you let your kids go but you think he had other prescriptions one of the problems people write about addiction in today is just the overprescribing on and on of the same drug or another equivalent drug so that it just continues a spiral may not be having any more surgeries but we're getting more pills yeah right we can't get these pills in the family see we'll get some stuff on the street exactly so he well long story short his role mate called us up one night and said gino has an addiction telling you this because  geno without telling somebody in his family and so they and he of course he was an addict too but he had given you know two thousand dollars a wanted it back so my husband went up to he lived above a bar and with it are probably the worst there they sell drugs they drink i mean you know a lot of alcohol a lot of drugs selling there and anyways he sees him sitting down there sipping on a beer they sit there and talk and gary and gary calls me and said gino's coming home we're getting this things finished college so that's where the nightmare really began for us because as they say it's a family disease it certainly is you know he was tough to deal with when he back when and experience with a fellow who is incredible athlete a golfer whose father had a big plumbing business had two brothers etc all this nice of the whole bit and  he was carrying on the golf course with his friend and earning money and an older caddie turned him on to heroin and this is a fellow who had severe diabetes who took insulin every day with a needle so needle wasn't a problem but the amazing thing is you talk about family having a privilege to to our tolerance so whatever to certain drugs china and they're mailing it in the regular us mail to people who fade obviously they have arrangements and it's become impossible to stop there's this isn't heroin coming across the border in big shipments this is small doses of fenton know it's you don't need a big area how coming in a letter you know we get millions of what day the government i mean they're talking about well we've done more money than the senators are saying we're attacking the over your prices they haven't even started i mean throwing back sat it not having the know all those people on the streets and a lot of those people were addicts as well so what can we do can we reopen them could we reopen you know you can't because i happen to have experience at that time with some of those folks so you remember that they would say they were taking him out of what we called state mental has to she is in denver is in different places large brick about one hundred twenty dollars a day for these folks at that time they dumped them out on the street you know i feel bad for these these folks and they were putting them in rest homes in nursing homes at seventeen twenty dollars a day that they were paying and in a fact this state was saving a huge amount of money and i have direct experience of that because my family owned a rest boston and all of a sudden they said here are four patients you're taking and they had all these mental health problems and said we can't take these people i mean we have vacancies but we don't have any psychiatric nurses we don't have any backup i mean they would see a community health center and spices and if a patient was sick with a general medical problem you know once a week and nothing for second this enough you have to take them state social providers in the united states in terms of states in other words they'll spend more money than a lot of the states in the united states taking care of elderly taking care of foster children etc if you can imagine what it's like in other states i was a as i was selling you earlier i mean it's in the globe we lost twenty one hundred people in massachusetts last year interdict marijuana while there are still huge needs in the opioid area to take care of there's not enough treatment centers on the effective treatment centers not affordable for people  one day he came home with kids that were he had when he was arrested he had to go to the sheriff's office every day and while so he made cousin who has a learning disability or a d h the giving and she's getting rid of when i was still a prescription i don't know how it makes him feel but it again it's another illegal they're going into going into this system yeah it's hard i know it was a mother who's who's lost a loving son what what do you think if there were no hockey injuries let's say he went to bed purchased do you believe in your heart he would not have gotten involved in  secret do you think his experience with being molested led him in any way to deal with  that he told me well i wanted him to stop playing hockey should you know i said this too many injuries you know you you think about please not planning college just do something else and he said i absolutely have to play it gets rid of the anger i am feeling in my soul checking in the raf yeah yeah yeah get it out did you know what their point what he was referring when he you know getting right back to school his english teacher said just write on anything you know write something that happened in the summer or right imagination right just in general so he has a measure nation w actually what happened in our family and he changed the names everything my two older children have been molested by my brother and my daughter pressed charges and put him in jail that it is in them it's just it's everywhere again like drugs it's everywhere and they don't reveal that we only see them talking about it with the church or something when it's pretty bad there but the point is in you know i had no idea it was happening yeah and it hard to accept i would think all those awful hugs it was when we found out and we had to press charges because he was still out on the even tell tell much to my own brothers and sisters because we had already been through it once that was a horrible experience with my other two children  divided my family of origin so i don't even want to bring it up to them so i just kind of we dealt with it as a group like my three kids and my husband and i after that and so when he said he needed to play i said well could you get a punching bag or something and you know thank boxing or yeah because you see the he didn't want to hurt anybody but you know he just was a big kid and he played rough and he was in the penalty box but we let him play for that reason and set up to me i'm the coach and yeah i'm not going forward or whatever yeah i'm not blaming them but i do think everybody needs to be aware of what i mean coaches parents teachers police the whole every neighborhood needs to be aware of this disease because it could happen absolutely anybody absolutely it's no racial religious  mentioned you were going to go he would take off i mean it's hard to visualize people listening maybe but it's it's so hard to try to make somebody do something that they don't want to do especially when they're older if the younger under age you have a little more control but when they're close to thirty years old and you say well we coulda section them but every time we wanted to section him all of us and he'd get clean and the police would come and so will he was he knew the police some of his friends were policemen at this point what do we do so what do you do so he'd take off go to friends for a couple weeks couple months and i would see him and combat and it would start all over again and then at the end he was on house arrest so he had to be with us and while doing that kind of drug and you know they're out there they're all like so much better than we are mentally you know if i don't manipulate the system and their friends their grandmother steal the silver while she's thrilled that you came in here because we need more people like you and fortune with a horrible loss yeah but we need to hear about the loss because it does repair all our rights and i want to thank a you can get it anywhere bookstores on line i have a website which is my name kate genovese books dot com so you can order it off of air some of the proceeds  going to go to helping addicts i'm not quite sure what we're going to do because we have some other things going maybe a hockey tournament or something so we're  already well thank you for coming in oh thanks very much