welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host my guest today is paul wrestler paul is a vietnam war veteran and within the last ten years in a three year span in there he got divorced he lost his sight due to something that happened in surgery and he lost his son to an overdose of opi so i'm not sure how anyone survives that comes through the other side but not only has he survived he is on a mission and part of his mission has to do with providing people with access on so that they can revive somebody who has overdosed paul welcome oh thank you very much for having me yeah so as you and i chatted on the phone i really don't know how you survive something like that i think i'd like to start you know you've got this organization and there's a you've got a mission and you're committed to that but i'd like to start a little bit with corey story sure so corey died of a drug overdose eight years ago what was his journey how did that come about well the journey was a difficult one both mostly for him but very much so for our family we kind of became extremely dysfunctional very different points of view in the house and lots of blaming lo of screaming how did he get started we figured that when he was thirteen which would have been i to ninety nine two or three or two thousand he began smoking weed and drinking alcohol which in spite of what people say they are gateway drugs in the open the floodgates for our children anyone who gets involved with those things because of their rewiring of the brain particularly at that age especially you're right yeah so he graduated into harder drugs yes and at what point did you know that he was doing drugs very early on he was hanging out with a little older crowd and we noticed some changes in his motivation and we learned he was smoking pot that's the first thing someone a friend called and anonymously said kobe's a pot head which they were trying to help but as you know we figured that that's impossible you know he's here with us all the time prior to all this craziness our family was ok you know we  had some dysfunction like others but you know we were leaving good lives yeah and then he went seriously to alcohol and then up the line and eventually to heroin and at what point did you you know as a parent i know how it's just so difficult to pinpoint anything and you know so you hear your kid is smoking pot and then you know the kind of the so it's hard to know when to get fully mobilized like wait a minute there's really a serious problem here at what point did that happen we got we mobilized very early on and we took him you know to pleasure outside of the normal right ways to get pleasure and that we couldn't we couldn't find a reason nor could any of the professionals and as hard as we too expensive he went to her own and that's a normal the normal line that ticks are on the reason we have this horrible epidemic yeah you know i interviewed someone who  is recovering addict i don't know thirty five years or something and he's been counseling for thirty years and he said you know it's real simple it makes you feel good and we all want to feel good and that eight thirteen you don't have the systems in place the self development career to see it as a huge issue at some point did he see it as a problem and admit that it was a problem way too late and his that mission as his admission was not as demonstrative as i think it should have been so he liked using drugs yeah he liked getting high yeah and although the great amount of pain it caused him and then all this because he you know he was arrested several times he was in jail several times and can you imagine the you know sitting in court and watching your son come into court and orange jumpsuit and staring at you and mouthing curse words and trying to blame the police for  this issue is just a catastrophe and i'll never forget it i can visualize it right now i mean it was just a horrible experience i i can sort of imagine but i don't even want to you know it's like you know on the one hand it does it intellectually it doesn't make sense like you know that you see yourself stealing and you see yourself hurting your family and and you see your life going down the tubes and and yet you will do anything for that drug so at that point it's not your mind that's in charge it really is that the drug it's a disease yeah and you know your mind gets your brain gets rewired from drugs so it becomes somebody else's it becomes the add experience and all the other wants to do is just get high yeah there's no there's no you know reasoning about it you know you might want to say i should do this but you will until the end of the day comes corey had some good years he went off to a couple of  pace and you know it just never really totally clicked then he had he was down in pennsylvania as well he wound up in a halfway house in  jersey after completing at malvern house in pennsylvania malvern and he wound up in this halfway house and he was there for a short period of time broke all the rules and wound up being asked to leave and he went and found an apartment with some friends and he was actually doing ok they were working he was on a little construction team fixing up places but then he got caught up in the gun yeah you know and i've done a number of shows you know addiction and it's mystifying and it's not something you can nail down and say you know aid needs to be the needs to see but you know it's it when you when you were talking about you know your son in jail i on your web site actually and we're going to talk about that people did their stories and one gal said i was just released from jail serving a three hundred sixty four day sentence i had spent all those days locked up planning how i was going to successfully get high without ever running out of money or having to do the awful things i did to get money so here she is in jail she knows she's getting it i and all her energy is going is how do i get high right now in a way that is more successful then you know ending me ending up in jail and doing awful things so it is this beast and monster that is unfathomable but meanwhile from what i understand when corey overdosed that there was an incomplete nine one one call on his phone that's correct and he was with people and what happens or what has happened in the past is that and again this is how unfathomable drug addiction is because i don't think any of these people are malevolent or but they're willing to watch somebody die rather than get caught so they don't call nine one one because they know they might get caught you know and sent to jail and i'm assuming that's what happened with corey so exactly right that it wasn't even a question i mean if the police came they would have gone right to jail back in two thousand and ten that's what happened we we treated addicts as criminals and immoral immoral people not as you know human beings struggling with an addiction that has taken over their mind taken over the lars and somebody did attempt nine on one as you mentioned  and it's you know as a parent i mean i could only imagine that i would be inflamed and enraged and devastated but that has changed  about that sure the overdose prevention act which was signed into law in may second two thousand and thirteen by governor christie offer two really good ideas one the first one was if you were in the company of someone who was overdosing you could call nine one one and not have to worry about being arrested you would not go to jail you would get sent home and of course there'd be an attempt have some intervention yes and the second part of that was no locks on currently i refer to today as narc him and walks own is a medication which will reverse an overdose right so you've started this organization called top pac the overdose prevention agency corp it's a private nonprofit agency dedicated to educating community members about the overdose prevention act and providing training in the administration of the overdose reversal medication the locks on so this has become your mission because people people's lives literally ten be saved on the spot and i've had people on the show whose lives have been saved by no locks on right so is there so you're trying to get everyone who should have as severe as it was way back when my son started using drugs but that stigma basically says if i carry no laaksonen then i mean i dicked or someone in my family so that right and so instead of thinking what she's i can save my neighbor's life yes save a child's life my child's life my brother in law's life yeah i can save someone if i  locks i want in my home and i know how to use it yeah so we're not at that stage yet so who does at this point because that you know on the one hand stigma is a huge issue and but i think it may lessen just because there's hardly anybody that you meet that isn't somehow impacted by this epidemic is how we see you can't keep hiding because well because it's you can't hard from it any longer it's in the newspapers every day it's on television so so as the awareness level goes up and that has increased by huge amounts the stigma has lessened right and that's basically what's happening when i first got involved in the year two thousand people didn't even want to talk to me the township by i live i live and i still live and i did not want to admit that they had drugs in the schools they're not the only ones to hamilton school district particularly starting a high school hope it's ok to mention that they should know what they should know about their problems they have in their kids are overdosing and and the interesting thing about of this when you hear about people overdosing and when we speak about it people seem to think that people are dying you know the younger kids are dying and you know high school kids well that's not the case what happens is they learn how to use drugs and high school middle school and then those they leave high school and they get out into the world pressures increase they have to get jobs they have to go to school and they go off to school and they start using  more than they were in before you know it they're addicted so myself i'm sorry my son and his friends had a very difficult group of children who were nice kids but a lot of them became madd six at a time of his friends died of overdoses but every one of them where were they were in college they had good jobs they were working hard or they were in recovery somewhere so you know he died in two thousand and ten so that group of kids you know four years back so i think ninety five one thousand ninety six ninety seven those kids were getting really involved in drugs wow of ten it's just snowing sure you can find that true and other you know other groups of kids but we had a we had a really difficult time convincing the board of education and the school system that they had a problem that but i was you know it's you can't deny you said i was watching something on some news program the other day i think it was west virginia i don't want to be badmouthing west virginia but i think it was and they were saying that currently there's about every ten hours somebody dies of an overdose every ten hours and that the coroner's office is so backed up that they can't release bodies for weeks at a time they had to hire refrigeration tr highest percentage of overdoses per i think it's one hundred thousand i don't have the exact amount but that that area it has turned out to be a very difficult area with regard to drugs and you know here's the thing you could say you know that's west virginia but west virginia is part of the rest of the country it's happening elsewhere it's just that the percentage maybe a little higher dow but  everywhere in this country and all over the world so before we talk a little bit more about your organization and then who should be using the locks down i want you to do a demonstration for me about how crazy it would be over for decades and people say to me man this is a great invention who invented this recently i said max fishman was the man who invented the locks on for cancer patients that was is to use to help with cancer patients who were receiving a lot of painkillers right and then the locks always kept around or actually included in some of those painkillers so if someone overdose they they had at least  locks on in the system so eventually it developed i think it would have been in one thousand that's now i'm sorry two thousand around two thousand and thirteen basically when the first method was put on the market as we have about forty minutes oh my god yeah ok that's not good ok i'm sorry so this is this is the first one and this one has to be assembled so you have to take a p c or take a p c or put it together it's difficult developed in two thousand and fifteen three years ago think about that just three years ago this is a nasal spray right this is was created by adapt it's already assembled and it's you know it's a little tiny thing that i pretty big hands and this i have a difficult time sometimes with this i know how to use itself so this goes in the nose and there's a plunger here yes and it should work with say here go and use press that right and you real quickly i just want to tell you about our most recent adventure we went down to kensington which is a part of a philadelphia city philadelphia it's one of the worst heroin areas in the world and and you know as a human being in this part of mankind so embarrassed what we've done in this country but anyway so we provide training at a place called the rock ministry and we had a training there we handed out a training down there and you know and again one of the things that needs to happen is you know just because you bring somebody back doesn't mean they're going to stay clean so then there is the next step and we've got other people in place and you know we're doing what we can about that but the fact is that you can save a life thirty in sixty days is unbelievable yes it is and why why aren't these things paid for as expensive as they are it's very telling that we as a society i don't put much of a value on a human life we don't and as a result of that i mean if i if does a wonderful job at making them accessible like i get them donated to our organization right we've been working with kelly oh for for years so they donate them and they allow me to use them where i think they'd be best used so that's why we were we were in kensington yes and basically they work but like you said you got to be ready to get them into treatment somehow or other yes it was so there has to be collaboration and yes you're just the first step and so we have three minutes left once you're like i wave my magic wand you know you're on this mission i wave my magic wand and let's not go to we don't want anyone on drugs but what would happen with your mission for your organization well for my organization this is our mission we're not big enough we get no funding from the government we have to individually raise with  donations so our mission is simply this you know to go out and train and educate the public about the overdose prevention act however as i've witnessed this epidemic because i have witnessed it from one nine hundred ninety nine actually and i've watched how government has ignored the need to eliminate opiates from you know availability of them and as a result of that you know the big insurance companies especially produce pharma came out with these oxycontin and they told doctors that there's only a one percent chance of someone becoming addicted of course is a major ally and it has caused society a great deal of problems with lots of money being you know thrown out the door down the toilet where they're multimillionaires billionaires now you know with and lives here no they didn't i didn't know they're they're being sued by lots of places and they're changing their method and i believe they're going to actually shut down so my solution is very different i don't think that prevention works i don't think that treatment works i don't think we have the answer i truly believe that the answer is in medical research so any money that we have in other error should be moved to medical research and  basically use an example as a little boy growing up five years old i remember polio like right like it was yesterday i remember some of my friends you know going to be horrified about it yanna and i anyway so so why can't we find a solution for this well you know what we're basically out of time but i love that because you're the only person who has said anything like that and it's another place to really take a serious look very serious that's where we have to go so paul thank you so much for coming on thank you for being who you are and coming through whatever you had to come through to get to this point and having this huge commitment so i wish you lots of luck and i invite people to check out your organization your website is on on screen and you know we can touch base maybe in a couple of years and hopefully your wish will have come true well i don't think i'm going to see that but i hope we can hope it has a hope and happiness and thank you very much for having told pack i represent a group of wonderful people this is not just paul wrestler this is not about me and it's not about my volunteers or our employees is about the public and the people we serve we are the