AMUDIM Awareness Event 3-4-2017 Zvi Gluck Part 1 of 5

thank you very much Yan and thank you everybody for coming out here this evening I'm looking around the room and I want to begin by saying thank you to everybody that's here thank you for taking a very very very important crucial first step for many of you it's more than the first step and realizing what we're battling as a community as a society as a universe drugs is no stranger to any of us whether it's someone in our own family family friend somebody that we grew up with or a neighbor of ours I think it's sadly safe to say that almost everybody that I know knows someone that's been affected by addiction one form or another for many many years too many years we've done a great job at keeping things under the rug on finding every excuse not to deal with it making every excuse why it's not really a problem but coming here tonight is saying that this is no longer the case in the Queen's Community or in any community and for that I thank all of you one of the things that's really important that we all must realize is that these problems they affect every Community every minority every majority there is no discrimination when it comes to addiction not race color creed gender makes no difference anybody and everybody can be affected by this and therefore we all must take whatever stands we can in order to make sure that we can protect those around us and those that we can care about it's also not limited by age or gender you know there was a time that everybody thought people suffering from addiction were mostly men that's no longer true oh it's only teenagers that's also no longer true probably was never true but now we see it more but there's also a very delicate approach that we have to take when dealing with these issues especially when it's people older especially when they are no longer with us when they've died of an overdose because there is family to worry about children but I'm going to say the word now that I can I've said many times before I personally think the dirtiest word that we have now in CLA Ro is the s word the word where we will not allow ourselves to get people help or to do what needs to be done because we're worried how it will affect somebody meeting their match and I I got to say not too long ago I was dealing with a family that had a woman from a prominent home regular Community husband had a decent job she had a good job bunch of kids in her 40s suffered from a severe addiction to painkillers after having been in a very bad car accident and I remember sitting in the house with one of the amudim case managers and her family and her R and her husband and there was like seven or eight of us there and we really tried getting them to realize the severity and extent of what was going on there and she looks at me and says I can't go to rehab because if I go to rehab the neighbors will will know my children will never find a suitable mate and I turned to her and I said straight to her face I said but the alternative is you might end up dead to which she responded without batting an eyelash but then my children will be considered orphans and it'll be easier to find a sh because no one's going to know it was drugs now I can't say let me first say she is in treatment right now so that's just that story has an ending that we're working towards a positive goal but I can't say that I disagree with her Theory because until our community is willing to take away that shame Factor remove the stigma and let people get the help that they need this will continuously be a problem and the only way that we can fight that problem is when we as as a community stand up together and decide that if someone has an issue with addiction and needs to get help we should encourage them to get the help that they need and encouraging to get the help doesn't just mean helping the addict you're going to hear tonight from some experts in various fields we have Dr pasquali Who's the deputy chief medical examiner for the office of the chief medical examiner for New York City we have manim pisansky who's the Clinical Director runs a program called the living room which is the largest network of uh I guess I'm going to call it sobriety programming within the Orthodox Jewish world and Jewish world not exclusively Orthodox and we're going to hear from Rabbi YY Jacobson who also in addition to being an international speaker is very very familiar with these matters but the common denominator no matter what we hear and who we hear it from is as long as we believe that we can keep things under the rug and we allow shame to get in the way of what we can do we will not be able to help those who need it and it's not just the addict who needs the help it's the family it's the friends the parents the siblings the children to really make sure that there's a real support structure and network and I also must say that just because we're there to give someone all this help and I I have to say this because it's just the sad reality it doesn't mean that it always works but that doesn't mean that we give up we could never give up we also have to learn to recognize the underlying reasons before people turn to addiction I say many times people that turn to addiction are usually doing so because there's a very very serious pain somewhere deep within them that they just can't get the help that they need again a lot lot of this could be resolved if we remove the stigma and the shame regarding mental illness people should go see a therapist people should be able to go get help before it turns to something worse so it all comes back to that same factor of trying to give people a healthy great meaning in life many times it's people that were bullied at a young age that had nowhere to turned or people that had learning disabilities sometimes it's people people that just want to have fun listen there are plenty of addicts out there that just really wanted to have a good time so there is no one common denominator for why people turn to substances or other addictions but more often than not the common denominator for people not getting the help that they need is because they're embarrassed to quote what rabant has said nobody that he knows died of hunger but they died of Shame not willing to ask someone for the food the last event that kazak and amudam did together was about a year ago maybe a little more and Dr schy Zimmerman said something then and I'm going to repeat it again in his name it's always very tragic when somebody dies it's tragic especially when they're young and it's an overdose and it's a real tragedy but as he said the tragedy the tragedy did not happen that day the tragedy was years in the making the tragedy was when these early warning signs were first there and people didn't notice it or chose to ignore it now it's sad everybody's crying but the question is how can we turn that into something to help people get a better experience for the future and many times people that have these issues turn to many many different types of ways of exhibiting it whether it's at risk behaviors behavioral issues acting out whether it's one or many forms of addiction drugs prescription street alcohol gambling internet porn there are all ways for people to escape from their reality to create an alternate reality one which they find can possibly help heal their pain many times it leads to emotional issues which then gets very disruptive within the family or religious issues where they get angry at God angry at the community that neglected them and then as we get into it we notice that there's more long-term effects leading to homelessness violence teen pregnancy we see many times many times people that are suffering from addiction have very very um I'm going to say bad interactions with law enforcement they're heading down criminal paths behaviors that are not something they would normally exhibit but now they don't know where to turn and then many times people end up dead now I want to just go on this for a second because I think it's important to note is especially when we talk about people that passed away of an overdose I try to differentiate from a drug overdose and suicide and it's important that we know the difference and you might hear about this more from some of the other speakers most people that we know that died of a drug overdose did not want to die it's what we would call an accidental overdose more often than not over 75% of the cases that we've been tracking since we started Amud which since Inception is sadly over 160 within our community alone the Orthodox Jewish community in the tri-state area most of them I guess I should say that again for effect it's important for us to know that we're losing hundreds of people that have died from addiction and overdoses in the Queen's Community alone that we know of since Russia sh there were over 11 that we know of that we know names times and which Funeral Home handled it so we can answer it that's just Queens alone one Community most of these people actually had been in some sort of treatment or another gone for help and have been clean many many of them for 90 days or longer and what ends up happening is for some reason or another there's a trigger whatever that trigger may be and they feel they don't have where to turn so they fall back to the path of addiction that they were previously at but what happens is the body was developed in a most amazing fascinating way maybe Dr pasquali can explain this a little better where we built up a tolerance to substances that don't belong and then as someone starts using more and more drugs the body needs a little bit of a higher dose to achieve the same desired height and this unfortunately increases slowly and slowly as the addict is moving on in life until they get sober get clean and at that point the body goes back to building up the resistance that it's designed to build up to get rid of whatever toxins don't belong there but when somebody doesn't think about it they come out of rehab they're sober they're back with their families they're back with their friends trying to get their lives back together and then they have a trigger they remember the last dose that got them their desired high and that's the dose they want to go to because they remember that being the amount and that's what proves to be a deadly combination many times it's important to know that when people leave treatment programs we try as hard as we can to obviously not hope that they'll relapse but let them know that if they do they got to start at a lower dose but it's extremely important to understand what we as friends families and community members can do to avoid the rates of Overdose being what they are and the easiest thing that we can do is be supportive of those that are suffering and struggling addicts are not bad people they're not evil many times times you'll hear people say derogatory things people are suffering from addiction they're suffering they need our support more than anything else when they come out of treatment they need our support even more so than when they went in giving people a reason to live a reason to thrive a reason to get up every day helping them find a job meaningful schooling helping the community allow them to reintegrate even though many times it's painful whether it's embarrassment to the family or whether they've done something to commit a crime or to hurt somebody but we still have to do our best to go above our own comfort zone and help those that are suffering be able to truly reintegrate back in and get the help that they need I