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

thank you so much Dr pasquali it's also very important to note that the level of care and compassion that the office of the chief medical examiner under the leadership of Dr Samson Citywide and Dr pasquali here in Queens is amazing when it comes to understanding the needs of our community and Expediting and helping us unfortunately in the most trying and difficult times and many of the cases um are where the families are still in a very severe level of denial even as they're sitting in the medical examiner office and that's where I say that our amazing staff at the medical examiner office are also as Dr HH of blessed memory used to say family physicians and act as the last emotional hold out to help these families keep it together when going through such a very very difficult time so we really owe a very big debt of gratitude to the office of the chief medical examiner for all their help and compassion now there was also something that I discussed with Dr pasquali very recently um and obviously you know we're going to try to be as sensitive as we can while still getting the points across everybody in this room I believe knows at least one if not more of the families that were affected by the recent wave of overdoses that plagued our community in the last 2 and a half weeks and when that happened I I'll just give my personal story which is why I'm standing here today I happened to be a volunteer in hatela uh two weeks ago right before Shabbat I was getting dressed and a neighbor calls my house emergently that I must come outside and I literally threw on a shirt and a pair of pants and it was a cold Friday two weeks ago not this past week and as I run out the house he points to a car and says do you think she's dead this is in the alley behind my house those of us that live in this neighborhood know there's a lot of sheared alleys and I look at her and she had every sign of someone being dead she was already blue my wife who's a nurse came out to help us as well um and of course I I called it into hatala and our fellow responders showed up EMTs and paramedics and brought her to the hospital and in that case she did survive that that surviving lasted 48 Hours when she overdosed yet a second time and the second time she survived as well and at this point we're trying to explain to her boyfriend and the other concerned families that it's time for her to get help but I remember going to to some of the community leaders that shabas I was literally shaken if I'm not mistaken I think atala had either four or five overd those calls within like a 30 hour period so even the members were getting shaken up and it was like it was just ridiculous and I remember running on shabas to some of the different Community leaders and saying guys this is ridiculous we need to do something and they looked at me and said it must have just been a bad batch now two things I have to say to that our community leaders are not experts in uh talk screening and uh you know biochemistry and understanding what batches are good or bad and before I got an answer to that whether that was or wasn't the case my response immediately was bad batch or not look at the sheer number of people using drugs in our community that we can have these staggering numbers in such a short amount of time and then it turned out that it might not have been a bad batch after all because a lot of these strains were coming from different places and they were not coming in with the same am you know the same levels but either which way I think we can all agree that I mean for lack of a better word we have a magaa on our hands and unless we as the Community member stand up and say it's time to do something about it nothing is going going to change and I have a challenge I always put up I address this at schools now I will tell you by the way last mon of shis we had an amazing meeting in this exact space that uh Rabbi Yaniv and his brother put together with some of the other community rabis and I apologize if I shocked them a little bit too much but I had no choice and it was a much more intimate meeting so I was able to speak you know very openly not that I'm holding much back here tonight don't uh think that for a second um and I put up a challenge and I'm going to say that the challenge was accepted by three of the schools within this community um but I'm going to put it up anyway for everyone to take the message home education about addiction awareness about addiction is like any other type of safety education we want to give our children don't cross the street without looking both ways I don't know any parent that ever said I'm scared to tell that to my child cuz they're going to purposely run in the street but I'll hear that response from people when we're talking about educating about sexual abuse educating about boundaries educating about drugs and alcohol or when I speak to some of the schools and the principles and I'm like guys we got to get awareness in there no if we bring it in people are going to know about it then it's going to make them do it more so I was giving a lecture to a bunch of uh High School principles not too long ago and I offered them that I would love to come into the school and at no cost randomly drug test as many children in that school that I felt necessary and there were two conditions to my request number one they have to say yes and number two is if anyone tested positive for drugs they would not be thrown out of school provided that they were getting the appropriate help not one principal accepted me for that challenge not one I'm going to say something now and I said this a few weeks ago I'll say it again now and for those that are here that are high school teachers and principles I'm sorry I do not know a single high school today in our community boys girls co-ed Orthodox cidic modern Orthodox or anything in between that has zero drugs in it or where a high school student can't figure out how to get drugs if they wanted to I'll repeat that again and I'll repeat it another hundred times if I have to I do not know a single high school today that a student in the high school will not be able to figure out a way to get their hand on illegal substances or drugs I don't but I guess if the leadership in the schools don't allow was to address it that's going to remain and that's where we the parent body the community members have that ability to stand up and say enough is enough this is what we need to do to save our children's lives we're not talking about you know an issue where someone's cutting school or has a problem and we're talking about life and death over here we're talking about I dealt with a case not too long ago where somebody jumped over an overpass thinking he was Superman to get hit by a car as he hit the ground taken to a hospital we put him into treatment and Amud case worker stood by his side for about three weeks and I remember going into the principal in the school and I said hey you think we could do something now in the high school with some of your students and he goes no no no we don't have that problem this was an isolated incident every school someone asked which school it makes no difference it's all the same now I understand that in our community like I said before shame embarrassment keeping things under the rug but that's the stigma that we need to change we need to be able to confront this issue so we don't have to go to yet another family and say a sibling of yours passed away a child a parent a loved one a cousin a friend my first interaction with addiction I was 19 years old and one of my close friends from yiva died in a car accident secondary to being high that was how I got welcomed into this world and then not too long after that I had another friend of mine who hung himself in a shower in a Yeshiva dormatory having left a suicide note about the sexual abuse he endured as a young child I'm no stranger to this it wasn't like I woke up one day and had nothing better to do with my life and said hey I'm going to go break my head to make an organization trust me it's not an easy thing to do it's extremely difficult but I felt that I had no choice again it's not that I'm trying to scare everybody here I just need everyone here to hear the truth and to understand the truth and to internalize the truth drugs kills silence kills shame kills and until we can stand up and do something about that I hate to say this but we are just as liable as everybody else because sitting by sitting by idly and not doing anything is not the answer applies to all of us we are not allowed to sit by idly and watch anyone that we know go through any unneeded pain or ultimate death and that's why we're all here tonight and we'll keep doing these and if even one person ends up getting help or one person gets saved by a Naran kit that we give out shortly or one family's life has changed it was already well worth it but we really need to keep our eye on the prize and the prize is our future generations and whether it's focusing on school-based programming Community Based programming or whatever else it might be we need to do everything we can to ensure that our loved ones have a great chance at survival and get the help that they desperately need it's extremely important to also understand that when somebody does have an addiction or a problem and they do confide or they do ask for help it's that first reaction that first response that you give that person is going to make all the difference in what treatment they do or don't get or whether it will or won't be effective we must be empathetic to them concerned compassionate listen don't make promises you can't F fulfill but if somebody comes and says hi I'm struggling this is what's happening the response is thank you for telling me let me see what I can do to help even if we don't have the answers there's nothing wrong with saying I don't know what to do but I'm going to try to find someone you came to the right person you know that response of so many people saying I can't believe you're telling me that you're throwing your life away you want to end up like so and so I guarantee you those responses don't help