March 19, 2017 Amudim Awareness Event Zvi Gluck Part 1 of 4

good evening everybody and thank you very much for coming I met mrs. Glassman when we did an event together in woodmere and it uh it was very emotional for me even though I'm in the field having done an event with someone as strong and courageous says mrs. Glassman who really stepped up to help bring awareness to something that most people in her situation try to hide from I'm confident that this evening is going to prove to be educational informative and most of all help us break the stigma associated with dealing with those that are suffering from addictions we need to show the world step by step brick by brick community by community that these matters will no longer be brushed under the rug it's not an easy task we know that it's more than not easy thank you mom it's extremely difficult but it's something that must be done over the last couple of weeks we've done a few events and people have asked me at what point are you going to give up or why do you keep speaking and giving the same message over and over and over again and my answer is I don't plan on giving up or stopping until we no longer have this issue or we find appropriate solutions for those that need help and I'm not going to bury my own head in the sand by believing that there's a magic wand and that it's going to be easy because we know it's not but we certainly have no excuse to not do whatever we can to try so really the thanks goes to those of you that are here tonight to take your time to show that you care about this issue and to take those first important steps to say we as a people we as a community we as human beings are going to do whatever we can to deal with this one of the main issues and this is something that I've been speaking about and I'm going to keep doing it that we have in dealing with this epidemic is the shame the stigma associated with it the many people that are purposely looking the other way because they're embarrassed about what's going on and don't want to admit to it just recently and if anyone heard me the last few weeks I apologize I'm not a public speaker in the sense that I come up with new materials for each speech I think the message is as important each time we say it but it's not too long ago we had a married woman in her 40s with five children that was suffering from a serious opiate addiction due to a car accident that she was in many years prior and it got to the point that her husband reached out and said we can't do this anymore we need help and we had a meeting in the house the husband the wife a therapist interventionist myself and the families rug and we came up with some options of treatment for her and she turned and said there's no way I'm going to a drug rehabilitation program I said why not and she said I have kids to marry off and if word gets out that I was a drug addict no one's going to want to marry my kids so I looked at her straight in the face and I said but you do realize you may not make it to walk your children down the aisle and she said that could be but if my children are an orphan they'll get a good look if their mothers a drug addict they want that is the sigma that we need to fight because sadly she may not be wrong in her thoughts because it has a community sorry it's as a community we're not stepping up to the plate and making it okay to help people that are suffering from addiction and we're just as much a part of that problem now in this specific case i'm happy to report barukh hashem she is getting treatment she is getting help and things are heading in the right direction but at the end of the day this is still a very very big problem and there are many others like her there are families that we meet with on a regular basis we'd love to put our child in treatment but what will the neighbors think what will the friends think and then we have the other side where we have people that are getting helped and then when they come out they're not getting the support that they need to stay sober and then many times that becomes a reason why people end up falling and relapsing whether it's helping those that are recovering getting them jobs making sure they get into school but I do need to mention this and this is the hardest thing to mention is and there are those times that we really do everything and sometimes it just doesn't work either and while that is sad and while that does happen we can't let that deter us from trying to continue to do as much as we can if somebody's ashamed or embarrassed by their loved one be it spouse child or parent that loved one will know it and buy them not only didn't buy them feeling it it's going to take the way their drive to want to get help so we have an obligation as human beings to be there to support those that are suffering from addiction and to understand that drug addicts are not bad people they're not evil there are people in paint people that are using the substance for one reason or another to be able to deal with what for many of us is just everyday life and they can't people ask how do you find this problem getting solved or how do we put an end to it so I see that based on the I'm sorry guys I apologize my throat's killing me I'm looking around the room and I see people here that seem like we have myself included children in school age if we can't get the schools that are children go to to step up to the plate and start bringing the proper education and awareness into the school system then we are way behind the eight ball there are programs that start and fifth grades some schools and fourth the fifth and sixth grades for sure in the general world is the right age to teach about issues such as addiction and many other issues whether it's sexual abuse prevention and many other things and I find it ironic when we teach our children to swim we're not scared they're going to purposely jump into the pool and try to drown and when we teach our children to cross the street to look both ways we're not scared that they're going to say oh let me test it out and not look but when we go to the schools okay we need to bring proper education into the school systems oh no we can't do that if we bring that up they're going to try it I think it's up to us as the parents to bring an end to that and to let the schools allow us to start bringing in proper education and then one of the other things that is really important for those of us to know and this is something very crucial because you know it's unfortunate that it was the large rate of drug overdoses that pushed us to start doing more and more of these events as often as we are and when I say the large rate it's well over a hundred and fifty since last Russia so it's about a year and a few months ago of the age 35 and under within our community that's a lot more than Zika killed but I see people spending whatever money they can on Zika whatever money they can another epidemics whatever resources and pressure they can put on communities to create safety measures but we're losing minimum of two precious Souls a week and I don't see the same response I wonder why though it's extremely important to note is most of these people that have overdosed did not want to die and the terminology that we continuously use of an accidental overdoses and extremely important one and I'd love to take a moment and explain where that comes from and why that happens when people use substances to bring themselves a loss of less pain or less suffering our bodies are built in a very unique way to build up a tolerance and as people use more substances they need to use a higher dosage to achieve the same height and this goes on until they either succumb to that illness or they can actually get clean and gets over so we'll use round numbers somebody starts off using one milligram of a substance and then as time goes on they go 22 and 25 and let's say 10 and they end up using 100 milligrams and then they get sober when they get sober our body is built such an amazing way that the body we builds up that resistance that it shouldn't take in foreign bodies and now somebody falls off the wagon for one reason or another and they remember the most recent doses that they were using to get that desired high and they unfortunately make that assumption that I can't deal with this I to just get high just one time just to get over whatever I'm dealing with now and they use a much higher dose than the body can tolerate and that unfortunately leads to what we consider an accidental overdose I know many of these people that passed away their friends of mine people that I grew up with people in my community a few weeks ago on a Friday afternoon just before shabbos one of my neighbors calls me screaming come to the backyard emergently I have a sheer dally with the parking driveway so I yell do I need my paramedic equipment when you might sell a bad what would just come so I go running down 21 year old girl sitting in a car completely discolored of the heroin overdose barukh hashem we were able to bring her back but that was because we caught it in time but what's also important to note in many of the reasons why people end up going to substances and how we can do things to prevent those as well I'm not going to go into all of that that's not the focus of tonight's speech but I just want to touch on it just for a moment whether it's those that has issues of being learning disabled in school and the school didn't catch it long early enough they became victims of bullying victims of sexual abuse that didn't get the proper help we see that a very high rate of that in the field of drug addiction and other addictions as well peer support peer pressure can work for you or against you peer pressure can destroy people peer support can save them can't tell you how many people were seemingly had no issues but their friends were doing something so hey they felt that they needed to try it as well and when people are suffering from these things whether they're being bullied in school whether they were abused whether they had another trauma and we don't catch it early enough and then they turn to other things so when we're finally realizing that they need to help because they're addicted to something we also have to understand the underlying factor as well because we need to also work on solving that to be able to help people but we also have to remember that these issues are not specific to any one specific community religious not religious from cookie the slip fish sparty jewish not jewish makes no difference the drug addiction in general does not discriminate it's not limited to people by age or gender but we also have to know that different communities these issues manifest differently and it's important for us to take a look around and no in the communities that we're in what could we do to get early detection of these of these issues so that we can help people before it's too late and then a lot of times once people start with addictions and then they don't get the proper help and a suffering from other ailments it then starts manifesting into many other issues and their own personal life emotional behavioral religious loss of self worth promiscuity and just so many other things that are just heading down a very very dangerous pass and then many times people that don't get the help they need end up whether it's homelessness acts of violence teen pregnancies interactions with law enforcement and many times sadly desk whether by choice or accidental but what we have to remember is that this is not a new phenomenon either this has been going on for years maybe with the invention of the internet media things are being able to be pushed out more yeah we're certainly seeing a surge now that we have in many years but the common denominator is that for hundreds of years the method was brush it under the rug and that's what we have to change right now that's why we're all here and that's why myself and my amazing dedicated staff work so hard with each and every person that comes for help to try to get them to help that they need we look at life as the most beautiful paintings I use the example of Van Gogh painting starry night when you look at that painting it's beautiful you turn that painting into a puzzle and it looks like a beautiful picture but now you see the lines through it as a puzzle piece and then we start taking out pieces of those puddles one by one and while we know that's a very beautiful picture but we see those missing pieces our job is to help put that puzzle together piece by piece person by person family by family the other common misconception is that this is an issue that is dealing with teens high school-age maybe college-age children I can't tell you how many clients we have coming to us now in their 30s 40s and 50s suffering from serious addictions that they can't get out of or they don't think they can many times we hear about that young adult or someone who's you know I'm not trying to point fingers this is not anything recently not trying to cause embarrassment but also whoops often we hear about the 40 and 50 year olds that had a massive heart attack and suddenly died and while that may be true it may also not be true and as someone who has done to Harris on many of these people all the signs are there that these people were using for a long time and didn't get the help that they need it so it's not just about breaking the sigma and the age groups in high school age colleges or even middle school but it's understanding where these things come from and that it happens everywhere and that's our job when dealing with these issues many times we come in contact with the communal leadership's the rabbinic leadership's organization leadership and while i must say that overall were certainly gaining a lot of traction people are realizing more and more that addiction is real people are dying we're losing people around us it's still not enough when I remember the story of the 14 year old boy that was molested in a mikveh and the rabbi was approached and the rabbi made the boy apologised to a 37 year old of users and when the rabbi was asked what are you doing what's going on here the response was you know I don't want this guy to go to jail he's got a family so the boy you'll get out of it he'll get over it you don't want to make a big deal and I look at the rabbi and I say you know that statistics clearly show that a person who does this will offend again when those who the next victim will be any quotes or he missed quotes let me say the laws of mecir oh the laws of reporting horrifically misquote fast forward three years later I get a call about a 17 year old drug addict who broke into a shul and stole money from a bush go to buy drugs and as I'm dealing with the people who called me to try to work out some sort of treatment program while he's going through the criminal process I look at the name of the shoe that press charges against him and it's the same shul that a few years prior the rough had mentioned we can't put an abuser in jail because of masira and the worst part was this was the same boy that was abused three years prior and I go back into the rub and I said he'll dear you and he looks at me with a straight face and goes you can't let people feel from manmohan heck dish from shul money there's no excuse for that thank God that boy now is actually doing great and getting married shortly bar crush em because if we don't have it a happy endings to these stories it doesn't allow us to continue with the work we do but it's the stories like that that I will sleep over where we have such a misconception of reality we turned the victims into the abusers we turn those that are suffering into the bad people I mean is a very very dear friend of mine a colleague who runs a high school for girls and he mentioned at a meeting a few weeks ago with a group of rowbottom and flatbush said you can you understand that when I have parents Mother's coming to me with problems with their children they turn to me and say I wish my child would have cancer because then I would have a support structure people would cure people would want to help but when they hear that my child is suffering from these issues whether was having been abused using drugs no longer wants to be religious there's nowhere for me to turn that is what we need to change that is the message that we need to give home we have to be there when we say low Tom Adele damn rocket we have to mean it those that are suffering are no less a cola no less someone who is sick that someone is lying in a hospital dying of something else they're just not in the same way as a volunteer I would go out on shabbos because someone's having a heart attack we go on at Chavez to help someone to suffering from these things as well there is no difference couple of years ago we had a someone that was coming out of detox and we were setting them up with a rehab program so whatever reason whatever reason and there was an insurance issue and we got an approval which in itself is a miracle in this field we have two separate note side note anyone that has been advocacy with insurance companies we'd love to get them to start covering treatment I'm not sure how to pull that off but let's try and whatever the reason was the discharge base and the detox had to match the admission date to the rehab and this was on a Friday afternoon and we arranged for a flight for this guy to go friday late afternoon to go to rehab and the family rabbi calls me up and says how can you do this it's Shabbos and I said how can you not the clock nefesh oh stop he's been cleaner rating he was in detox for a week he's going to go saturday night I couldn't argue anymore I tried my police fell on deaf ears Saturday night never came Sunday morning we had a levaya Saturday night wait one more day I would never hear a rub say don't call out some of friday night for a heart attack wait till after shabbos but people don't understand what addiction is they don't understand what mental illnesses they don't understand what sexual abuses and therefore they make these mistakes it's not because they're bad I want to be very clear because they're not as educated as they need to be so having an opportunity to come here to be welcome to the west hempstead community and I'd like to thank tovo for really putting this together and be rubbin them in the leadership here and rabbi caliber who may have a resource Alaimo who I've dealt with on these matters many times a gem a real gem of a person who understand these things we need to do more by educating the public making people aware of it and those of us that are children in school we need to force our school that our children go to the power of the dollar has to work over here we pay tuition for kids to go to your school's you're going to educate our children to the issues going on today we went we had a booth at an expo recently my husband and wife team that ran a summer camp walked by and we were trying to promote a safety training for sexual abuse awareness for staff in camps and the husband who runs this camp looks as good that's not for us we don't have those problems in our camp and I turns em and I go which camp are you in wasn't someone so a counselor by you and you just looked at me because you know I said I know more than you think I knows how about you listen to what we have to say so we can actually make sure that doesn't happen again our job here is to really do what we can do to make sure that no more people have to suffer from losing a loved one and that we can bring proper awareness and really help those who need to help and whether it's coming to a museum are going to any other organization that you have in your local community if you know someone who needs help please reach out and ask for it and when they get to help be there to support them through it extremely important point that I'll leave you off with when somebody comes out of treatment and they're sober they need you more than than ever before we need to help keep them sober we need to help make sure that they have a reason to live they have a reason to wake up every morning a loving family loving community there is no shame there is no stigma we're not going to make believe we're living in a world we don't live and the shuttle is over it's done it's March 2017 we're living in a world today that we can no longer keep our head onto the sand and while I say this all the time I hope for the day that we no longer have to have any of these meetings or any of these events but until that day comes we're going to do our part stay here and try to help raise awareness and help each and every person that comes by thank you all very much [Applause]