Tw: overdose death

I’m listing this as survivor testimony bc I’m a TTI survivor myself, and that’s where all this perspective comes from. Lmk if that’s not okay, sorry mods.

I’m currently mired in the story of a teenager who died of a fentanyl overdose.

His mother posts all over Facebook about the dangers of youth cannabis use and Narcan and overdose prevention…which I can understand, she’s grieving. Maybe it’s wrong for me to judge her for the way she’s processing it. But what gets me is that she’s turning her son into some kind of poster child for the way he died. So much for not letting him become a statistic, now he’s a fucking propaganda meme. Less than half his obituary is about the things he did in life; the rest is lamenting the opioid crisis.

Meanwhile, she sent him to wilderness as a teenager bc of his anger issues and marijuana use. I can’t go into too many details about how I know that for anonymity reasons, but it’s almost an afterthought, a reference to a punishment. Not a word about how that experience probably traumatized the hell out of him and contributed to his transition from weed to opioids, nope, it’s the weed’s fault.

Not saying teenagers should be using cannabis or anything. I’m just so frustrated at the ways these parents will jump to become anti-drug Facebook warriors without a word of the role they play in creating an environment where kids want to use and sending them to a “treatment center” that makes things worse.

For someone who posts about him constantly, she can’t tag him, because he wasn’t FB friends with her when he died. He was friends with his other relatives. Ugh I’m just so frustrated. I’ve lost so many friends to this system and adults think they’re stepping up when they fucking aren’t. I feel like an asshole for being so critical of her, but we need a holistic approach where parents and other authoritative institutions are held just as accountable as the kids themselves while they learn their bodily autonomy.