Unification through tragedy

Fight against opioid abuse can help bridge our divides

THAT American politics is polarized has become a glaring, depressing fact of life. From immigration to impeachment, guns to graft, every issue seems to spawn two sides — the same two sides — angrily going at each other’s throats.

Most of us now live and work surrounded by people like us politically — in a state of the same political persuasion. We rarely interact with someone from the hated other party … except maybe an outcast relative.

Can nothing bring us together? I have a suggestion, admittedly born of a father’s deepest grief.

Over the past two decades, 400,000 Americans have died from a specific, merciless cause. It’s a death toll, according to the Centers for Disease Control of 130 Americans every day. This is a nationwide horror story, not just a set of cold statistics. Yet the cause of death on such scale is known to most of us, and deeply enough to me.

In 2017, I received a call in the night that every parent dreads. My only son — a college kid — died of a drug overdose. He was the victim of a single Xanax pill laced with fentanyl. His life was lost to a class of painkillers called opioids.

I tried to translate my grief into helping others. As a television anchor and commentator, I was invited to host a series of town halls highlighting the crisis. I was often joined by first lady Melania Trump, Surgeon General Jerome Adams or the national drug policy director, James Carroll.

At these town halls, I learned that a lot of parents think addiction strikes only only other people’s kids. They are fooling themselves, as I tell them every chance I get. As for children, they can be blindsided by the loss of a father or mother because of addiction, which has shattered communities across the country.

Having lost my only child and best friend, I took another step. I established the Eric Chase Foundation in my son’s memory, set up to warn parents and to urge doctors, lawmakers and other influencers to combat the opioid epidemic.

Yes, today’s political climate is nasty. Yes, we Americans wring our hands over how progressives and conservatives so hate each other that no candidate, legal decision, movie, restaurant or bakery is free from partisan controversy. Yet here is a unifying issue — here is a calamity that can strike any of us like a brick falling from a high-rise building. It brings misery and death to all races, parties, genders, classes and religions. Here is a nonpartisan, equal-opportunity killer.

That’s why we have to battle it together. We can still argue over immigration and impeachment. But on this issue, we must unify.

There is some hope. The Trump administration has addressed the crisis — and with bipartisan support, I’m happy to add. Some 57 federal programs sponsor nearly $11 billion dedicated to prevention, treatment and recovery, as well as research, criminal justice, health surveillance and supply reduction.

Nevada has been alert to the crisis since at least 2014. The 2017 Assembly Bill 474 reduced the number of prescription pills on the streets, and, in the past year, more law enforcement agencies and people who are prescribed opioids carried naloxone, the anti-overdose treatment. At last count, 56 law enforcement agencies across the state were supplied with nearly 3,000 units of naloxone.

It’s a wonderful start, but there is so much more to do. Let’s not stop at reacting to current suffering. Let’s punish deceitful drug marketers, set up treatment centers and clamp down on prescribing painkillers— but not stop there.

My view is that Americans can band together to go deeper into this crisis — right to the core issue: how we treat pain. Pain is the body’s reaction to injury, chronic problems and disease. Everyone is susceptible to pain of one kind. It’s a unifying human experience.

Let’s redouble our efforts to find pain treatments that don’t risk drug dependency and addiction. Let’s harness the nation’s R&D resources to produce remedies that end pain, not mask it — remedies that kill pain, not people.

As for my pain of loss and grief, I don’t think there ever can be relief for that. I just try to channel my emotions into something positive. I hope that personal experience leads to understanding I can share, and that our divided nation can unite around this issue: ending the opioid epidemic and saving lives.

The Associated Press file