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Rally calls for an end to the pain of drug addiction
By SARAH LEHR
YOUNGSTOWN
Evie Coe of Warren was sitting in a pew at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Youngstown on Monday evening, attending a rally against drug addiction, when she got a text message.
According to the text, one of her daughter’s friends had died that day. The friend was 26, and Coe suspected drug overdose.
For Coe, Monday’s news was all too familiar – she said she personally knows at least six other people who have died from overdoses.
Drugs first touched Coe’s life when her oldest daughter, who was then about 17, started taking crack cocaine. Her boyfriend’s parents first turned her on to the drug, Coe said. Soon, Coe’s daughter became addicted to crack-cocaine and heroin. After high-school graduation, she left to wander the streets and went three years without contacting her family.
The tide turned, however, when Coe’s daughter picked up one of the business cards her mom always foisted on her and decided to call Warren Family Mission. No detox centers were available to her, so she checked into the psychiatric ward of Trumbull Memorial Hospital and subsequently spent a year and three months in treatment with Meridian Community Care.
Since then, Coe said, her daughter has been three years sober, though not everyone in her social circle has been so lucky. Coe, who has since become involved with the nonprofit Ohio Can Change Addiction Now, is a friend and confidante to many recovering addicts, some of whom she met through her daughter. In fact, just three days ago, Coe had exchanged a Facebook message with the young woman who died Monday.
Hope Lovrinoff-Moran, a congregant with the Unitarian Universalist Church, decided to host Monday’s event after hearing too many stories like Coe’s. The rally, which included, music, speakers and a candlelight vigil, was Youngstown’s first offshoot of the national FED UP! movement. FED UP! calls for federal action to address opioid addiction. Opioids include heroin and prescription painkillers.
During Monday’s rally, a slide show featuring photographs of people who had died of overdose in Ohio within the last year played in the background. The slide show was eight minutes and 44 seconds long. At one point, Donald LoGiudice, who lost his 28-year-old son to overdose this April, gestured at the photos. “You can’t look at their faces and say they’re just junkies,” he said. “They’re someone’s child or someone’s husband or wife.”
Later in the evening, the church hosted a panel discussion about the barriers that formerly imprisoned people face upon returning to society.
Rebecca Soldan, director of Uniting Returning Citizens and now an AmeriCorps representative, spent three years in prison after being convicted of a 2007 robbery that she committed to support her heroin addiction. Before she entered prison, Soldan decided to get sober. After she was released, she said, she was privileged to have a support network that many of her peers lacked.
“I’ve seen so women who were just released from prison and dumped off at the side of the road with some clothes, maybe 50 bucks and little chance of finding a job,” she said. “How can we expect recidivism not to happen if they aren’t given any tools?”