 Welcome. I'd like to take a second here to thank the media for showing up to cover this event. It's obviously a very important event for our community. We are here to talk about the heroin issue that is deeply impacting the Greater Sheboygan area. Unfortunately heroin is no longer a drug used in back dark alleys hidden from the public. Over the last two years there has been a devastating increase in the use and addiction to heroin. This is especially troubling in that every dose of heroin is a potentially fatal dose. We have seen that the issue of heroin abuse crosses all racial and ethnic groups as well as social and economic classes. No one is immune from it. In Sheboygan since 2009 we have seen a 200 percent increase in heroin related deaths, an increase of over a thousand percent in heroin arrests and heroin recovered by law enforcement. We have also seen an increase in Narcan that is administered by the fire department of over 39 percent. Sheboygan area emergency rooms have seen a 34 percent increase in patients with opioid abuse and dependency and a 49 percent increase regarding patients admitted through the emergency department with opioid abuse and dependency. As you can see this is not an issue that can be solved by law enforcement alone. I'm extremely pleased to say that we have an excellent response from our partners across the community in attempting to deal with this crisis. Many of those partners are here today showing their support. They represent law enforcement, corrections, health and human services, health care, non-profits and our corporate partners. I just need to recognize some of the people that are here with us today. Mayor Mike Van der Steen, Mayor of Sheboygan, Alderman John Bellinger and Jim Bourne, Chair of Todd Preby, District Attorney Joe DiCecco, Sheboygan Falls Police Chief Steve Riffle, Deputy Chief Steve Roth, Plymouth Police Chief Jeff Toschik, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, Chair of Todd Preby, State Representative John Nigren and State Representative Mike Ensley. Also with us from the Department of Health and Human Services is Tom Eggebreit, Ellen Cheney, Dan Ohl from the Sheboygan Area School District, Lisa Patton and Erin Wood from the United Way, John Dahl from the Family Resource Center and Healthy Sheboygan County 2020 is Mary Adele, Luanne Travis and Phil Ducat, Michelle Hetterberg from Probation and Parole, Mary Palachniak from St. Nick's, Dr. Howard Croft from Affinity Health Care and Lance Dassler representing the Sheboygan County MAG unit. I'm pleased to announce that the Sheboygan Police Department has been awarded a grant of $17,000 from the Department of Justice to assist us in addressing this issue. The money is going to be used to fund a community wide survey that is in progress as we speak and can be found at the Sheboygan website, sheboyganpolice.com. The community wide survey is put in place to establish benchmarks to better understand the level of awareness in the community and help us better target our educational efforts. Funding will also be used to assist in identifying service gaps and implementing best practices to address those gaps. Finally, the funds will be used for educational efforts and follow-up surveys to measure our progress. I'd like to thank Attorney General J.B. Von Hollen for his leadership that he has shown on this issue. Every time that I have had the opportunity to speak with him, he has always made the point of emphasizing that the Wisconsin Department of Justice exists to assist. He has further explained that that means that they're there to support law enforcement prosecutors and other criminal justice and public safety professionals in Wisconsin. He has certainly taken that leadership role on the heroin issue as evidenced by the grant program that he has established and the multimedia campaign that he is unveiling today. I'd like to thank Attorney General Van Hollen for his efforts. This time I'm happy to introduce Ben Salisman, who is here with us today. Mr. Salisman is the president and CEO of Acuity Insurance. Under his leadership, Acuity has consistently been ranked in the top five best places to work in the nation, including the number one ranking among mid-sized companies. Additionally, his work in impact as president of the Acuity Charitable Foundation can be seen across the Sheboygan community. Mr. Salisman and Acuity have been strong partners of the Sheboygan Police Department, and we are incredibly grateful for his recognition of the growing heroin problem in our community and their donation of $100,000 to support our collaborative efforts. Mr. Salisman. Forty-five years ago, I competed in an elementary school marathon county speech contest. In the semifinals, I was up against this brilliant young girl. I knew I was cooked. She goes up on stage. She gives a speech for preventing heroin addiction. I looked at the 12 judges. They were all glassy-eyed because it just didn't mean anything. In 1962, in Wausau, Wisconsin, I realized I didn't have to be good. I had won. Forty-five years later, I realized she really was brilliant. This society does not want to arrest our citizens, convict our citizens, imprison our citizens. The highest form of law enforcement is where preemptively we can educate our citizens. We can empower them with the tools to fight heroin addiction. We can work with our community partners and create a better society. That's what happened here. Captain James Visser. Police Chief Christopher Damagalski reached out to the community, the community partners, the business leaders, and as a result, we came together. This grant from the state is so important as a validation for everything that Sheboygan County is trying to do. 25 years ago, I had a friend who was a police officer. He wrote fictional books. They were never bestsellers. He actually put my name in one of his books. He was shot to death by two brothers with shotguns strung out on drugs. This is personal. We don't want police officers hurt. We want police officers being safer. That's what makes this entire effort so important. Attorney General JB Van Hollen coming here today means a lot to our community for this validation. Acuity wants to be there. We want to partner with the police. We want to partner with local government. We're one of the few organizations that make donations to health and human services. Any other business is listening to this because it's a federal organization. They can't, or municipal governmental organization, they can't solicit funds, but they serve some of the neediest. Help them there, too. This is a call to all business leaders, all community leaders to do more. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Salisman, for your very inspiring comments. We are also pleased today to welcome Representative John Nigren of Marinette. Representative Nigren is currently serving his fourth year as Wisconsin State Representative for the 89th Assembly District, serving as co-chair of the Powerful Joint Finance Committee. He is deeply rooted in the community with his wife Maggie and their three children, Cassie, Callie, and Colin. John is extremely concerned with the heroin epidemic that has hit Wisconsin in the past few years, and he also has a personal story to share about how agonizing it can be to deal with the loved one addicted to such a powerful illicit drug. John. Well, good morning. I'm happy to be here, and it's great to see all the community support for an issue that's really hitting our communities very hard, and being where I come from, especially from experience, can stay hitting small and rural Wisconsin exceptionally hard. My oldest daughter is now 24, but when she was 18, we learned that she had a drug problem. We didn't know at that time the severity of it. The pretty girl, who was once a straight-A student and had bright hopes and dreams for her future, started not going to school, being missing for days on end. Her mom and I went to the school. We went to the police. We went to anybody that would listen, but being 18, we had very few options. We tried to get her back on track, but as I said once again, this bright girl ended up not graduating from high school. While that was very disappointing, it really was only the beginning of the last six years with the struggles that we faced the family. I'll never forget the day that Cassie told me that she was addicted to heroin. The police officer was talking about the thought process of heroin being done by people in dark alleys, by rock stars. This wasn't something that hit small towns and didn't happen to pretty smart girls, and especially it wasn't something that, having grown up in my community, that I expected to happen in a city of 11,000, but it was real. The heroin problem in my community, like many others, and the origin of my daughter's addiction, started with OxyContin prescription drug. We actually had a doctor in Menominee, Michigan who was selling prescriptions for the drug, which kind of magnified the problem. With economics and other access issues, eventually kids turned to the heroin after they steal or use up any resources that they have. After I was aware of the problem, we were able to convince her to go to treatment, and unfortunately that treatment and two others have not been successful. Through these last few years, we've endured issues such as disappearance of cash, valuables, family heirlooms, burglaries in our home, and many sleepless nights, expecting and fearing that phone call that every parent who has a child that's addicted someday might come. Unfortunately, that day did come. One day, Cassie's mom, I got a call from her frantically saying she had got an anonymous phone call. I'm saying that Cassie was passed out on her kitchen floor. Being closer, after telling her to dial 911, I raced to the home, found my daughter, her friends having abandoned her on the kitchen floor with a needle still in her arm, and she was purple and barely breathing. Not being trained as an EMT, I did what I could do, try to clear airways and help her breathe, and pray that the EMTs would arrive soon enough to save her. Thankfully, the EMTs did get there and were able to administer Narcan, which brought her out of the overdose. I thank God for their ability to utilize that drug and for their quick response. Merritt County, like a lot of other counties in my area, is very strict on heroin because of the size of the problem that we have. Cassie was convicted and charged and convicted with possession of heroin, just a small amount, but was sentenced to three years in state prison with 18 months being deferred for treatment. She was released twice and relapsed twice, and currently, just recently, she left town to escape a drug test from the Department of Parole Improbation. Having seen your child, when I was watching her grow up, you would think that one of the most difficult things that you could see is your child in prison. I have to tell you it's much more difficult to see your daughter or your child potentially dying in front of you. As a public figure, I was initially hesitant to speak of this problem, but as I have learned and looked into it more, I learned that my family's problem is not unique. I learned that my community's problem is not unique. As I said, this is hitting our state especially hard. It's especially difficult for our small communities because they don't necessarily have the resources or the infrastructure to be able to fight the problem. It crosses many lines. This is not a problem of poor, rich. It's hitting middle class. It's hitting upper middle class. It knows no racial boundaries. It just simply is an addiction that we as a state need to come to grips with and be able to find alternatives. As somebody who is responsible for state finances, I'd look at this issue on many different lines. First of all, it's a crime problem, obviously. It's a family problem. It's a workforce problem. As job creators and companies in my area struggle to find people to be able to fill the jobs that they have, people unfortunately fail drug tests at a very high rate. Once again, it's a financial issue as state and local officials struggle to be able to pay for the costs associated with incarceration and other effects of this drug and others. Because of that, I've decided that this is an issue that I want to fight head-on and I appreciate the Attorney General and all other law enforcement that I've had conversations with and local officials who are behind an effort. But there's a number of proposals that will be coming out here in a very new future just to give you an idea of what those might be. These are in addition to putting some additional resources into our state budget for treatment alternatives and for drug courts in areas that don't currently have them. We're going to be looking at a requirement to show an ID when picking up a narcotic at the pharmacy. Right now, I could go pick up a prescription for my wife without showing any type of ID. This is an idea and that makes it very difficult for law enforcement to be able to track where these narcotics are going. That's an idea that came from me from the Brown County Drug Task Force. Also, currently there's clean sweep programs throughout our state, but they are currently not allowed to take narcotic drugs. So we're looking at a change to change that. We're also looking at a 911 Good Samaritan Law, limited immunity for people who actually dial 911 to save a life. Also, Narcan was mentioned a few times is through research with the Department of Health Services. Narcan is limited as far as who can administer the drug, only a Class 1 EMT. The Department of Health Services is agreeable to change that so that all first responders can be able to administer the drug. In addition to those issues, we're also looking at alternatives for funding for treatment availability in underserved areas, as well as significant reforms to the community corrections. None of these issues, none of these ideas are, there's no silver bullets for any of them. But if we all work together and begin this initiative, I think we will see some success and hopefully save some lives along the way as well. And I really want to once again applaud the Sheboygan community for coming out and showing their support for this initiative. Many different agencies that are involved. But I also want to once again thank Attorney General JB Van Hollen for his leadership on this issue. As an elected official, I can tell you it's our number one responsibility to listen to the people that elect us, the people that send us here. And for me, listening to my community, there's no way I couldn't get involved in this. And for the Attorney General, I know this is the reason he's involved too, because he's heard from law enforcement. He's heard from people on the ground that says, this is the problem that we face and we need some help. So I applaud him and want to welcome him to the podium at this time for some comments. Attorney General JB Van Hollen. Thank you, Representative Nigren. I appreciate your comments very much. I appreciate you being here. Appreciate you being up front. We did a similar press conference like this, announcing a grant recipient in Dane County yesterday in the city of Madison and was the first announcement of our kickoff of our media campaign to educate the general public about heroin. And we had parents of victims of heroin overdoses there as well. Even worst case scenario than Representative Nigren, we had their parents of three children, young adults, who did not survive their heroin overdoses. It is very, very difficult, and quite frankly, to listen to them, especially as a parent of two young, well, I guess teenagers, and think about what our children are facing out there in just about every community in this state. And I commend parents like them, parents like Representative Nigren, who has been blessed that his daughter is still with us for standing up and making sure that people understand in the front lines that it can happen to just about any of us. A state representative, beautiful, intelligent young lady, relatively rural community, certainly not close to any major cities, and here it hits. And that's just what I've learned over the course of the last few years as Attorney General. I've served almost my entire career in law enforcement, and of course we have many law enforcement issues that are preeminent that we have to face and we have to tackle head-on and we do, whether protecting our children from child sexual abuse or internet crimes against children and the list goes on and on. And we can't necessarily throw all the dollars and all the resources in law enforcement we have, and in the community we have all of those potential problems or real problems, but certain ones we have to hit and we have to hit them hard. And heroin is definitely one of those problems. In 2005, the statistics we keep at the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratories, which are in the Department of Justice, indicated that like 22, I believe, counties in the state of Wisconsin had submitted heroin to the crime labs for analysis, roughly less than a third of our counties. Six years later in 2011, 37 counties already had submitted heroin samples for identification and analysis. One year later, 56. From 37 to 56 in one year, out of 72 counties. Heroin is truly an epidemic in every corner of this state. Times have changed. Heroin has changed. Addictions have changed. We have, unfortunately, had a problem that went unrecognized far too long in our communities, in our state, in our country of prescription drug abuse. As that prescription drug abuse, which I think too many of our young people were the abusers of, started to take hold, more and more of these kids and young people became addicted to opiates. When they could no longer access easily prescription drugs for a number of different reasons, they turned to the only other opiate really available to them, and that was heroin. Unaware of the dangers of heroin and how different it is from every other drug on the market. Unlike so many other drugs where you take more or have a pure quantity, you get higher. These opiates are different. They shut your body down. The more you take the purer they are, they kill you. And other than life-saving tools such as Narcan, there's really no way out. Heroin is an epidemic that is spreading across this state like I've never seen. And it's an epidemic of one of the most addictive, most destructive drugs that we could possibly have to face. I've traveled around the state during my entire career in statewide law enforcement, speaking to law enforcement and community leaders about their problems. I can tell you five years ago heroin wasn't on the radar screen of anybody except maybe inner city Milwaukee, maybe parts of Madison, Rock County and the like. Last time I traveled around the state with maybe two exceptions. Every law enforcement agency, every police chief, every sheriff who I spoke to, when I asked them what their number one public safety concern was right now, they said heroin. Everywhere, north, south, east, west, rural, urban, all of them asked for our help. None of them really knew what to do. And I said, you know what? We don't know what to do either. We don't have all the answers, but we're going to do what we can to try to help. And we've set out to do just that. We have, I have always been a proponent to multidisciplinary efforts. Please don't solve all the problems. Prosecutors don't solve all the problems. We have to try to work together with the health care community, with the business community, and my thanks to Acuity Insurance for being so heavily involved financially and otherwise. We have to make sure that we partner together to look at every possible way to help make our communities safer and obviously to fight the scourge of heroin abuse. We have shown some successes in Dane County and elsewhere in our ability to do this. We in the Department of Justice don't know what the answer is, and we know we're not the answer. Local law enforcement is, and we're finding ways to reach out to help them with the problem. We've always had the only of its kind heroin initiative here in Wisconsin in Milwaukee run by a DCI agent out of the Department of Justice to take down major drug trafficking organizations related to heroin. Heroin is a little different however and frequently it's not distributed in that same manner as cocaine and other drugs that you customarily think of and see on television in the way that law enforcement agencies are taking down the DTOs. We have to find new ways. We have now in the Department of Justice looked at every possible way we can try to address this. We've trained agents in every one of our DCI offices specifically on heroin and heroin investigations. We've been training district attorneys such as District Attorney DeCecco here on heroin overdose cases, len bias cases as they're referred to through our statewide prosecutor enforcement training, education and training excuse me program. We are rolling out grant money of which I'm pleased to say Sheboygan had the wherewithal and the courage to step forward and the ideas to step forward and apply for and receive a grant so that local municipalities and multidisciplinary teams can look at new ways that they can help fight this epidemic. Hopefully they'll find a successful way and we can take that model and export it throughout the state and throughout the country and hopefully then have more financing to make sure that we take what works and expand it as well. We are looking at just about every way we can approach the problem but as is always the case perhaps one of the most simple solutions and most successful solutions is education of those potential abusers of their parents of their friends and loved ones and the general public. We have found that as was mentioned twice already that heroin is different not just in its chemical makeup but it's different because of the onus that it now carries versus what it used to carry. Heroin used to be only in the injectable form it was looked upon as being something that only a junkie would use and you have track marks and in your arm and most drug users would shy away from it. Certainly we wouldn't find our young people who didn't have a history of being drug addicts turning to heroin which was fortunate for us in part unfortunate that it existed at all but fortunate that it wasn't really a drug that was expanding. Unfortunately with the prescription drug abuse problem and the fact that we've been working hard to nip that in the bud we had these kids who were became addicted to prescription opiates because they thought well they're prescription drugs they're not really drugs they're not they're not what you think of drug abusers as using and so they're kind of okay and so young people got into those and as they found they were harder to access more expensive to buy and less productive in meeting their high and their addictive needs they would turn to heroin which has been formulated differently now it no longer has to be injected it's easier to attain it's pure it's cheaper and with prescription drugs going the other way we have more and more of our young people certainly between the ages of 16 and 26 who are who are turning to heroin now. Young people who have no idea how this is going to impact them have no idea what the purity is have no idea the addictive factor or the fact that it is taking more and more lives all the time. First and foremost in addition to everything else we need to step up that education we need to educate these young people as to the spiral that heroin creates in their lives how dangerous it is even as opposed to other sorts of illicit and illegal drugs that can be abused and that's what we're kicking off in a statewide event yesterday and today. We have put thus far a quarter of a million dollars out of settlement money in the Department of Justice and there will be more to come with the cooperation of local law enforcement and the media paid and otherwise in an effort to educate these individuals as to the dangers of heroin and the spiral effect that it that it leads to in their lives. We have kicked off to TV ads public service announcements or public education programming radio ads we've got a website called the fly effect dot com which I encourage everybody to visit. We've got posters that we have available. You see some posted around the room in DOJ. We have posters available that we encourage businesses the law enforcement community and everybody who would take them and post them up around schools and the like to raise awareness of the issue and to drive people to the fly effect dot com website. We have banner ads we are looking at every avenue possible to reach out to our young people to educate them about the dangers of heroin before they get into the situation that Representative Nygren's daughter has found herself in. He's explained there's a lot of things that we can do and need to do legislatively and funding wise but I think when you listen to his explanation you know first and foremost if we could have prevented her from the spiral of heroin abuse in the first place it would have been the greatest success that we could have ever had. The fly effect dot com is based upon the nursery rhyme about the fly and how things spiral out of control and what you think is very minor becomes very significant. We have employed some of the best marketing and public affairs individuals to make sure that we have a media campaign that we think will appeal to the target audience that will drive them in. That it's not just a lecture. We want to focus on making sure that we get these at risk people and the people around them to be interested in the subject matter and to dig a little deeper. On the website we have testimonials from other parents who talk about the hurt that has caused to them. It is an opportunity for us to explode the concept of heroin and heroin abuse statewide and we appreciate all of your support. I certainly appreciate the support of all the media who are here. It is that sort of exposure that this campaign needs and will make this campaign a success. I will reiterate it to the tip of the iceberg between what Representative Nygren and I said and what the local community of Sheboygan is doing and what Acuity of Church is doing and I don't know how you would have ever lost a speech contest by the way. Between what everybody is doing you can tell we're hitting this from a multifaceted approach. But we are looking for what works and when we find things that are working we're going to continue to pound those issues home. First and foremost we need to get the message out there and this is a day when we're starting to do that. Just yesterday we announced theflyeffect.com. As of last night we had already had almost 1400 hits on our website from almost every one of our 50 states. That's what this is about and we thank you for being here. We encourage your participation in helping us to spread the message and spread the word. God bless. Just quickly I'd like to recognize a couple other people standing straight and back here with the blue shirt on his Captain Jim Visa who is leading the effort for the Sheboygan Police Department and is really doing an excellent job. And then in the back row is Cassandra Wilgemuth and Mary Dainan who are helping him out. We can open it up for questions now if anybody has questions. Henry. You said that you were going to initiate something like for the pharmacies where they would have to show. Is also the campaign that you're looking at to also cover like the children or the young people that are getting these drugs usually start at home where the parents have the opium. And is there any emphasis being placed on that for educating maybe your parents also for maintaining their pharmaceuticals and how to keep them out of the hands of the young people and maybe possibly getting that information to different individuals that would deter that from actually using them? I can't speak to the campaign per se but I know every time I have an opportunity to speak I mean I always address that issue. And it's a great question because it is a huge part of the problem. This particular campaign doesn't focus on that specifically. We know it's a big problem. We're trying to right now really hit these individuals at the cusp of starting to use or thinking about using or have started to using but not yet abusing heroin. We have statistics that show 75% of those who use heroin for the first time will use it at least one more time. So there's a cusp in there where we really need to catch people which is a huge part of what this campaign is focused on. We in the Department of Justice have been actively participating as have law enforcement agencies across the state in a national take back day to get educate the public and get them to turn in their unused prescription drugs. We've been in the last couple of cycles I think in the top five of most successful states in the nation in doing that so we are getting that message out. We've also spent settlement money in the Wisconsin Department of Justice in the past on media campaigns specifically to address what you're talking about. We've run public education programming specifically showing a kid who's a drug abuser starting by virtue of taking prescription drugs out of his mother's purse for instance in a TV ad. We know that's a focal point. We'll continue to make it part of our overall effort but it's not really a focal point of this specific media campaign. I would just reiterate the same thing. We have a strong take back program in place in Sheboygan County. We have drop off boxes at the Sheboygan Police Department, the Plymouth Police Department at Sheboygan Falls. Maryland born is here who's involved in helping us collect and sort those drugs. We have a date set already for a collection with St. Nick's and we're in the planning stage with Acuity for an event that they're planning so I think we're pretty active and aggressively addressing that. Anybody else? Okay. As a community member, give us a couple days and I would suggest you contact Sheboygan Police Department or in touch with DOJ and they're getting them to us so we'll have them available. And currently you can go on the DOJ website and have access, I believe Dana, is that correct? Almost any of the materials. We're going to do our best to disseminate them and hopefully the law enforcement agencies will be a point of dissemination for them. You know, obviously we're going to look at different sources, schools are a great location, pharmacies are a great location, law enforcement agencies, businesses in the community, obviously getting intriguing the interest. Some of these posters you've seen really can drive interest. I don't know if we have the one out of Just the Fly, which is a great poster as well that makes people inquire and want to go look. But the Go on the Fly effect, it's a tremendous campaign. All right, thank you everyone. Appreciate it.