 Welcome, everybody. Come on up a little closer. We're going to get this show on the road. We'd like to welcome everybody this evening. Come on up. We have a really exciting evening plan for you. This event is close to all of our hearts, as it is to I'm sure many of your hearts as well. So we're grateful that you've all come out to share this event together. I'd like to start off by announcing that we'll have two emcees this evening. So we've got Ed Baker and Kimberly Blake. So they'll be your guides for the evening. We have some other speakers throughout the night with Jeremy and David and Andy and Sarah, Dakota and myself. And you'll get to know each one of them a little bit better later on. Over the evening tonight, we're going to have a couple of breaks and you'll see that in the program. If you haven't got a program, they're out front here on the table. So you'll see what the timeline is. So during the breaks, we have different providers here tonight who are ready to talk to you about overdose prevention. We have free Narcan to distribute. You can learn about fentanyl test strips, learn about low barrier treatment. All sorts of interesting folks to talk to during the breaks. I want to thank Ben and Jerry's. They're here tonight scooping free ice cream for everybody. They are going to close their window when we have speakers talking, but they'll reopen during all of the breaks. And if you need a porta potty, it's down in the left hand corner here of the, the lawn area. So at Baker, I've had a great pleasure of working with Ed for many years and especially during this time of organizing this event. Ed is the host and producer of the addiction recovery channel. It's a public TV show here in Vermont and it's dedicated to the elimination of stigma. He is awarded the Vermont Recovery Jack Barry Award for excellence in recovery and advocacy in 2021. Ed is in personal recovery from addiction and he is the co-chair of the Vermont overdose prevention network. Your other MC is Kimberly Blake and Kim is the ambassador for Vermont's team sharing. She's a long time physician in Burlington. However, her most meaningful job has been mom to Sean and Ned. Unfortunately, Sean passed away from a fentanyl overdose in August of 2017. So you can imagine how close to her heart an event like this is. So we're proud to have these two people represent the event for you this evening. Without further ado, I am going to bring Ed Baker. Well, thank you Teresa for kind introduction. I'm going to ask people to just kind of move in a little closer, get a little closer together just humor me and do that. I want to thank you. I want to thank you all for being here tonight. I'm honored to be here with you. Thank you for showing your support. This is important. I'm a person with lived experience of drug addiction. I'm a person with lived experience of injection drug use. I'm a lucky man. I'm here today. I'm alive. I'm with you. It was dangerous back in the day when I used drugs. It was deadly back then. We died. We died of hepatitis C. We died of violence. We died of overdose. We died of AIDS. But today is a different beast. Today we have an unregulated drug supply contaminated with poison. International criminal organizations are reaping wild profits. Praying upon people with addiction and people who use drugs. Fentanyl has virtually replaced heroin. It has infiltrated the methamphetamine and other stimulant supply. And it is the main ingredient in many counterfeit pharmaceuticals. If a person uses any of these drugs, they are likely to be exposed to fentanyl and they are at risk for death. One use, one pill can kill. The grim statistics show it. In 2021, 108,000 people lost their lives in America. That is one person every 4.8 minutes. That's the equivalent of 36 World Trade Centers in one year. 72,000 of those deaths had fentanyl involved. Fentanyl is the most potent opioid known. Here in Vermont currently it was responsible for 93% of the overdose deaths in 2021. We lost 215 beautiful Vermonters last year. We were first. We had the highest rate of overdose death increase in America in 2021. If there's one thing I'm sure of tonight, one thing I am certain of tonight, it's that this great pressure that we face together has bonded us deeply. We bond in suffering. I'm certain of it. Everyone with us tonight with two feet on this people's lawn wants nothing more than one thing. We want to end overdose death in Vermont. I'm going to ask you now to join each other and me. Join the parents of team-sharing Vermont. In a moment of silence, a reverent moment during which Dylan, our friend from Montpellier High School, will strike his drum 215 times, 215 hard beats. One for each Vermont that lost in 2021. Thank you Dylan. It's not easy. It's not easy to bond in grief, but we bond in suffering. Thank you. Thank you for joining me and joining each other. Thank you for joining the wonderful parents. Team-sharing Vermont. Tonight is about saving lives. Tonight is about one heart. Tonight is about no questions asked, no judgments made, no demands, no stigma. Tonight is about love. One heart. Tonight is about loving those taken from us. Tonight is about loving those still with us who use drugs. Tonight is about protecting those at risk for death. Those being preyed upon by international criminal organizations. Who of us does not need the protection of another? Yes, much is being done in Vermont. Public education, prevention, treatment, medications for opioids, disorder, an array of harm reduction interventions that work. Recovery services easily available and accessible to people who need them. Much is being done in Vermont. I'm proud to be a Vermont, but we don't turn our backs. But more can and should be done. We need to keep our loved ones alive by supporting the array of interventions I just listed. In addition to that, we need to find the resources and follow the science. And the resources are here pouring into Vermont tens of millions of dollars. We need to follow the science. Expand harm reduction. Meet people where they're at. And yes, that includes overdose prevention sites. They work. The data shows it. Globally, they work. In New York State, they work. Underground, they work where they're not sanctioned. They save lives. Tonight is about saving lives. The time is now. I'm Kimberly Blake. I'm the Vermont Ambassador for Team Sharing. I have the privilege of welcoming new parents to our group when they've suffered the most unimaginable loss. Each and every child means something to me. And it means so much to the parents and I see the grief that people experience. When my son died in 2017, the only thing that kind of kept my heart beating was advocacy. And I started writing letters, reaching out to anyone I could to try and change what was happening. I became involved in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy trial and I befriended some of the people who were on the victims committee. And I did advocacy in terms of protesting outside courtroom appearances, listening to testimony from the Sackler family. And I had the privilege and honor of being one of 26 victims chosen to present a statement to the Sackler family as part of the bankruptcy. I didn't take this testimony lightly because I know each and every parent that I know who's been through this would have loved to have two to three minutes to talk to the Sacklers. But I would like to read my testimony today for all of you to hear. Good morning. I'm Dr. Kimberly Blake. I'm an OBGYN physician and now addiction medicine provider in Burlington, Vermont. I'm speaking on behalf of my husband, Timothy and my younger son, Edward, and families who've been affected by the opioid crisis in Vermont. My beautiful, brilliant, charismatic son, Sean, his life was cut short at the age of 27 due to an opioid overdose. As a young physician in Vermont in the 1990s, I heard the sales pitch from the Purdue Pharma salespeople. They wanted us to prescribe OxyContin for painful conditions, chronic conditions such as endometriosis. We're told that this new opiate was non-addictive. And I remember how that this medication was formulated so that addiction would not occur. I didn't believe the sales pitch and neither did my business partners, but unfortunately, many Vermont physicians did. Vermont lacks some of the regulations that are in place in New York state, a triplicate prescribing form that allowed people to write large amounts of medication for even minor ailments. And this is a recipe for disaster as the medicine cabinets of Vermont were filled with this drug. Our son, Sean, found OxyContin when he was just a teenager. He was given Oxy and he had a rough patch. He struggled to finish college. However, he found sobriety. And after a year of sobriety and health, he proudly enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He excelled at basic training in submarine engineering school and he became stationed in Broughton, Connecticut. Unfortunately, one weekend while I came to visit him on base, I noticed the telltale signs of opiate withdrawal. And I knew that the Oxy was back. Less than a week later, Sean was admitted to a psychiatric facility after a suicide attempt. He was so distraught at the end of his naval career that he tried to take his life. The next several years were a blur of relapse, institutionalization and recovery. At one point after being in New York City for several months missing, I received a call from Sean. He was in Rikers Island. He'd been caught shoplifting a tube of toothpaste and a bar of soap. He asked me if he could stay there because he was receiving methadone and there was no availability of methadone in Vermont that the waiting list was over two years. Our family drained our bank accounts, our retirement savings, our younger son's college fund, all to try and find treatment for Sean and he struggled every single day of his life. In 2016, he was sentenced to jail in Vermont for five misdemeanor charges. He was sent to jail where he went for over a year where he received no medication-assisted treatment, no psychiatric treatment, not even counseling. And after release from jail within 30 days, Sean overdosed. He became brain dead from the overdose in a bathroom where if people had only known that he was using, they would have been quickly to help and revive him with Narcan. Sean donated his heart, his liver, and two kidneys to grateful individuals. And I'd like to just end with a poem that Sean wrote called Help Wanted. And it says, I need a God in my life. The only thing that I want from this God right now is to lead me to sanity. As time goes on, I may want God to help me forgive myself, to give me the courage to do the right thing and shape me into a better man. Right now, I need a God to bring me out of the chaos. I don't need a God to open up the gates of hell and let me in. I just want the gates of hell to open up and let me out. I feel that I've worked very hard for these funds that are coming to Vermont. And I understand that we need prevention in Vermont. But right now, people are drowning, and I think that we need every flotation device available. Swimming lessons are great, and they're important, and we need to help the monitors of the future. But right now, we need harm reduction. We need better access to medication-assisted treatment. And we need overdose prevention sites. Thank you. At this point, take a break and visit our stations. And I think the ice cream truck will be serving. Sorry, folks. Actually, because we started a little bit late, we wanted to give people a chance to filter in here. We're going to skip this break right now and move on to our next speaker. If that's okay, please take in my clipboard, Ed. So I'm going to bring up Jeremy Holsey. He is from Burlington, Vermont. He's the manager of the Ben and Jerry's flagship scoop shop on Church Street in Burlington. And he's got a personal story to share with you today. Hi, folks. As Teresa mentioned, my name is Jeremy. I'm here on behalf of the Ben and Jerry's team to, first and foremost, voice our support for overdose prevention sites in Burlington. I'm not here because I'm a subject matter expert or someone who's suffered the, you know, experienced the tragedy of losing a loved one to overdose. I'm here because my role as the manager of the Ben and Jerry store on Church Street has put my team and I face to face. And face to face with the harm that this disease has inflicted on people who are suffering from addiction and our community. Within the last few years, our bathrooms have become a hotspot for folks seeking a private place to use heroin. Our staff of mainly high school and college students are regularly finding discarded needles and have even witnessed drug use and overdose in our store. I remember when all this started, I felt helpless. The most important part of my job is to keep my people safe. And to make working at Ben and Jerry's a fun and exciting experience. But that felt impossible when I had employees telling me that they didn't feel safe. And that they had anxiety at work knowing that the risk of seeing someone overdose in the store was so high. In a cry for help, I reached out to City Council, the Howard Center, and other businesses in Burlington to learn what we could do to better manage this in our store. And also how we could help heal the community. Through this, I was connected to some amazing people who helped me understand the true scale of addiction in Vermont, the severity of fentanyl, the different stigma associated with drug addiction and Narcan, and the different methods of harm reduction, which can save lives and prevent overdoses. We at Ben and Jerry's sincerely thank you all for showing up today. And we share your hope and vision for a future without overdose fatalities. I hope everyone gets a chance to grab some free ice cream when we reopen. You know, it's our way of thanking you all for being here and providing a little bit of joy for what is a tragic need to organize. Emma and Thomas, who are working in the truck today, they're a part of our catering all star team, but they're also the very same employees who work in the store and have faced this issue head on. So thank you, everyone. Thank you, Emma and Thomas. Okay. So thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Ben and Jerry's. I can just say that from the minute I talked to people at Ben and Jerry's, there was no hesitation. They were behind this 100% immediately. It's my pleasure now to introduce Andy Seaman. Andy Seaman is an addiction specialist in the Vermont Medical Director of Better Life Partners, a low barrier addiction treatment organization with a harm reduction framework. They're also an associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, a harm reductionist, a hepatitis C elimination researcher and advocate for the rights and voices of people who use drugs and a partner and parent to some incredible humans. Thanks, Ed. Thanks, Kim. Thanks, Jeremy. It's an honor to be here. So often when we hear about the overdose crisis, we hear about numbers. 210 Vermonters died from accidental overdose last year. That's one-third more than 2020, which is one-third more than the year before. In the U.S. last year, 107,000 people lost their lives, making overdose the number one cause of death under the age of 50. These numbers are striking, but they leave me numb. As I said today, I want to talk about stories of real people, mothers, fathers, children, uncles, aunts, partners, friends, and stories of a community, a government, and a culture that are failing them. A 40-year-old man living with disability eight months into hard-fought recovery was taking a shower when someone stole his money in buprenorphine, a life-saving medication, an incredibly safe life-saving medication for the treatment of opioid addiction. The state said they could not fill controlled substances, no exceptions. So desperate, he stared down withdrawal and said he knew he would use. He died a week later. A 32-year-old mother with young children, a brilliant spark of a human despite all the struggles and trauma she experienced beyond belief, ran into an old friend and had a brief return to use. She was picked up on a parole violation and sent to a cold jail cell. She lost everything, her kids, her job, and soon her life. She was released to the street with a single day of buprenorphine, missed a connection and died three days later, just trying to stay well. Her children will never really know her. A 37-year-old father in and out of recovery more times than he can count the time leaving feeling judged and shameful after a relapse came to better life partners in severe withdrawal. He needed high-dose buprenorphine to help him through withdrawal from an ever more potent, more dangerous, and more contaminated drug supply. The state denied our request for 20 milligrams of buprenorphine. The pharmacy wouldn't fill it and he died a few days later in Burlington, just a few blocks from the proposed overdose prevention site to buy our government year after year. And so many more. Why? Because the Vermont Department of Health has decided that it's more important we protect the community from someone selling safe, life-saving medicine like buprenorphine than to make it easier to get than fentanyl, which was responsible for 93% of all overdoses in Vermont last year. Because despite some fiercely supportive legislators, our legislature continues to pass toothless laws calling for yet another oversight committee, another review board, another report, and our governor continues to veto anything even coming close to real reform. Because we continue to double down on a 50-year failed drug war, arresting our way out of this public health problem, throwing people in jail, and taking away the very things people need to get up in the morning and choose life. Because we choose paternalism over love, making people jump through hoop after hoop to survive another day, still convinced we know the exact path forward toward healing for people whose lives we cannot even begin to comprehend. All this must change. To the other providers and policymakers in the audience, I ask you, do you think someone can talk to you for 20 minutes or look at a spreadsheet and know exactly what's right for you? Does anyone truly fully know your story? And can anyone make you thrive? Or do you need to find it for yourself with doors wide open and do you also need a hand sometimes? We must change the story we hold as a community. We must shift away from the mantra of us versus the drug to us versus human suffering. We have to stop telling people that we'd rather they inject a loan in an alley or a studio apartment or a street corner than in an overdose prevention site where after millions of supported injections worldwide there has never been a single overdose death. By saying this we are telling people directly or in the space between our words that we would rather they die than sanction something we find distasteful. We must stop justifying bad policy under the guise of protecting our children. Last I checked people who use drugs are our children and our friends, our family, our community. We need a sea change in how we care for people who use drugs. We need real action and we need it now. We need overdose prevention sites now. We need removals of barriers to treatment now. We need direct to consumer drug testing so people can know what particular version of poison they're about to take in a supply made ever more dangerous year after year by this drug war. We need to decriminalize drug use to start building people up not taking away their dignity, their supports, and their ability to provide for themselves. We need more providers in the state willing to offer treatment in a harm reduction framework and we need to stop talking about harm reduction and actually practice it from the front lines to policy. And lastly we need to start recognizing the miracles people who use drugs perform every day just to survive in this system and treat them as heroes to learn from because they have wisdom to share and experiences you cannot imagine. So let's stop trying. So let's start listening. Let's amplify these voices and yes let's thank all the frontline workers already doing transformative work and let's do this by creating a system that makes this work possible and let's thank the policymakers who I truly believe are trying to do the right thing and as we do this let's ask them to channel the voices of people who use drugs through their pens to radically reimagine what is needed in this moment. Thank you. Let's take a little break for 20 minutes, 10 minutes. We're going to reconvene. What a night. What a beautiful night. What a beautiful crowd. Great to be here together. It's my great pleasure to introduce a person that is dear to me, Teresa Vizena. Teresa is the executive director of Vermont Cares. She's a leader in harm reduction across Vermont. Her heart is all in when it comes to working alongside people who use drugs. She has been instrumental in making this event happen and that's putting it mildly, believe me. She is here to tell you her story. Thank you, Ed, for that introduction. This is such an amazing turnout. I really am so grateful to be standing here alongside all of you while we shine a light on this most important issue. You know, count my blessings every day that I'm still able to be here and share my story with you tonight. When I was preparing for this speech, I thought about what am I going to say? How am I going to share my story with all of you? And it's a long story, so I knew I couldn't do that tonight. And then I realized it really isn't my story that matters. Yes, I engaged in crippling drug use. I lost everything I had, including my dignity, and I'm lucky to be alive. But none of that really matters. I'm no better, no more special than anybody else. I stand here now, free from problematic drug use, safe, successful in my career, but those things don't make me better than who I was when I was panhandling in the streets of LA, when I was smoking crack in the alleyways, when I was making some pretty bad choices. I'm no better of a person now than I was then, and it has taken me years to understand that. What I found is freedom. I found freedom from chaotic, harmful drug use that was all consuming. I found freedom from living a life of survival. Too often, the accolades go to people who found their way, to people who've made it. And I don't want us to forget that it's okay to celebrate that for sure. Those are things we absolutely want to celebrate, but we want to remember that we can celebrate people who are struggling. We can celebrate people who use drugs. We can celebrate someone that just experienced an accidental overdose. Everybody deserves to be celebrated for who they are, no matter what. I remember when I was kicked out of rehab for breaking an arbitrary rule, I was about a week into my 28-day program, and I was released with no transition plan back to my old life. I cried, I begged, and it didn't matter. I wish my one week had been celebrated that we could have talked, and maybe I could have continued in the program that actually was making a difference in my life. I left. I kind of had to. But over the many years that followed, I struggled walking through life with labels that I really refused to accept. But still, I felt I'm not good enough. I'm a total screw-up. I just need to settle. This is who I am. And I punished myself for all the bad things I did, for all the bad choices I made, for hurting the people that I loved most. And in those early days, I wished just one person would have said to me, You're okay. You are more than that. You are not your behaviors. You are not your drug use. You are not broken, and you have the capacity to change. And luckily, slowly, one at a time, caring, loving people came into my life, and they showed me a level of acceptance and non-judgment that started to change my story that helped me to see something within myself that I hadn't been able to see before. It hasn't been an easy road, and it's a journey that will continue. And I'm forever grateful for every bit of the life I've lived, all the good and bad. I've been blessed, having so many people in my life to mentor me, to guide me to where I'm at today, giving me the encouragement and strength to get me here, to this podium, to share my story with you today. This message of hope. I'm here to say that each of us can bring this same compassion and love into our communities, into our families, into our workplaces. We all have the capacity to do that through a simple smile, a kind word, genuine eye contact with somebody, a meaningful conversation that could change a person's day, and over time, maybe even a life, and we can do this starting right now. So the next time you see someone you may have prejudged, think again, this could be your daughter, this could be your grandchild, this could be your best friend. And remember, people are people first, and everybody wants to be seen and treated with respect. This is what harm reduction has meant to me, and I am so grateful that I'm able to do this work with everybody here. And I'm grateful for the support that we get, but we need more support for harm reduction. It is some of the most valuable work, and honestly, I wish there had been these kind of programs back in my day. I don't want to date myself, but there weren't. And everything was pretty abstinence based. And I think had I had someone like myself back then, it would have just been easier. I still would have struggled. You know, I just want to end this. It'd be really, I'd be remiss if I didn't share this at an overdose awareness event. And so often we think about overdose and that it only affects people possibly who are struggling with a substance use disorder, who are engaging in problematic drug use, chaotic drug use. But the reality of it is overdose does not discriminate. The more 80% of people who use drugs are occasional, once a year, twice a year drug users. Those folks are also at risk. Everybody that uses an illicit drug right now is at risk for an accidental overdose. We need to find a way to open up this conversation, talk about it without judgment, make it a regular conversation. It's time to change the narrative. It's time to end the stigma and love people for who they are no matter what is going on in their life. It has been such an honor to be here with you all tonight. I'm very grateful. Thank you. Please enjoy the rest of your evening. I am going to bring up our next speaker. So the next person coming up, we have Dr. David Craig and he is a professor of surgery at the University of Vermont. He is with a team here. He brought his published evidence on OUD together into one accessible location. He's also a member of Team Sharing Vermont. David, come on up. I've been around long enough that held a young man who died from a very strange new disease. Young man, he developed a weird infection and died. And we learned later that was called AIDS. And then several people died. And they kept dying until something happened. They advocated. And they advocated in ways that were considered rather radical. But they accomplished something. They accomplished a change in the thinking of the people who provide funds for research than the people who provide care for people with that disease. Later, when we came to Vermont in the early 1990s, breast cancer was kind of like AIDS. It was in the closet. And when he talked about it, there was no coordinated care. And that just didn't seem right. And so this thing emerged, this group of women, breast cancer action group, and they modeled their efforts after the AIDS activists. They called themselves the Breast Cancer Action Group. And we hosted them in our house. And because of that, I started, I simply put up a little sign on my office door at UHC that said Breast Center. It wasn't such a thing before that. And we got coordinated and then things evolved. And it involved a change of thinking. And now, of course, it's been successful and many things are changing. Well, here we go again. And we got another disease. And everybody here knows what that is. But it's like the early days of AIDS with stigma and bias. It's like the early days of breast cancer with it being in the closet and not wanting to talk about breasts and things like this. So I so much appreciate people coming up to this microphone and saying we have to talk about it. We have to change our way of thinking. And we have to change the way of thinking of the people who are responsible for caring for sick people. And it's up to us to do that. So there are two things that are part of that responsibility. One is we have to provide some way to solve it. And then the other is we have to advocate for that. And so our small effort right now on solving it is there's Sarah. Sarah, could you raise your hand please? All right. Before you leave here, go visit Sarah. See what she's doing. Get a cookie. Some would nuts, some without nuts. Take one of each. And I'll let her explain what this project is about. It's a bold project that has to do with not taking little pieces of information and using them for your own purpose. All right. The amount of information that already exists on this disease is massive. There are over 50,000 published articles. It's like a giant oak tree. And every leaf on that oak tree is a piece of information. People look at that big oak tree and the best they can do is take a little leaf and say, oh, this is what I'm going to use. That's called evidence. It's not. It's out of context. It may be accurate. It may be true, but it's not part of that tree. We're trying to create that entire tree of information that's accessible to everybody here today. And then we can bring that to our people who are responsible for improving the care of the sick people. And everybody has an idea how to do that. And they're good ideas. Personally, where does it start? Everybody here that has somebody who died that they love would do anything to turn that clock back. So let's do this. Take the moment they died and most of you know the circumstances. That person was alone. They put a drug in their vein and their heart stopped and they stopped breathing. Now, if you were there, this is my question. What would you do? What could you do? There's a lot of things you could do. So you would save their life if you were there and you have the tools. Go back five minutes before that heart stopped beating and say, well, they're getting ready to take that fatal dose. What could you do and what would you do? A lot of things you could do and you would do them. But we have to have the tools. We have to take that death and analyze it and work backwards from that moment. Is it preventable? And this is when I want everybody to go, yes. Is it preventable? Thank you. We just have to do that. It's not that hard and it's not that complicated. And we have to have people think about it from that perspective. Not from a system, not from expenditures, not from clinics, not from protocols. But that moment when that person we loved died. Thank you very much. I wanted to share a little bit of Sean's poetry with you guys tonight. I read the brief poem that this is one that he wrote about love. Okay. Love, have you felt it take over your soul? Burn your insides like flushed coals. Do you know that feeling when your heart takes over your head? When you wake up next to her in bed? The deadly saturation of infatuation. It always starts with celebration. Then your mind fights back with complication. You're feeling in a state of excavation. Why is someone always digging? Maybe you're the owner of the shovel. Have you felt it take over your soul? Burn your insides like flushed coals. Do you know the feeling when your heart pounds like a bass drum? When she whispers in your ear that little hum? The next stage is always a scene's dark, a little bit like a debt to a loan shark. Your little taste was too much to chew. Won't someone push the undo? I implore you to follow through until you get a new point of view. Have you felt it take over your soul? Burn your insides like flushed coals? Do you know the feeling when wrong turns to right? When you see her smile and it hits you the brightest light. My heart's been broke about four times, hung drawn and quartered, all because I fought to cross that dangerous border. I'll keep trying, I promise. Love's not a neurologic disorder. Thank you. I'm so pleased to introduce Dakota. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Hello everyone. I'm Dakota. I am the Overdose Prevention Outreach Worker for the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont. So kind of what I'm responsible for is, you know, helping really engage the community. You know, get as much Narcan as we can out on the streets, but equally as important, you know, building a relationship with people. But I thought so. But equally as important, you know, building a relationship, a genuine relationship with people, because, you know, oftentimes that's all that you need sometimes. Because, you know, when I was out on the streets and run around doing whatever I happened to be doing, you know, there was always people in the background that recognized my problematic drug use for what it was, you know, a social and economic issue, not some moral failing on my part. And, you know, somebody was always there with kind words, just interested in making sure I was staying safe and staying alive and, you know, there to open the door to whatever kind of, you know, treatment I happened to be interested in, or whatever road I wanted to go down. And I have a lot of friends that didn't have that kind of support or didn't have, at least thought they didn't have anybody, you know, in their corner doing that. And, you know, sadly they didn't make it, you know. So we have a lot of great services now and there's a lot of great people out there doing great things to help people. But for myself, and I don't want to speak for everyone, but I feel that building that genuine connection for people and being there is, you know, the basis of what harm reduction is. I'd like people to be safe. Ideally, you know, they would get into recovery, but, you know, as long as they're safe and they're staying alive and they know that people love them, that's all I can do. Yeah, that's all I really have to say. Thank you so much, Dakota. That was amazing. Now we're going to take a short break, just 10 minutes. Sarah George is going to be our last speaker and she's going to close us out very soon. All right, everybody. I hope you've enjoyed this short break. I want to introduce our last speaker of the night and it's a great honor. Sarah George had the opportunity to work beside her in so many different ways and I'm really honored that she is able to join us tonight. Sarah is the Chittenden County State's attorney who has used her position and her power as a prosecutor to advocate for harm reduction approaches to a true public safety. Sarah understands the importance of meeting people where they are and providing the necessary supports and services to anyone and everyone who uses drugs. We are so excited to have her here to close us out this evening so please everybody come up and give her a great big welcome. Good evening, everybody. Thank you all so much for coming to this event. Thank you for everybody who put this together. My girlfriend just texted me from Burlington that the rain is coming so thank you as well for sticking this out and for being here till the end. In 2011, my first year as a prosecutor, all of 28 years old, I got paged and summoned to a scene. All I knew upon arrival at the home was that it was an overdose death. What I didn't expect to see were the parents in the living room sobbing. The fiancee in the kitchen sobbing and shaking and the beautiful 24-year-old girl in her bedroom dead. Killed by an addiction that started with a prescription for a knee injury an injury she received while playing soccer. What I didn't expect to see was a scenario that absolutely could have been me, a soccer player from a good family. That was the day that I saw myself in the overdose epidemic. I saw how the stigma of substance use permeates so deep that even 24-year-olds with loving parents cannot escape it. And I wondered, if this happens in this home, how can we ever help the most vulnerable, the most targeted, the most stigmatized, the most traumatized, the most hurt, the most unseen. Nearly 12 years later, I have been to countless more scenes, received countless more calls, and my email fills with autopsy reports. Young and old, men and women, some with criminal histories and others with none, some with families left behind who had no idea, and other families who watched their loved ones struggle and get strangled by every inch of the red tape that our state puts around them. All found dead in their homes, hotels, parks, public restrooms, and cars. 12 years later, hundreds of Vermonters lost. If you hear anyone, whether they're elected officials or not, talking about public safety and the utmost importance of public safety, I beg you to remind them that harm reduction is public safety. We must protect people from harm by using a public health approach, evidence-based practices, and compassion, basic human dignity, to inform our laws, our policies, and our practices. We must demand not just low barrier access to treatment, but no barrier access to treatment, access to clean syringes and Narcan with no questions asked, access to immediate and no barrier care from MAT to long-term residential treatment. We must demand the decriminalization of drugs and the end to the war on drugs. The war on drugs has been proven to cause more harm in our communities than good, and it does not keep us safe. We must demand safe consumption spaces because public safety requires that we eliminate unsafe consumption spaces, which are all around us every day, from our parks to our Ben and Jerry's bathrooms. Together we can turn the tide on this epidemic. We can move towards a state that doesn't just say this is a public health issue, but actually acts like this is a public health issue. With every decision we make using evidence-based practices, a public health approach, compassion, and an absolute refusal to lose another Vermonter in this way, we will save lives. We will save Vermonters. We will guarantee that not one more person dies alone in a park, in a hotel, in a bedroom, or in a bathroom because we've chosen to value their life more than we value old, archaic, and fatal policies. To every single person struggling, I want to say that we see you. We care about you. I don't know where Teresa is, but we celebrate you. And we pray that you escape that chaos that Sean talked about. We pray that you get the services that you need to get through this so that you can one day also be a voice of hope and prosperity despite so many obstacles that we have put in your way. But we have a lot of work to do. On a day that at the very least our government could have lowered the flags, we are up against a lot. We have a lot of work to do, and we are all up for it because we do believe in public safety. We believe in harm reduction. We believe in human beings and compassion and dignity and kindness. I'm grateful for all of the folks here, every single person here, every person doing this work. The people on the ground doing this work and talking to the people in our communities who are struggling and hearing their stories is hard work. It is work that legislators hear about but often don't actually do. It is work that elected leaders like me, prosecutors, rarely hear about until it's too late. Or there are places where prosecutors are actively part of the harm. We all need to be held accountable, and it's those of you doing this work that need to hold us all accountable. Thank you for being here. Thank you to all of the organizations that are here and for doing the work that you do. I have faith. I am optimistic that this session we will get some stuff done and I'm looking forward to doing it with all of you. So let's do this. Thank you. This is our committee. I wanted to make sure that everyone knew who was responsible for pulling together this amazing event. We all want to wish you guys a great evening. Good night. Thank you for coming out. Get home safe. Thank you for showing up and doing this work. Together we have a huge impact and make a difference. We love you all. We are so grateful for you all. Have a wonderful evening.