International Overdose Awareness Day - 31 August 2024

Admin note: this international campaign to end overdose is happening in the last week of August. Here are some ways to get involved: https://www.overdoseday.com/get-involved/

International Overdose Awareness Day 2024 theme: "Together we can"​

No one should stand alone in our fight to end overdose.

While every individual action matters greatly, coming together as an international community creates a powerful collective action. One that moves us with greater speed toward our shared goal of preventing, and ultimately, ending all overdoses.

Through our 2024 theme, “Together we can” we’re highlighting the strength of coming together and standing in support of those connected to the tragedy of overdose.

For people who use drugs and those who don’t. For heartbroken friends and family members of lost loved ones. For activists who fight for sorely needed policy reform. For healthcare and harm reduction workers. For tireless advocates. Overdose can affect anyone, and we encourage you to remember the tenacity of our community. Lean into the power that we can have when we work together.

This August 31, reach out and connect with others in your local community and join the global IOAD movement. Our collective voices are stronger, louder, and the most impactful when brought together.

Let’s remember, together, we can end overdose.

#TogetherWeCan #EndOverdose #IOAD2024

 

I believe that legalization of everything (yes, everything) is the answer, or at least a start to overdoses ending. Why? Well, the last time 2 days ago when I went to dialysis, I handed someone a Cannabis edible, and while I was being hooked up 3 nurses/other and I were openly joking and talking about Cannabis without hesitation. Being able to ask questions if I had them with no reservations, being able to disclose drug use without judgement or recriminations is absolutely priceless. I’ll take decriminalization and safe use sites any day but believe firmly in the need for legalization.

Tom

 

Many years ago (13 to be exact), my youngest son, Caleb, overdosed and died alone. He had just become a moderator here on Bluelight, though I never would have known that, nor anything at all about Bluelight had his older brother not found the site on his computer and showed it to me when we went to clean out his apartment. Caleb was a very intelligent, compassionate, inquisitive, adventurous young man who had just turned twenty. He could also be profoundly spiritual and hysterically funny, often at the same time. We will never really know whether his overdose was intentional or accidental but either way we do know that it was connected to his despair (which predated his drug use) and his fatalism about the fate of the world as well as his own place in it.
Caleb's life had been a crazy descent into hell for the past year thanks to MDPV. He saw people that were not there and they were always out to kill him. He became estranged from both his friends and his family and his life hung by a thin thread every single day for that last year. He was not generally an opiate user but that is what he overdosed on. There are lots of theories--poppy pods, opiates that a friend got and shared after dental surgery but whatever the source it really does not matter. A boy, barely a young man, our son, his brother's only sibling, is gone and year after year that means something different but the pain never stops.
I became a big believer in Bluelight because of Caleb. It did not save his life but it gave him a home when he had no other that he could trust. And then it gave me a home for my grief. No one will ever know the comfort i got from knowing that even his last year of life, so often consumed by shame and self-loathing which was only accentuated by society's views of drug users and especially addicts ( he described his compulsion with MDVP as addiction), he had a community of compassionate folks online here in these forums. This community allowed him to be himself as he truly was: wild, funny, wise, irreverent, empathetic and just plain interesting. Meanwhile, the world saw him as a felon, a drop-out, a mentally ill person who had nothing to offer and he was fighting a war within himself not to see himself that same way.
Because I was so grateful to Bluelight I became involved myself and moderated here for a decade. I no longer have the fortitude to give the work of moderating its due, but I believe in the positive role of this community wiith all my heart. A very cynical old BLer once challenged me over that, asking how I could say that, when even my own son, a moderator here no less, died of an overdose. Bluelight can and probably does save lives in the way the forums offer factual information about everything from safe practices to dosages etc but let's be real--it cannot save the lives of people who need much more than facts. Bleulight's real value is in the community it provides to the living at some of the worst times in their lives. Everyone who gets involved and keeps this site running (and I can say from experience, that is no easy task) is a hero of mine. Thanks for all you do. Keep doing it. All we can do while we are here in these silly and complicated body-suits of ours, for this incredibly short span of time, is to offer ourselves to each other in the understanding that we all need community. Everyone needs to be seen with respect. The big world out there doesn't offer that. Thank heavens for the little pockets that do.