member. and can you imagine you suddenly come upon a family member who is dying of an overdose, and you call 911. you do all those things. but this organization also empowers them to do something about that, to potentially save lives. and as you heard from joanne, 200 times now they ve reversed overdoses. wow. it s a pretty incredible organization. you re a doctor. you work in a hospital. but even being a doctor, are you surprised by the rise in overdose numbers even during the pandemic? well, i was initially, but, you know, there s obviously the social isolation, the economic instability, all the disruption to our daily life. but also, don, what i was really struck by was this, you know, recovery programs and counseling programs and programs that help people that are in recovery overall, they work. and, you know, this in some ways proved it because so many people at least in the initial days of the pandemic were not able to access many of those services. and i don t think that
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heroin use. so many times when we talk about the opioid crisis, we talk about it in terms of dozens of people may have overdosed in a particular city or tens of thousands of people have died of drug overdoses. we talk about it from a policy perspective. but what makes this distinctive is this is an organization that recognizes not only the trauma to the individual who is dealing with substance abuse but the whole family. i lost my niece a couple years ago to an overdose. i m sorry. i lost a brother ten years ago, complications of his addictions. joanne peterson s family had a long and difficult history with addiction. i learned when my niece passed away, the most important thing to do is no matter what, tell that person you love them and kind of be there for them. i have terrible guilt because in the end, i really wasn t there for her in the very end. and it haunts me. and it wasn t that i didn t want to be.
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i lost a brother ten years ago. complications of his addictions. joanne peterson s family had a long and difficult history of with addiction. i learned when my niece passed away the most important thing to do is no matter what tell that person you love them and kind of be there for them. i have terrible guilt because in the end i really wasn t there for her in the very end. and it haunts me. it wasn t that i didn t want to be. it was that i knew that i couldn t fix her problem or change it. she just kind of disappeared and then i got a call that she was in beth israel hospital on life support. so that haunts me. reporter: it was another part of the struggle with the stigma of substance abuse she had dealt with most of her life. until she met other families like her at a community meeting about drug overdoses. i started saying to people, let s start meeting. reporter: in 2004 learn to
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cope was born. we are there to help the family and remind the family that no matter what you are going to be okay. and i have had so many people say to me they have feel grateful that they were a member of a peer group like learn to cope because they understood the disease. i know a mom, her son had cancer. he had been prescribed oxycontin. because he was in pain. he was taken off it and he turned to heroin and she told me she missed his cancer. she said, you know why? because everyone loved him then. no one gives anything about him now. reporter: even after 20 years of covering these types of is stories i still learn something every time i meet someone like joanne peterson. the idea that the ultimate first responder in this opioid epidemic is usually a family member.
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