Victoria's Story Mercedes Schlapp, Sheriff Dennis Lemma, and David Siegel - CPAC FL
Mercedes Schlapp hosts a panel with Sheriff Dennis Lemma and David Siegel at CPAC Florida 2022. The trio discuss the drug epidemic taking lives across the nation.
Siegel’s own daughter, Victoria, was a victim of drug addiction. Rather than retreat after the death of his daughter, Siegel chose to become an advocate for rehabilitating drug addicts and making the life-saving drug, NARCAN, accessible and available in every police department. NARCAN, also known as the Lazarus drug, when administered to the victim of a drug overdose will revive the patient in a last-ditch effort. Siegel founded the Victoria’s Voice organization to advance awareness of drug addiction and promote rehabilitation efforts and the accessibility of NARCAN. Victoria’s Voice successfully influenced the Care Act in Congress that enabled their efforts at preventing deaths from drug overdoses.
Lemma shares the extent, to which, drug addiction has reached today. He explains that drug addiction is no longer relegated to poor or homeless individuals or veterans, but has expanded its reach to people of all walks of life, and especially young people. The drug in question has also changed. The common addictive drug used to be heroin, but now police officers, like Lemma, are seeing fentanyl as the common culprit in overdoses. The flood of fentanyl illegally crossing the border is certainly the leading cause of this epidemic, and as Lemma observes, it is being “mixed into everything.”
Siegel warns that fentanyl is not the only drug involved in this epidemic but that young people are being introduced to drugs at an early age through gateway drugs like marijuana. Lemma agrees that recreational drugs are diluting the stigma and justified dangerous connotation surrounding drug habits and enabling the younger generations’ interests in drugs.