
Maureen Cavanagh is the author of “If You Love Me: A Mother’s Journey Through Her Daughter’s Opioid Addiction” and founder of Magnolia New Beginnings
In September 2016, there was a video that went viral. It was viewed and shared so many times that the Washington Post and New York Times covered it, in addition to countless local and national news outlets.
It wasn’t Adele’s Carpool Karaoke with James Corden or the latest TikTok challenge (TikTok only launched that month). It was a heartbreaking video of a 2-year-old girl in “Frozen” pajamas crying, pulling, and shaking her mother in the toy aisle of a Family Dollar store in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The mother, whom I will identify only by her first name Mandy, was unconscious after an opioid overdose, and the scene was recorded on cellphone by bystanders after calling 911.
The video was a distressing visual reminder of the opioid epidemic in the US. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted over 103,000 overdose deaths in the twelve months ending April 2021.
In 2020, 75% of overdoses involved an opioid. It is common to stereotype drug users, yet the accessibility of prescription painkillers has expanded opioid use to touch all of America. Everyone from construction workers managing chronic pain to stay on the job to patients prescribed opioids following surgery is susceptible, and opioid addiction impacts parents, children, workers, and neighbors. This video helps to explain how it happens.
Maureen Cavanagh is the author of “If You Love Me: A Mother’s Journey Through Her Daughter’s Opioid Addiction” and founder of Magnolia New Beginnings, which provides education and peer support to those affected by substance use disorder and their families. Cavanagh helped Mandy find treatment in 2016 and says, “It can happen in any family. We want to find the thing in the family that we can point to and say that it is the ‘reason’ for the substance abuse because we’re scared. Things like, ‘this won’t happen to me because they didn’t have a family dinner. They didn’t go on family vacations. They didn’t talk to their kids about drugs.’ All this is ridiculous. I know hundreds of people, including myself, whose children got involved in drugs, and they did those things.”
Thankfully, three out of four people who experience addiction eventually recover, according to this CDC and National Institutes of Health study. Cavanagh helped me understand how.