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OCALA, FL (352today.com) – “He could sell sunshine to snowmen.”
It’s not easy for Hilary Jackson to talk about her cousin, Herschel.
“He was a light. Everywhere he went, he just lit up a room,” said Jackson.
Herschel’s light was extinguished on July 6, 2021.
“His heart was just so big. He had a heart for people. It really didn’t matter who you were. He just cared for people.”
Herschel went to a Fourth of July barbecue and just planned to party with friends. Someone gave him a pill that his family believes Herschel thought was Percocet or Xanax – a prescription opioid that would presumably make him relaxed, euphoric. Instead, he collapsed and never regained consciousness.
That pill turned out to be laced with a deadly dose of fentanyl.
Herschel was just 20 years old.
One pill can kill
In that moment… everything changed for Herschel’s family.
Eating Chicago beef with siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins who gather to watch the family’s beloved pro teams – the Bears and Bulls – play will never be the same.
There’ll be no more father-son rounds of golf where his dad will have to endure Herschel bragging about beating him or ribbing him for missing a putt.
And, there’ll be no daddy-daughter anything for Herschel’s little girl, Sophia. She was nine months old when he died.
Herschel dreamed of being an entrepreneur. “He wanted to move his girlfriend and his daughter back home to Florida and see what he could do to start a life… he was super into the idea of working for himself,” said Jackson. “All that was cut short. It was never his plan to be poisoned.”
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) calls fentanyl the “single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered.”
“Fentanyl is everywhere.
From large metropolitan areas to rural America,
no community is safe from this poison.”
– DEA Administrator Anne Milgram
In 2022, the DEA seized more than 58.4 million fentanyl-laced fake pills and more than 13,000 pounds of fentanyl powder. That’s equal to nearly 388 million deadly doses of fentanyl, says the agency.
The DEA says there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of fake prescription pills containing potentially deadly amounts of fentanyl being mass-produced and trafficked by Mexican drug cartels across the country. In 2022, the DEA says six out of 10 pills analyzed contained a potentially lethal dose of the opioid. That’s up from four out of 10 just the year before.
“Never take a pill that wasn’t prescribed directly to you. Never take a pill from a friend. Never take a pill bought on social media. Just one pill is dangerous, and one pill can kill,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.
The cruel irony
For Jackson, Herschel’s death is a cruel irony. “It stings a little bit,” said Jackson. “I did this work long before this happened [Herschel’s fentanyl poisoning].”
Jackson is on the front lines of the fight against fentanyl as the Director of Prevention for the Marion County Children’s Alliance Community Council Against Substance Abuse (CCASA)
It’s her professional mission to prevent young people from becoming a statistic. “It [Herschel’s death] kind of reads like an anecdotal after-school special,” lamented Jackson.
“I’ve helped thousands and thousands
and thousands of strangers.
When it comes to my own family, I couldn’t help him.”
– Hilary Jackson
She says Herschel’s family moved from Marion County to Chicago when he was around 12. He was the new kid and trying to fit in. “It was the wrong crowd at school and risky decision-making,” said Jackson. “We did not jump from good–great kid to fentanyl poisoning and gone in minutes. It was a gradual build of [substance] experimentation.”
In her job, Jackson works closely with teens involved in clubs like Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD). “I see opportunity in programs like that to give kids who are twisting in the wind – that don’t feel like they fit in or don’t feel like they have a purpose. I can set them up with something to do and give them a purpose.”
Jackson’s personal loss has fortified her professional purpose. “Everything I do, no matter what it is, is through a lens of empathy. A great big dose of empathy. There isn’t anything I put out to the community – there isn’t a room that I speak in where I’m not trying to think about people first.”
She says even the way we talk about addiction is important. Terms like addict, junkie and user are pejorative terms. “To say that someone is clean would indicate that at some point they were dirty,” explained Jackson.
She says putting people first is something Marion County has made a priority as a community. One big step forward was reducing barriers to getting treatment.
A beacon of hope
That’s the vision behind the creation of Beacon Point, a one-stop campus offering a wide array of services to treat behavioral health and substance abuse.
LEARN MORE ABOUT BEACON POINT: Reducing barriers to getting help to overcome drug addiction: Unique approach in Ocala puts all services in one place
Beacon Point opened in 2020 at 717 SW Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. Beacon Point receives a majority of its funding from the Marion County Hospital District (MCHD) and brings together agencies that provide services ranging from crisis intervention like detox to medication-assisted treatment to outpatient behavioral health and more. The services are free for Marion County residents.
For a full list of treatment resources in Marion County, click here.
Honoring Herschel
Sadly, many people never make it to treatment. Marion County alone had 187 overdose deaths in 2022. Due to inconsistencies in data collection, it’s hard to know how many of those were fentanyl-related, but Jackson believes it’s a majority.
For Jackson and her family, they’re not letting the circumstances of Herschel’s death define how they remember him. “He was so much more than this one event that took him away from us,” said Jackson. “He was supposed to be here. We were supposed to have more time.”
That’s why on his birthday and at every holiday, the family always does something in remembrance. They all have special ornaments for their Christmas trees. They use skylights to symbolically “send messages to him in Heaven.”
Other families who’ve lost loved ones to drug-induced death participate in the Empty Chair campaign. During the third week in September, they place an empty chair outside their home as a call to action for greater access to treatment and recovery resources.
Still others have memorialized their family member through the DEA’s Faces of Fentanyl Wall exhibit located at DEA Headquarters in Arlington, VA. If you’ve lost a loved one to fentanyl, click here to submit a photo to the Faces of Fentanyl Wall.
Jackson’s family finds strength and comfort knowing in his death, Herschel gave the gift of life through organ donation. His organs helped six others including two who received the gift of sight. The family sports lavender bracelets from the organ donation organization that say “Gift of Hope,” a daily reminder that Herschel lives on in others.
“I never take mine off – it is my reminder why I go to work each day and lately it has been my reminder to keep talking about the ‘gift of hope’ that recovery can bring. A reminder to keep being a light for others,” said Jackson.
GET INVOLVED: The 6th annual Ocala Recovery Festival will be held this Saturday, September 9, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Tuscawilla Park at 829 NE Sanchez Ave. Hear testimonies from those in recovery. Get connected with community resources.