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The following essay was written by Brandon del Pozo, police chief in Burlington, Vermont, in response to an obituary that has recently become viral. This obituary details the opioid addiction that eventually led to the death earlier this month of Madelyn Ellen Linsenmeir, a 30-year-old mother from Vermont. This essay, which del Pozo published on his Facebook account on October 16, is republished here with his permission and has been slightly modified.
I have a problem with this obituary.
Born here in Burlington, Madelyn was the mother of a 30-year-old child. She was loved by her family. She developed an opioid addiction at the age of 16 after trying Oxy at a party. When his addiction finally killed him last week, after fighting him almost half of his life, a family member gifted for expression wrote him the honest and touching obituary that She really deserved it. It has become viral. It is read across the country. It's in People, The Globe, HuffPost and Daily News. The problem is that his obituary is much better than the one we deserve.
Why did it take a bereaved parent with a good literary sense to get people to pay attention for a moment and shed a tear when nearly a quarter of a million people have already died from the same way as Maddie while the epidemic was developing?
Do readers think it's the first time that a beautiful young darling mother of a pastoral state is addicted to Oxy and dies of the descent that she has caused? And what about the rest of the victims, who were not so beautiful and lived in oppressed cities or in the rust belt? They too had mothers crying for them and blaming themselves.
She died as my wife's cousin, Meredith, died in Bethesda, herself a young mother, but if Maddie was a Bronx black man found dead in her bathroom from an overdose, this is not the case. would not matter if the author of the obituary had won the Booker Prize, there would be no weepy article in People about it.
Why not?
But if there had been enough early and we acted quickly, humanly, and therefore, maybe Maddie would still be there. Make no mistake, no matter who you are or what you look like: the Maddie bell rings for someone close to you and maybe even someone you love. Ask the cops and they'll tell you: Maddie's death is nothing special. It happens all the time, to people no less loved and necessary and human.
Maddie, in death, gave us a last gift thanks to the moving tribute his family gave him: the gift of focusing our attention for a moment. Thank you Maddie and his family. That's what I'm tired of: arguing with the sheriffs about their Naloxone MPs at national conferences. Discuss with prison authorities at home to ensure that all inmates in need receive medical treatment at the beginning of their sentence and maintain it even after they leave. Make me ridiculous by the reactionaries because I will not stop the desperate for using non-prescribed drugs for the treatment of drug addiction.
If nothing else, I will be able to be pious and know for sure that I was doing what was right. But the NYPD did not elevate me this way and that's not what a city needs as a police chief. It has helped me win: protecting and saving people and defeating threats, not just feeling right. To get the Maddies of a house in town.
The science is clear. We have effective medications and protocols to effectively reduce the risk of overdose deaths or other addiction-related causes. If you ignore them or deny them, I'll wonder if your tears for Maddie are crocodile tears. This spring, under the leadership of Mayor Miro Weinberger, Burlington police partnered with Johns Hopkins, the American Health Initiative and the Police Executive Research Forum to give police and municipal leaders what they could do, or defend, for deaths by opioid addiction in the nation.
They are based on science and medicine, and they walk reduce the number of fatal overdoses and deaths related to addiction. And they do not look like the police, which is not an accident because the police are not going to arrest the dying themselves. Here are some highlights and the general strategy of our city, which is good for the nation:
- Support and expand needle exchanges – conducted in Burlington, Vermont (BTV)
- Distribute buprenorphine for syringe exchanges to virtually any user who requests it (BTV does)
- Give buprenorphine to the emergency room to anyone who is addicted and who asks for it (BTV does)
- Treat every prisoner who needs it with buprenorphine, methadone or vivitrol at his convenience (at least Vermont tries)
- Stop arresting and suing for simple possession of non-prescription drug treatment drugs (police and city attorney policy)
- Stop asking for total abstinence in recovery housing by allowing stabilized people to take drugs for the treatment of addiction (not even nearby)
- Provide users with the tools to test their fentanyl medications (Vermont does)
- Create sufficient capacity to eliminate waiting lists in treatment centers (almost in Vermont)
- Train primary care physicians to treat addiction and prescribe drug addiction medication (progressing in Vermont)
- Reduce the opioid prescribing rate to pre-epidemic levels (en route to Vermont)
- Recognize addiction as a chronic disease and that treatment based on abstinence only works for a very short time, in some people (old stigmas have a hard time)
- Saturate communities with naloxone (made in Vermont)
Maddie is gone. She can not feel your grief. But others are next. Some are not beautiful. Others do not look like you. Some are like Maddie's twins and also have young children. They are all human beings and they need our help. Go. Get to work. We still have to gain the feelings inspired by his obituary. We should have felt them years ago.
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