WASHINGTON — Inside Jessie Dunleavy’s home, memories of her late son Paul are just about everywhere.
Portraits of her 34-year old son hang over the staircase, the photos taken by a friend just a couple of months before he died.
“It’s a little nutty, but here are his keys,” Dunleavy said, picking them up in from the counter in the foyer of her Annapolis, Maryland, home.
Paul Reithlingshoefer died of a drug overdose five years ago; according to Dunleavy, the cause of death was from a multiple drug overdose that included heroin and fentanyl.
“You can’t get your mind around the fact that the person is gone, gone and it was a preventable death, 1000 percent preventable,” Dunleavy said.
As a child, Reithlingshoefer’s learning disabilities forced him to switch schools. Struggling with mental health issues, he turned to drugs. His addiction led to repeated arrests and jail stays.
Dunleavy fought to get her son the inpatient treatment he needed, but was unsuccessful. In an effort to assist his recovery, she sought a doctor to prescribe Suboxone - the brand name for a medication that includes buprenorphine and naloxone, used to treat a dependence on opioid drugs such as heroin. That effort also failed.
After his death, Dunleavy fought to understand his struggles, eventually writing a book, “Cover My Dreams in Ink,” about his life and death — including weaving in his poetry.
“I learned a lot in pulling it together because I didn’t realize just how much every system failed him,” Dunleavy said. "I could have addressed it while we were in the midst of it, but just one thing leads to another."
More than 100,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses – most of them from opioids like heroin and fentanyl, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a record high in the U.S.
The White House announced a national new drug control strategy last week, the first to stress harm reduction, which the Department of Health and Human Services describes as "a proactive and evidence-based approach to reduce the negative personal and public health impacts of behavior associated with alcohol and other substance use at both the individual and community levels."
The plan would expand needle exchange programs, as well as access to Fentanyl test strips and the overdose treatment, Narcan. The strategy also includes targeting the financial activities of transnational criminal organizations.
Advocates say the White House’s plan is a step in the right direction, but would like to see public health spending prioritized over money for drug enforcement. Some are looking to stop a growing push on Capitol Hill to place fentanyl analogs permanently into Schedule 1 and the mandatory minimums that usually come with criminal convictions involving schedule 1 drugs.
“We need to push the current administration to see that harsher penalties have not taken these drugs out of our drug supply, if anything they’ve already exacerbated racial disparities in who was actually sentenced,” said Sheila Vakharia, the Deputy Director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance.
Some critics say an emphasis on harm reduction could enable more drug use. The White House strategy needs congressional support, which likely will include a vigorous debate in the months ahead.
Dunleavy said a harm-reduction strategy might have saved her son’s life. She said she plans to devote the rest of her life seeking help for those struggling with addiction, something she said Paul would have wanted.
"I feel his presence and I feel him telling me to keep fighting. I hear him saying you go, Mom. He’d be proud of me because he would very much want to save somebody else,” Dunleavy said.