Ethan Gonzales looked down at his aunt’s smiling face displayed in front of him on a cardboard sign. He recalled how she taught him the importance of eye contact when talking with people and shared her appreciation of Metallica.
Next year, Gonzales’ nephew will also be memorialized alongside Gonzales’ aunt and hundreds of other people who have lost their lives to drug overdoses.
“It’s been a family disease for all of us,” Gonzales said of addiction. “My mom has seen her sister die, and my son and my daughters have seen their cousins die from it. But it’s woken up a lot of kids in our family, which is really good, because it’s killing this generation.”
On Wednesday, nonprofit organizations and community members gathered for the eighth annual Fentanyl Prevention and Overdose Awareness Day. The event at Vancouver’s O.O. Howard House offered resources in addition to a memorial walkthrough for those who have died from drug overdoses.
Those whose photos were displayed represented an array of ages, genders, hometowns and stories. They were all someone’s someone.
“It’s important to see faces before the numbers because the truth is that those statistics are someone’s child, sibling, parent, friend. If we can all come together knowing that is why we’re here, to remember and honor them, that will make the difference,” said Nicole Hamberger, engagement specialist with Southwest Washington Accountable Community of Health, or SWACH.
The annual event was created locally by Lyn Fortner, whose son, Ryan, lost his life to a heroin overdose in 2012. A few years later, she learned about Overdose Awareness Day and decided to begin marking it in Vancouver with the first local event in 2017.
Fortner now partners with SWACH, among other agencies, to host the annual event. Participants browsed booths staffed by such organizations as Columbia River Mental Health, XChange Recovery and Lifeline Connections.
As deadly fentanyl has overtaken other drugs, more community members have mobilized to prevent future overdose deaths.
“There’s no single law, there’s no single treatment service. It’s going to take all of the solutions to fix this complex, multilayered problem,” Hamberger said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 107,543 people died of drug overdoses in 2023 — a 3 percent decrease from the previous year, marking the first annual decline in the U.S. since 2018. However, the crisis remains dire, with more than 130 people dying each day from opioid-related overdoses nationwide.
By the end of Wednesday’s event, Fortner told attendees that 108 Americans had died from an overdose since that morning.
“We’re all working our hardest, but fentanyl has become … a nightmare for all families. And people tend to forget because they say, ‘not me, not mine.’ But, yes, yours,” Fortner said.
Fortner and fellow leaders hope the event fosters connections among those grieving loved ones lost to drugs and those struggling with addiction.
Early in the event, a man approached Fortner and shared that in the past year, three of his family members had died due to drugs.
“He began to cry, and he said he was so happy to see that we didn’t forget people because these people were loved and are still loved,” Fortner said. “Our hope is that we connect with another family and remind ourselves that our loved ones are not forgotten and that we are going to change what is happening.”
