A middle-class family man's journey into homelessness and heroin

Tom Wolf embodied the quintessential image of a middle-class family man—married, with two children, living in the suburbs, and holding a steady job as a child support officer. However, his life took a drastic turn after a seemingly routine foot surgery led to a prescription for painkillers.

Listen as we delve into Tom's journey from a happy, hardworking American to homeless, living on the streets and consumed by the relentless pursuit of heroin.

We hope today's episode not only informs you about our nation's opioid epidemic and how literally anyone can struggle with substance use disorder but also gives you hope that there is help available. Maybe you, too, can be the one to make a difference in someone's life.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Angela Kennecke: Tom Wolfe was really just your typical middle class guy, married with two kids, living in the suburbs, and employed as a child support officer. 

[00:00:15] Tom Wolf: I used to actually work with moms who wanted child support, and I used to go get that money for them. 

[00:00:21] Angela Kennecke: But Tom's life took an unexpected turn after a doctor prescribed him painkillers following a foot surgery.

[00:00:28] Tom Wolf: I'd be out on the street and I'd be using and I'd start thinking about my wife and kids and I'd feel even more guilty because now I'm all the way out on the street and shame like how did I get here like 10 years ago I was going to Europe on vacation with my wife. 

[00:00:41] Angela Kennecke: In this episode of Grieving Out Loud hear how Tom went from a happily married hardworking American to homelessness.

I'm Angela Kennecke. This is Grieving Out Loud. We hope today's episode not only informs you about our nation's opioid epidemic and how literally anyone can struggle with substance use disorder, but it also gives you hope that there is help available. And maybe you, too, can be the one to make a difference in someone's life.

Tom, welcome to Grieving Out Loud. I am so grateful to meet you. I've heard a little bit about your advocacy work and your story, and I wanted our listeners to hear about your life and what led you to this point where we're actually here talking today. for having me. 

[00:01:42] Tom Wolf: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me.

And I am grateful for a lot of different reasons to be able to be sitting here speaking with you today, as opposed to being dead or still being out on the street. So I'll just preface this by saying I'm a regular guy. I'm a regular middle class guy that's married with two kids. I own a house in a suburb right outside of San Francisco.

[00:02:06] Angela Kennecke: In 2015, Tom had to undergo surgery on his foot to repair an old injury. The procedure involved surgeons breaking his foot to reset it. 

[00:02:17] Tom Wolf: And after the surgery, they sent me home with a 30 day supply of 10 mg oxycodone for the paint. And I didn't use those pills as directed, I guess you could say. I started abusing them.

And that one pill every 4 to 6 hours wasn't cutting it. So I, uh, went to two pills. That got me a little, feeling a little better, and I still remember the day that I tried three pills all at once, 30 milligrams, and that's kind of when I hit this threshold, I crossed this threshold into this euphoria, I guess you could say, where all my problems melted away.

My pain was gone. Any marital problems or financial problems that I was having were gone. You know, I had two small kids at the time, they were six and four, so dealing with them wasn't as big of an issue, because I was feeling good. I was basically high. I was really high. And I continued to use three pills at a time.

And of course, you know, this 30 day supply, which is supposed to run a whole month, was starting to run out after about 10 days. And so I tried to taper myself off of those pills.

[00:03:26] Angela Kennecke: When Tom attempted to detox by himself, he experienced severe withdrawal symptoms. He struggled both physically and mentally. 

[00:03:37] Tom Wolf: I felt feverish. I had anxiety. I had stomach issues. Like my muscles were tensing up, spasming, things like that. And the biggest thing is that I had this obsession where I was obsessing about the drug all the time.

All's I could think about is how can I get some more? How can I keep this feeling going? So I called my doctor. I tried to get more and of course they were like, uh, it's only been 10 days. What's wrong? You know, what do you why are you asking for more pills?

[00:04:07] Angela Kennecke: Tom knew that his doctors would not prescribe more oxycodone instead of going through withdrawal which he knew would be painful Tom made a decision that would impact him for the rest of his life 

[00:04:21] Tom Wolf: I went on Google and I googled up where can I buy pills on the street in San Francisco? And it took me to YouTube to all these different references to a block in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco called Pill Hill.

And so I got into my minivan and drove down there with a boot on my foot. And sure enough, there were five or six people selling a variety of different opioids on the street that I could purchase from 30 milligram Roxycodones to Opanas, Percocets, Vicodins, all the way up to 80 milligram Oxycodone pills.

And mind you, again, this is in 2015 when you could actually buy those pills on the street. You can no longer purchase those pills on the street. Everything now is fentanyl. 

[00:05:01] Angela Kennecke: In 2023 alone, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than 79 million fake pills containing fentanyl, a staggering 33 percent increase from the year before.

And listen to this. DEA lab testing revealed that 7 out of 10 of those pills contained a potentially deadly dose of fentanyl. Here's DEA Special Agent Justin King on a previous episode of Grieving Out Loud, shedding light on why illicit drug manufacturers are increasingly using fentanyl. 

[00:05:35] DEA Special Agent Justin King: The synthetic drug does not have a growing season.

It does not have a product. They don't have to have the manual labor. To do all that and, you know, I've worked in Afghanistan in the poppy fields and eradicating that and, and it's a very tedious process to produce heroin from that once you get that going, it's the same thing with marijuana growing. So anything synthetic, there's a higher profit margin and plus they make an unlimited supply of it.

And you just did a building. To make it in a building, but they a lot of times will make it in the middle of a jungle or they'll make it, you know, somewhere in a rural area because it takes a lot of laboratories to make the products. 

[00:06:14] Angela Kennecke: Meanwhile, Tom is thankful that the fentanyl epidemic really began after he was in recovery.

With so many fake prescription pills now containing fentanyl, Wolfe realizes that the likelihood of him dying would have been very high. 

[00:06:30] Tom Wolf: When I was at my peak, I was taking 560 milligrams of oxycodone every single day. Just to stay well and the pills on the street were 30 a pill at the time So I was buying seven 80 milligram pills a day and at 30 a pill that's two hundred and ten dollars a day So you can imagine over the course of seven days Over the course of a month over the course of a year how much money I spent I spent well over a hundred thousand dollars On bills.

Well, I basically bankrupted my family bankrupted myself and my family and You know, my wife, I'll just say this, that denial and codependency are really big issues for people who are family members or loved ones of those who are experiencing addiction. Okay. 

[00:07:11] Angela Kennecke: I would say that's a hundred percent. Like with my daughter, we knew something was wrong, but I never could have imagined that she was using heroin.

I thought it was marijuana and Xanax, you know, legal Xanax pills that she was getting illegally and we were planning intervention, but I think a lot of it was, I just never wanted to believe that about my child. Right. And I. It's just, it's really hard on families. So you're married with little kids. Are you taking care of those kids?

Are you going to work? What is happening when you're taking all the pills? 

[00:07:42] Tom Wolf: So I'm doing my best right under the circumstances, which meant that I was doing a terrible job of being a dad, being a husband, being a provider for my family. I was still holding down my job for a period of time. I was what they call a functioning addict, I guess, but I wasn't functioning well.

You know, my job performance had slipped. I was nodding out or passing out at my desk at work. So there were already signs that were happening, right? But again, like you said, you know, my wife and other people around me knew me as a pretty stand up guy in the community. I worked as a child support officer for the city and county of San Francisco.

So I used to actually work with moms who wanted child support. And I used to go. Get that money for them. So, you know, I was trying to serve the community in that way, but it was also a very high stress job that was very thankless job many times as well. And oftentimes I was the bad guy, especially when I'm trying to get someone to pay their child support that doesn't want to pay.

[00:08:38] Angela Kennecke: Despite continuing to work the high stress job, Tom was spending more than he was making on drugs. Soon, he could no longer hide the fact from his family. 

[00:08:49] Tom Wolf: We came home one day, and there was a notice that was posted on our front door, and it was a foreclosure notice, that our house was in foreclosure, and it's because, without telling her, I had stopped paying the mortgage for six months.

I was taking all that money, and I was buying drugs with it, and hiding all of that from her, hiding all the debt from her, intercepting the mail at home, all those things to try to hide the secret that wasn't really a secret. For more UN videos visit www. un. org There was an elephant in the room, but nobody wanted to talk about it because, again, denial is a very powerful thing, and I sure as heck didn't want to say anything about it because, you know, I had my addiction that I had to support.

That was, that became paramount. It became first. 

[00:09:29] Angela Kennecke: I mean, I think this is what is hard for people who don't suffer from substance use disorder to understand, is that what becomes most important to the hijacked brain, because your brain was hijacked by these chemicals, is the drug, and it becomes more important than your loved ones, than your children, than shelter, food, anything, right?

[00:09:48] Tom Wolf: That's right. And so, you know, addiction, it's a disease of the mind. It's been well documented. It's a disease of the mind in which addiction actually implants itself in your basic brain functions of your survival instinct. And of course, every time that I would prioritize it, I felt more and more guilt, more and more shame, stigmatizing myself.

Wasn't that anyone was stigmatizing me. I was stigmatizing myself. I was beating myself up because I felt bad that I couldn't be there for my kids. I felt bad that when it was time to read a bedtime story to my daughter, I was passing out. and not able to do it. And they would ask me questions like, Dad, Daddy, why, why are you sleeping all the time?

[00:10:26] Angela Kennecke: I know my daughter was ashamed because I found a writing in her journal after she died addressing shame. So I think most people who are using, I mean, they don't want to be using, they know it's not right. A part of them knows, right? 

[00:10:38] Tom Wolf: That's right. 

[00:10:39] Angela Kennecke: And so there's so much self shame that they don't even need anybody else to shame them.

[00:10:44] Tom Wolf: And the irony is, is that, you know, I wanted to stop. But I couldn't stop. I couldn't. I can't stress that enough to anyone out there that's never experienced addiction. Imagine trying to stop something that, if you do, your body has a visceral reaction to actually stopping it. 

[00:10:59] Angela Kennecke: What about psychologically? I mean, I've heard about the withdrawal, like the psychological break that people have.

It's not just a physical thing. 

[00:11:06] Tom Wolf: Yeah, you rationalize in your mind. Okay, you rationalize this addiction in your mind, and you find ways to justify it in your head, and you convince yourself that you can manage it and manage everything else all at the same time. And then when you do try to stop, right, there's this great fear of that dope sickness, that withdrawal that you're going to feel.

And also, all that time you spent justifying your addiction to yourself comes into play, and it kind of tricks you into thinking that you can continue to do this. And that's just the disease. It's really the only disease out there that actually wants you to make it worse. Right? When you get cancer or diabetes, it's not telling you, Hey, go drink another Coca Cola to pump up your blood sugar.

But actually addiction is telling you, yes, go back out to the street and buy some more dope.

[00:11:58] Angela Kennecke: In addition to the psychological challenges, Tom's financial troubles continued to get worse. So your house is being foreclosed upon. What happened then? 

[00:12:08] Tom Wolf: Well, my wife cut me off from all the money, and we started to scramble to try to figure out ways to save our house. I cashed out my 401k, my retirement, to pay all the back pay on the house to get it caught up.

So, I threw away my retirement that I had built up working for the government. 

[00:12:26] Angela Kennecke: Despite the financial problems, Tom continued to abuse drugs. He sank deeper into his addiction with each passing day. 

[00:12:35] Tom Wolf: I still remember I went down to the tenderloin again and I only had 30 in my pocket. That's only enough to buy one pill.

I needed seven to get me through the day. So I made the decision to walk down one block to the guys that are selling heroin. And I bought two dime bags of heroin for 20 bucks. I'm diabetic, so I have hypodermic needles at home. So I actually came back home, went back on YouTube and learned how to inject drugs into my arm and I became an intravenous drug user at that point.

[00:13:06] Angela Kennecke: Was there ever any point in that process where you thought, I never thought I would do something like this? Or was it just sort of something you just went through with the motions because you needed the drug so badly? 

[00:13:16] Tom Wolf: That's a great question. And yes, the answer is, of course, yes. So I'm a Gen Xer. So I grew up in the 80s and the taboo drug that nobody ever crossed into was heroin.

[00:13:26] Angela Kennecke: Right. I think the same way. I'm the same age as you. I mean, I think the same way. 

[00:13:29] Tom Wolf: Right. So it's like, you know, you, you might've experimented in high school at a party, maybe had a little cocaine or maybe did a little acid or weed for sure. Right. But never, ever, ever were you to ever, you know, heroin was for the guys that are down.

You know, in the back alley somewhere that 

[00:13:46] Angela Kennecke: we're just lost, right? I think that's why I couldn't believe my daughter would ever touch it. Right. Because I had those notions the same as you. That's 

[00:13:53] Tom Wolf: right. So it was the taboo drug, right? So I definitely found myself kind of incredulously like, man, I can't believe I'm actually using heroin, but I can't help myself either.

So I started injecting drugs and that's when my life really spiraled out of control. I literally. Stopped going to work. I just quit my job. My 80, 000 a year government job. I just quit. I didn't even tell my wife that I quit. I just stopped going.

[00:14:22] Angela Kennecke: He didn't have a job, but Tom continued to use heroin daily. And this may surprise you. His wife stuck by his side, even though she didn't trust him. 

[00:14:34] Tom Wolf: And the levy broke one night in December of 2017. My wife used to sleep clutching her purse because I would always try to steal money out of her purse to go buy drugs, because now I didn't have a job, so I really didn't have any money, and whatever little money we had, my wife was in control of it.

And one night I was successfully able to get the purse out from around her arms. And she had about 300 in her purse that her mom had given her for groceries. I took it and I took the van, the minivan, and I drove down to the Tenderloin and I didn't come home for 11 days. I went on an 11 day bender out in the Tenderloin.

It was on the 11th day that the police finally came knocking on the window of my car and I had drug paraphernalia all over my car. I had needles, straws, foil, pipes. I was filthy. I hadn't showered in 11 days. And they said, are you Tom Wolfe? And I said, yes. And he said, well, your wife filed a missing persons report.

You need to go home. So they didn't arrest me, even though I had all this paraphernalia everywhere. They actually just told me to go home. So I started my car and I drove home. I was petrified of what was going to happen. And I walk in the house and my wife's standing there with a packed bag saying, I got you a bed at a treatment center.

You can either go to treatment or you need to get out. I was in withdrawal at that very moment and I wasn't ready to go to treatment. So I chose addiction. I left. I chose addiction over my own wife and kids and I walked out of the house. And that was the day I became homeless and I lived on the streets of the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco for the next six months, doing what I needed to do to survive and maintain my addiction.

And when I say survive, that means maintain my addiction, not necessarily stay alive or eat. It's actually maintain my addiction because like so many people in the struggle right now, they don't want to die. But for many of us that lost hope along the way, we don't care if we do. 

[00:16:31] Angela Kennecke: Right. I think my daughter was at that point.

She made some comments that really startled me, which, like I said, we were planning this intervention and unfortunately, fentanyl got to her before we did, but she made a couple of comments that I can see that and I heard testimony from people who were using heroin in court who were testifying against some dealers that were bringing it into our community.

And they really said they didn't care if they lived or died. They just cared more about going through withdrawal and just more about getting the drug. It wasn't about living or dying. 

[00:17:01] Tom Wolf: That's right. It's exactly right. And you know, I'd be out on the street and I'd be using and I'd start thinking about my wife and kids and I'd feel even more guilty because now I'm all the way out on the street and shame.

Like, how did I get here? Like 10 years ago, I was going to Europe on vacation with my wife and now I'm a homeless guy on the street, addicted to heroin, willing to steal, willing to hold drugs for the dealers to be a decoy to get drugs as payment, willing to do all these things. Yeah. That I would have never otherwise done had I not been addicted to drugs.

[00:17:33] Angela Kennecke: You're star I mean, it's so sad, but also like millions of other people, I have interviewed so many people who, they themselves or their children or a loved one, started with a prescription opioid. It just starts with a prescription opioid and it leads to this huge, full blown addiction that is out of control.

In fact, the CDC says the opioid epidemic began with doctors over prescribing opioids starting in the 1990s. The issue has been highlighted in several recent TV series, including Painkiller and Dope Sick. During a previous Grieving Out Loud episode, I sat down with the real life doctor who inspired a character in Dope Sick, played by actor Michael Heaton.

[00:18:17] Dr. Stephen Loyd: Within three years, I was using 500 milligrams of Oxy's a day. And so if you think about that, I went from One half of a Vicodin five milligrams to 500. So that's a hundred pills a day. That accelerated pretty quick. I got there in about two and a half years and you know, I wasn't living underneath the bridge.

I was seeing your friends and family and relatives in the hospital. I'm a hospitalist, internal medicine physician. So I'm working in the ICU medical step down units, you know, taking care of patients every day. 

[00:18:46] Angela Kennecke: Addiction among these high stress fields in the medical profession is really not unusual, whether people are turning to alcohol or pills, whether it's a doctor or a nurse.

It's not unusual. 

[00:18:58] Dr. Stephen Loyd: It's not. It's actually higher than the general population. The lifetime prevalence is about 18 to 20 percent, which as you think about it, it's about 1 in 5, and point prevalence is around 2 percent. So just think about that in the community you live in, where every hundred medical providers out there.

You have, two of them are an active addiction, right, Nat? 

[00:19:19] Angela Kennecke: You are certainly not alone. 

[00:19:20] Tom Wolf: I know. And that's what I found in recovery is that, wow, I'm not alone. So I ended up getting in trouble with the law. I started getting arrested out on the street. I actually got arrested a total of six times in a three month period when I was on the street.

And every time they would put me in jail, I would stay in jail for like two or three days. And then they would just release me with no bail back out to the street. Okay. 

[00:19:41] Angela Kennecke: And no treatment and no putting you anywhere.

During his time on the streets, Tom says he saw unspeakable things, things he has never been able to share with his family. 

[00:19:56] Tom Wolf: It was real trauma, you know, waking up next to someone who died of overdose. So waking up and looking over and seeing someone's blue foot sticking out from a blanket because rigor mortis had already set in.

Or another friend of mine who I gave, I had two jackets, I gave him one jacket because it was cold, and when I woke up in the morning he was lying prostrate on the ground in my jacket, dead from drug overdose. Those types of traumas, and then just the daily trauma of not knowing what's going to happen to you.

When you're living on the street and then wondering what's happening with your family at the same time of what type of Situation you put them in all of those things are very traumatic events and then getting arrested is very traumatic and going to jail is very Tremendous. 

[00:20:38] Angela Kennecke: Thankfully Tom says something good finally happened to him.

Although it may not be what you'd expect He was arrested for the sixth time 

[00:20:48] Tom Wolf: They basically said we can't let you out anymore because you have caught too many cases too close together I had Four felonies and 12 misdemeanors pending against me at that point, and I went to jail for three months, and while I was in jail, they had medication assisted treatment.

Since I was going to be there for a while, they gave me suboxone, or buprenorphine, to help with the withdrawals on a five day taper, so I took it for five days. That was it. I've never touched a drug or a drink since then. 

[00:21:14] Angela Kennecke: So Suboxone saved your life, or Buprenorphine saved your life. 

[00:21:17] Tom Wolf: It's a combination of accountability and the Suboxone, followed up by residential drug treatment that saved my life.

So it's not any one thing that I can point to. It was being taken off the streets and being held accountable, combined with medication assisted treatment, which is harm reduction, combined with going to a pretty strict abstinence based drug program, which is the program I needed for me. to help reset my life and start building a foundation and recovery.

All of those three things contributed together to help turn my life around. So when people ask me in my advocacy, I tell them, I said, Well, you know, it's funny because I had all three things touch me. I had accountability touch me with the police and going to jail. I had harm reduction touch me with medication assisted treatment.

I had the Salvation Army touch me with residential treatment, which was kind of tough and hardcore, and there was a certain religious element to it. And it took all of those three things together, and now I'm sitting here talking to you, I'm nearly six years clean and sober. 

[00:22:16] Angela Kennecke: Oh, congratulations. And you were able to repair things with your family.

[00:22:21] Tom Wolf: I was. I was able to repair things over time. So this is another piece. After completing treatment, I had to go live in a sober living home. My wife was not ready for me to come home. She had put a restraining order on me at that point, so I couldn't even really talk to her. So I was, like, literally, like, passing messages through my dad to my wife to try to start the conversation going again.

And she gave me an opportunity after I had completed treatment to have the restraining order removed. And she said, but you're going to have to do the work. So you're going to have to go to the court. You're going to have to file the motion. You're going to have to get me served. I'm not going to do any of it.

You have to show me your actions. Your words mean nothing anymore. And I did. I did all of those things, which are things I could have never dreamed of doing in my addiction. But in recovery, you have some clarity. You're not distracted or overtaken by addiction and this desire to be free.

I actually went and did all of that and she showed up to court and they took the restraining order off and then after that I agreed to go to counseling with her and we started going to a marriage family therapist and I got slowly reintroduced to my children through this really wonderful, wonderful therapist that we found and I'm a huge proponent of mental health treatment and mental health in general.

There is no shame. There's no stigma in talking to a counselor or talking to a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Learn or therapist. Your mind is part of your body, so you need to take care of that too. And that was medicine for my mind and my soul, my heart, and hers as well.

[00:23:55] Angela Kennecke: After two years of counseling, Tom's family says they were ready for him to move back home. His children are now 17 and 15. So they're right at that age, you know, where they could be experimenting with substances. Oh yeah. Addiction runs in my family and I thought that would protect Emily from addiction.

ever using or trying drugs, but I think she identified with someone in our family who was using drugs and therefore tried them, which you would think if it had kind of ruined everything, why would a kid do that? But so can you protect your own children through your experiences? I'm saying we all learn things ourselves the hard way, right?

Can you protect your own kids? 

[00:24:35] Tom Wolf: That's a such a great question. I also come from a family of alcoholics, so I believe you that it's genetic. Addiction is genetic, and I had the gene. It just manifested with opioids instead of with alcohol, right? You know, the answer to your question is, yes, you can, but it requires a lot of work on your part.

So what I tell people now is, Especially parents, you need to educate yourself about drugs, not just say no or drugs are bad. You actually have to learn about what's out there, what's in the drug supply, how many people are dying, what they're dying of, why they're dying. You need to really educate yourself so that you can have an honest conversation with your kids, whether that be about vaping marijuana all the way up to taking something that you think is Xanax but it's actually a fentanyl pill, or something that's Percocet that actually has fentanyl in it.

So you need to, as a parent, take the time to educate yourself so that you can pass on some primary prevention techniques and ideas to your kids. And then, once they're educated, you have to have a certain degree of faith that your kids are going to make good choices. Just like with anything else that you teach your kids when they're little, to make good choices.

And so that's what I tell my kids. My kids are, it's a unique situation with me, because they witnessed my addiction. It's very fresh in their mind still, and we talk about it often, we talk about drugs often. I'm a recovery advocate, so I'm always talking about recovery in my life. It's what I do for my work, so they're always hearing about it.

So I think with them, maybe I feel more confident that they'll make good choices, but at the same time, they're going to be in parties and situations where there's going to be other drugs around, and I just tell them, if you don't know where that drug came from, just don't do it. It's not worth it, because right now, six out of every ten Of those street drugs that you see are contaminated with fentanyl.

[00:26:22] Angela Kennecke: I can't understand. Of course, I live this day in and day out, this advocacy work, as you do. And I can't understand why everybody in this country isn't alarmed about it and trying to do something about it. And I just can't understand why we're not mobilizing as a country. I talk about this all the time. I say jelly rolls stole my line because when I talk to kids, I talk about a plane crashing out of the sky every day carrying, well, if you add on alcohol related deaths, it's close to 800 people a day dying.

What would we be doing in this country if a plane was crashing out of the sky every single day? We'd be mobilizing, right? We'd be grounding all the jets. We'd be doing everything we could to solve this problem. Yet, While we do have segments of people working on this issue, we don't have everyone on board.

And we also have such a cultural root of drug use. This one thing that's really bothered me, Emily, you know, she was obsessed with watching Breaking Bad that to me, glamorized drug use and drug manufacturing. And I just think it's everywhere. It's everywhere in our culture. And it's killing mostly young people every single day, hundreds of them, but we're not doing anything.

We're doing something, but not enough. 

[00:27:35] Tom Wolf: That's right. Not doing enough. So there's a few things. So I totally agree with you that it's a cultural thing. We've been celebrating drugs in this country. There's a drug culture that exists in this country that's been in place really since the 1960s. It really gained steam in the 1980s when we were growing up.

And now it's just kind of part of the vernacular. You see it in music. You see it in TV. where they kind of just downplay drugs. You see it in certain factions of the harm reduction movement. I don't want to make an umbrella statement where they kind of downplay drug use. It's really not a big deal. You can manage it.

It should be a regulated supply, all these things in an effort to reduce stigma around people who use drugs, which is good, but that comes with another set of unintended consequences. In which that you get more unsuspecting people that are just kind of like, Oh, well, you know, I heard somewhere. It's really not a big deal.

So let me try it. And we have done so little to educate people on the advent of fentanyl. It's almost like fentanyl caught this country off guard, right? I know that in San Francisco in 2019, when I was really starting to talk about this publicly, you know, members of our city council, of our board of supervisors tell me there's no fentanyl crisis.

And I'm sitting here like, are you kidding? Like, literally, like, All the dealers are switching over from heroin to fentanyl, like, before our very eyes. And now you've got all these people all of a sudden starting to die. And, of course, there's a crisis on our hands. And now, of course, that's really the number one issue in San Francisco, politically.

And I think that's part of the problem, really, is that it's become politicized. You've got the Republicans saying one thing, the Democrats saying the other, and 

[00:29:06] Angela Kennecke: Right, instead of it being a health crisis, right? Instead of it just being, this is a health crisis we need to solve, even as COVID became politicized, right?

So, COVID 19, a health crisis. everything becomes politicized. 

[00:29:19] Tom Wolf: Right. And it's a health crisis. And you know, the irony is, is that it's also going to require within that health crisis that you have a lot of different parts working together. So yes, you're going to need some law enforcement and interdiction in all of this.

It has to be part of the solution. But yes, you have to increase your access to drug treatment for people and educate people about drug use and make more things available, make as many options and resources available to people. 

[00:29:43] Angela Kennecke: In my area where I live, resources are so limited, especially public resources or resources for people who can't pay for it.

And I think that just treatment should just be available. We've got so many nursing homes in our area that closed up. We could turn those nursing homes into recovery treatment centers instead of sending people to jail or prison. And in my area, they're not getting treatment in prison. So I mean, maybe that's starting to change a tiny bit, but it certainly is slow coming.

So I just think, why aren't we making all of this more available to people? And it's just part of the infrastructure and part of where we put our public funds. For 

[00:30:22] Tom Wolf: Well, it's kind of like the issue of homelessness, right? So, the example that I use is I built a pretty big platform on social media talking about what's happening in San Francisco and in the western United States.

If I was just talking about crime, I'd probably have two or three hundred thousand followers. But because I talk about homelessness and drugs, I have twenty percent of that. And that's because people aren't interested in talking about homelessness and drugs because it's ugly, it's dark, it's dirty. It speaks to our failure in society to actually provide enough housing for people and provide enough drug treatment.

And I think it makes us take an unhappy look in the mirror at ourselves so people don't, don't want to do it until it shows up on their doorstep. 

[00:31:03] Angela Kennecke: Right. People feel helpless too. I think they just feel like, well, what am I supposed to do about that problem? 

[00:31:08] Tom Wolf: That's right. I agree. I think that's one of the biggest things too, is that people do feel helpless.

And then there's a bunch of people that want to help and now those people are fighting with each other. 

[00:31:17] Angela Kennecke: That's true. So, like, how do you feel about some of these approaches? I know they've used harm reduction sites or safe use sites in California. 

[00:31:26] Tom Wolf: What they did, like, for example, in Oregon, they made it so that you can possess two and a half grams of drugs and nothing will happen to you if you get caught.

That's 25 fentanyl bills. That's a drug dealer. They decriminalized drug dealing and didn't even realize, I don't think, that they were doing that. And now Oregon's overdose rate has grown by like 1, 300 percent since 2019, the fastest growing state in the nation for overdose deaths. It doesn't leave the country yet, that's still West Virginia, but it's catching up faster than anyone else.

And so you have to start looking at those policies that are in place. Safe consumption sites, supervised consumption sites, overdose prevention centers, they keep changing the names on those. Those are illegal. They're against federal law in the United States because of the National Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

If that changes, if the federal government decides to act and change that, then so be it. But what's happening is you're starting to see states bucking federal law and just opening those sites anyway. New York City has two. Rhode Island is preparing to open one. San Francisco had one 2022, but they closed it because it wasn't working out.

And the proponents of those sites will argue passionately. sometimes even more than passionately, almost violently, about the need for these sites, saying that no one dies inside those sites and they help save lives. I think on a one on one basis, yes, they can save lives. You know, look, I used to be an intravenous drug user.

I get it. I would rather use inside in a safe place than in a doorway or an alley, right? I understand. So I'm kind of actually even neutral to that idea. If you step back and look in the aggregate at cities like Vancouver in Canada, British Columbia, the province of British Columbia has over 40 supervised consumption sites throughout its province.

40. Yet, last year, they broke all their records for drug overdose death. Now, of course, the proponents of those sites will argue that, Oh, you know, well, think of how many more people would have died had we not had these sites. And I'm sitting here saying, well, you know, that's speculative. There's actually no evidence to support that one way or the other.

And I'm not saying that you shouldn't have that, but that coupled with decriminalization coupled with a movement towards legalization is not the solution. If we're going to have those sites, we need to think about, well, if we're going to have these sites where people can use inside, then we have to change our laws to make it zero tolerance for people to be able to use on the street because you actually have a place to go.

So if you get caught using on the street, then you face consequences and there's accountability that comes with that in the form of maybe drug court and being remanded to drug treatment as opposed to actually going inside and using one of those sites. But no, they don't want that. There has to be all or nothing where they take off all the guardrails around accountability.

You just look at the data and you kind of see what's happening.

[00:34:15] Angela Kennecke: At Emily's Hope, we believe one of the main ways to prevent drug deaths is to teach children about the danger at a young age. We've created a K 5 substance use prevention curriculum with age appropriate and evidence based content. Next school year, we plan to introduce middle and high school lessons.

You can check out the details at emilyshopedu. org. We've posted a link in the show notes of this podcast. We teach kids about how drugs affect the brain and body and we teach them about the dangerous substances that are out there and we teach them about their emotions and pressures and things like that.

We talk about those things too. So we're trying to cover the whole child and really, I think prevention is key. But I know we're not going to prevent everybody from trying or using these substances. 

[00:35:07] Tom Wolf: And I, I love that kind of work and I love the idea of primary prevention at a very young age for kids. I think that that's one of the keys to solving this crisis because that's the root of a lot of this starting from there.

And then there's people like me that are out on the street in the front lines talking to people and understanding that. There are about 40 million people in the United States right now struggling with a substance use disorder and or alcoholism. And what do we do about those folks, right? And there's a disproportionate amount of people that are experiencing homelessness that also are struggling with untreated mental illness and or substance use disorder.

[00:35:44] Angela Kennecke: Whether someone struggling with substance use disorder is homeless, living on the streets, or a high paid surgeon, in today's world, you have to find help as soon as possible. We have a list of resources on our website, emilyshope. charity. You have a short window of time to get people help, and we know that.

[00:36:04] Tom Wolf: I totally agree, and I think that's the big thing that's changed with the arrival of fentanyl. If you were using heroin, there are people that could live for 30 years and be using heroin on the regular. Fentanyl doesn't give you that. Right now, based on just my experience of being on the street, and I've talked to thousands of people on the street in San Francisco and L.

A., The average lifespan once you get addicted to fentanyl is about two years. We can make all these other arguments about, Oh, if we just had a safe supply of drugs and all these things that you hear folks talking about, it doesn't matter. Once you're on fentanyl, there's 

[00:36:38] Angela Kennecke: no going back to heroin. And you know that because you graduated to fentanyl, right?

I did. It's amazing that you're here, really. 

[00:36:46] Tom Wolf: It is amazing. It's a miracle, right? And finding recovery. And leaving my addiction behind gave me a chance to actually reset my life. I can basically be honest. I can be honest with you. I can be honest with my wife. I can be honest with my kids. Most of all, I can be honest with myself about who I am.

It helped me learn to like myself again. I'm still working on loving myself, but it taught me how to like myself again, where I can look myself in the mirror and not feel shame of the things that I did. Because I learned in recovery, how to own. My mistakes and do my best to make amends and make living amends, which I'm still doing to this day to my wife and my kids and my my elderly parents are still with me.

Thank God I learned about faith and faith can mean a lot of different things. It doesn't have to mean Jesus or whatever. It's believing in a power greater than yourself. And that can mean different things to different people. And I have no judgment for anyone how they choose to view that. But for me, that was a big difference maker because I believe that addiction Does eat into your soul.

I think it does. I think it's a spiritual sickness as well. And so turning my will and my care over to God as I understand him was really a deal breaker for me. I needed that. I needed to find that faith and that hope and that belief. There's a power greater than me that's looking out for me and that I didn't have to do everything.

I could sit back and just let things happen and I would be okay. And once I started figuring those things out and then started practicing those things in my life, and then coming home and talking to my kids about it, fortunately for my wife, she went to a lot of her own 12 step support meetings while I was gone to help her cope.

It was easy because she was familiar with some of the principles that I was talking already. And we as a family decided to adopt and live by those principles in recovery where we're honest, we live in a world of gratitude. We're not rich, but we're not poor. We have enough. And so we're grateful for what we have as opposed to what we don't have.

My kids are thriving now. Both of my kids are straight A students. And you know, my daughter is just so proud of her. Because in seventh grade, she was flunking out of school. Right? Sure. 

[00:38:59] Angela Kennecke: Yeah, because she had the trouble at home. And I think you can give a lot of hope to other people and families. that recovery is possible.

Unfortunately, like you said, we're dealing with a very deadly drug that there isn't really time to let that whole thing play out. But you do give hope to people that recovery is truly attainable. 

[00:39:23] Tom Wolf: Well, I truly believe that even if you're addicted to fentanyl, there's still an opportunity for you to recover.

Human beings are extremely resilient. Now, what's complicated this is fentanyl is, like I said, it's killing people so quickly. That like you said, they're not getting that opportunity, and that's what's really tragic, and that's why we have to act quickly, and we're not. There's federal things happening, and state things happening, and local things happening around fentanyl.

They're not happening fast enough, and they're not funded well enough, and we can't get it out of each other's way because we're fighting about the best approach and how to address all of this. And while all of that's happening, you have all these people dying on the street and you have a bunch of unsuspecting people dying as well.

We must do what we can, not only to educate the public and support public health approaches, but we need to hold those that are selling it to our kids and killing them accountable. 

[00:40:13] Angela Kennecke: Yeah, you know, we talk about the cartels on this podcast all the time, but also I remind people about 80 percent of the drugs laced with fentanyl, are being sold to Americans by other Americans.

That may be a little different in California, but not in the Midwest and not in other parts of the country. So we're doing this to ourselves in many cases. And so you cannot blame an outside country. You can blame them for what they're manufacturing and shipping into this country, but you can't blame them for always who's dealing it and who's receiving 

[00:40:44] Tom Wolf: it.

I don't know your political affiliations or anything, but I will say this, that the Republican Party has made a mistake. And that they've conflated the illegal immigration issue, which is one issue, with the issue of smuggling drugs in the United States, which is a separate issue, being that the majority of fentanyl is coming through legal ports of entry.

[00:41:02] Angela Kennecke: I preach this every day, you know, when people talk about the wall, just because I've done all this research, it doesn't have anything to do with my political affiliation. I've talked to the DEA, heads of the DEA, and other people who are on the front lines of this. And they tell me how it's coming into this country, and there is an immigration problem and a drug smuggling and fentanyl problem, however Two separate 

[00:41:22] Tom Wolf: things.

[00:41:22] Angela Kennecke: Yes, two separate things. And that's what people can't seem to understand. There are occasions where, you know, someone who's trying to get into this country is smuggling drugs, but this is a business. This is an operation that the cartels are running. They have sophisticated means of getting it into this country.

Right. 

[00:41:39] Tom Wolf: And the cartel is big time here in San Francisco. We have a thousand organized drug dealers on the streets of San Francisco. Most of them are from Honduras because the Sinaloa cartel has a pipeline. that brings a bunch of young men and women up here from Honduras to sell drugs on the street. But we also have to do what we can to reduce the demand for those drugs.

Because now there's so many drugs here that it's starting to drive the demand. And that's super worrisome. That's true. But you know, I do go out to the streets of San Francisco. It's five bucks for a tenth of a gram of fentanyl right now. Five dollars. I was paying 30 bucks a pill, right? Just in 2015 for real Oxycontin, right?

Oxycodone. Now it's five to $10 a pop. And in Portland, Oregon, fentanyl pills are a dollar 50 on the street. Right? So yeah, in an eight month period in San Francisco, the police see 70 kilos of fentanyl off our streets, 70 kilos, 200 pounds. Insane. It's insane the amount of drugs that's here. So we do have to do our part to educate and work on prevention, but we do have to do something about that.

Like it's not sustainable to have 200 pounds, which is probably 10% of what's actually out there. in San Francisco, be flowing through our city. It's bad for the city's health. 

[00:42:51] Angela Kennecke: Well, I just want to thank you for all the work that you're doing on your part, and all the advocacy work, and for so openly sharing your story, because I think it does give other people hope.

And if you haven't lost someone yet to this scourge, it gives people hope that recovery is possible, no matter who you are or what you've been using. I've 

[00:43:10] Tom Wolf: lost 15 friends to drug overdose, people that I knew that are out on the street. I can't imagine losing a family member or a daughter. I'm so sorry that that's happened to you.

And it just speaks to the need for us to do so much more around this crisis from every angle. 

[00:43:29] Angela Kennecke: I'm with you. Thank you so much. 

[00:43:31] Tom Wolf: Thank you. My pleasure.

[00:43:39] Angela Kennecke: If you'd like to get involved in the fight against fentanyl through Emily's Hope, check out our website. We've posted a link in the show notes of this podcast. Thank you for taking the time to tune in today. If you're enjoying this podcast. Please consider giving us a five star review. Until next time, wishing you faith, hope, and courage.

This podcast is produced by Casey Wannenberg King and Anna Fye.