Snaps of sorrow: A father's advocacy after losing son from Snapchat drug deal

Buying drugs online is "nearly as convenient as using one's phone to order a pizza or call an Uber," a report by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser found. Sadly, an increasing number of grieving parents are painfully discovering the truth behind this statement.

Chris Didier's 17-year-old son Zach was an Eagle Scout, talented soccer player, and straight-A student who decided to buy what he thought was a Percocet via Snapchat. Unfortunately, that pill was a deadly dose of fentanyl. In this episode of Grieving Out Loud, Didier shares his son's tragic journey, reflects on what he wishes he had known, and shares invaluable advice for other parents.

Zach's mom has also joined host Angela Kennecke on Grieving Out Loud. You can listen to that episode here.

Learn more about the Emily's Hope Substance Use Prevention Curriculum here.

Transcript

[00:00:00] The Today Show: We're back. Carson joins us. We've got an eye-opening look this morning at just how easy it is to purchase potentially deadly drugs with nothing more than a smartphone and social media app. 

[00:00:10] ABC7: This morning, Snapchat sued by the families of 50 victims of drug overdoses.

[00:00:15] KTLA: FBI is investigating the popular social media platform, Snapchat, and its potential role in Fentanyl overdose 

deaths.

[00:00:31] Angela Kennecke: From social media to gaming and texting, teens spend an average of eight and a half hours on screens every day. That's the equivalent to a 40 hour work week. Many parents question, how on earth can they stay on top of the ever shifting tech trends, all when ensuring their children stay safe? 

[00:00:50] Chris Didier: The social media is a proverbial grocery store of everything under the sun, and they never check Id to see if you're old enough to purchase this from vapes to you know edibles to marijuana to alcohol.

[00:01:05] Angela Kennecke: Today's guest on Breathing out loud is Chris Didier, an Air Force veteran who was recently invited to the White House and the State of the Union address. But these prestigious invitations weren't in recognition of his military service. But instead his impactful advocacy work that unfolded after he faced what too many parents like me have had to deal with.

[00:01:27] Chris Didier: And at first I thought, oh my gosh, kid, he's wearing his pajamas. Uh, he fell asleep at his computer desk playing Minecraft or something like that. But when I got within a few feet to check on him, I sensed a, a void. That still haunts me every day.

[00:01:54] Angela Kennecke: Welcome to Grieving Out Loud. I'm your host, Angela Kenecke. I hope you find today's episode informative on one of the biggest crises facing our nation, the Fentanyl epidemic.

Well, Chris, welcome to Grieving Out Loud. I had a chance to interact with you very briefly in Washington D.C. Over International Overdose Awareness Day when we were all invited to a meeting at the White House. I didn't get a chance to really get to know you there, but I'm so glad that we're able to reconnect here on the podcast.

Me too. 

[00:02:31] Chris Didier: I'm grateful for the opportunity to meet a lot of families and hear a lot of their stories, and I'm profoundly sorry for your loss. I'm impressed and I'm grateful for your work and your awareness. I think your efforts are nothing short, uh, than heroic to do that. Oh, 

[00:02:49] Angela Kennecke: well thank you so much and ditto.

I mean, you're doing a lot of work too, so I think it takes all of us, right? It, it takes everybody and joining hands with one another.

And I joined hands with both Chris and his son, Zach's mom, Laura. I sat down with Laura during a previous podcast episode, and you can find the link in the show notes for episode seventy-three titled Seventeen-Year-Old Makes a Fatal Mistake Via Snapchat. Tell me a little bit about your son and I mean, it was just such a awful, horrible thing that happened with Zach.

[00:03:28] Chris Didier: Well, Zach was a little younger than Emily. I think your daughter was twenty-one, if I remember right. Mm-Hmm. He's a senior and. High school at Whitney High School here in Rockland, California. He is the youngest of three children and absolutely is a beautiful soul. He was successful in all aspects of schooling.

He was a bona fide, straight-A student getting A's in every class. He was enrolled in every AP class he was allowed to take. But on top of that, he was a recognized and respected multi-sport athlete. He loved soccer. He was one of our key players that filled my heart with pride to see him outpace the other guys and, uh, use his skills to do well.

His other sport was track and field. His main event was hurdling Every track meet Zach had participated in. He bested his own time, was very active in scouts, almost finished with his Eagle project, earned the rank of Eagle, and he was the lead role in a high school musical called High School Musical. So a brilliant kid who just was doing well, firing on all eight cylinders.

We were all excited to see what would be the next amazing chapter in his life. And unfortunately, we never. We never got to see that part. 

[00:04:46] Angela Kennecke: Right. Emily was a hurdler too, in trash. She was a gymnast and a hurdler and brilliantly gifted academically. So I think these kids, you know, we talk about these kids and people wanna, I.

Put them into like a certain category. There's so much stigma around losing a child to a substance and whether they were a regular user or whether they were just experimenting, as it sounds like, was Zach's case. You know, it's just so awful to lose such talent in the world. And when I speak to high school students around the country.

I show pictures of young men, and I show Zach's pictures too, because he was only 17

in December of 2020. Zach was in his senior year of high school because of Covid. It wasn't the senior year that he'd been anticipating. He was studying from home. His sports seasons were canceled, and even his driver's license exam was postponed.

[00:05:43] Chris Didier: It was December twenty-six that Zach was with his friends and he had dinner later that night with his girlfriend. 'cause during Christmas itself, uh, you know, kids tend to be with their families and not really have an opportunity to hang out. And on the 26th it was like, Hey, I wanna hang out with my friends, compare what we each got for Christmas and just have fun.

And I said, okay, no problem. And Zach came home about 30 minutes before his curfew. And I was texting him when he was at his girlfriend. He, 'cause I had asked, Hey, let me know when you get to Sydney's house. And he texted me and I, I said, remember the curfew? And he said, no problem. And then he asked, Hey, can we watch a Christmas movie tonight?

And my kids and I,, we always like to watch. As many Christmas music or Christmas movies during Christmas holiday as possible and set a new record every year. And I said, absolutely. You know, just get home before curfew. We can look at watching a movie. And he did. He got home before curfew and my other kids were there.

So we all, three of us watched a movie and he was excited. Okay, we're watching a movie. And I said, yeah, which one? And we picked one and watched it. He sat right next to me on the sofa. It was a little after midnight, the movie was over and we were all ready to go to bed. And Zach's last words were, I love you, dad.

[00:07:09] Angela Kennecke: The next morning Chris noticed his son was sleeping in. More than usual, he decided to check on him, but the site that awaited him is now forever etched in his memory.

[00:07:22] Chris Didier: And I opened Zach's door and found him appearing to be asleep at his computer desk. He had his head resting peacefully on his left arm and his right hand was near his mouse and his computer was still on. And at first I thought, oh my gosh, kid, he's wearing his pajamas. He fell asleep at his computer desk playing Minecraft or something like that.

But when I got within a few feet to check on him. I sensed a, a void that still haunts me every day. I knew something was horribly wrong. I went into panic mode. I. I am a retired military veteran and in my twenty-six years of military experience, we've gone through something called Self-Aid Buddy Care a number of times, and that training immediately kicked in.

So I carefully placed SAC on the ground and started CPR. I knew my other son was nearby and I alerted him and told him to call 9 1 1 and thought I was joking. And I said, no, something's wrong with that column. Column now. And he said, okay. And I heard Sam coming up the stairs and hear him talking to the 9 1 1 operator as he approached the rim and Sam said.

Hey dad, let me help. I got, I got the nine-one-one. We got this. He just kind of kicked in into leadership mode and wanted to help. But when he walked,

when he walked in Zach's room and witnessed me doing CPR and seeing his brother lifeless, I saw Sam going to shock mode and he didn't know what to do. He was paralyzed. I directed Sam to put the phone down as a parent, losing a child, as you know, is at the top of any parent's grief hierarchy. There's no greater pain, but when you witness your other children suffer and you can't do anything.

To protect them from that. It adds a layer of intensity to that, and I struggle every day with that. I can say 

[00:09:50] Angela Kennecke: that I can relate on so many levels to what you're talking about, and I am so sorry for the trauma you've been through. No parent ever expects to walk into their child's room and find them dead at their computer desk.

You know, nobody, nobody, and nobody should have to go through that and. I know I was with my daughter after she died, and that feeling it, it's so traumatizing in that day and going over and over again that day of the death and of what happened and the how other people reacted and the look on other people's faces, and then having to tell my daughter's siblings about what happened.

They were all traumatized. Everybody in the family, of course, is traumatized.

That trauma and heartbreaking tragedy is unfortunately being played out over and over again across the nation as more than 112,000 Americans have died from drug overdoses and fentanyl poisoning in the past year.

[00:10:52] Chris Didier: We made a rather resolute effort to revive Zach, I wanna say maybe 30 minutes. I had lost temporal awareness, but when a decision was made, of course all the responders asked me to leave Zach's room. Uh, the coroners showed up. I think I had around twenty-five agents or so in the house altogether. They were there for about four hours.

They examined Zach and they. In every crevice in his room, they tell me they know every little hiding spot, and then they examine my house. They asked my kids and I to leave the house for a bit. We were outside. That's when Laura got to the house and had to break the horrific news, unspeakable news to her, which crushed her, and it, it just adds to the grief.

When I arrived 

[00:11:40] Laura Didier: at the house, they'd already had pronounced and dead and everybody was. On the driveway when I got to the house and, and Chris, his father, you know, just said, our, our baby is gone. My other two kids helped me up. I was in 

[00:11:55] Chris Didier: the shock of it all, but when the coroner brought us back in the house, I said, Chris, this is a mystery.

We found no evidence in Zach's room, no products, no paraphernalia. Has there been any drug history? And I said, not that I know of. 

[00:12:10] Laura Didier: There was nothing in his room. There was evidence of. Any drug use, there was no injury to his body. They ruled out self harm immediately, and, but they said, we don't know exactly what 

[00:12:20] Chris Didier: it is.

So they first thought, Chris, this is likely an undisclosed health issue. Does Zach have any issues with his heart or anything else because it's probably that or it's fentanyl. The 

[00:12:33] Angela Kennecke: coroner 

[00:12:34] Laura Didier: said, we're gonna suspect fentanyl because we're seeing this trend in our county. They're like, what is that? How can my kid get it?

What are. I knew nothing about counterfeit pills. I knew nothing about any, there was no awareness in our area at all. And so, you know, I said goodbye to my, to my baby. They had, I had to do an autopsy to roll out natural causes because there 

[00:12:56] Angela Kennecke: were 

[00:12:56] Chris Didier: no drugs. And, and that added to our confoundment and confusion because it's like, wait a minute, isn't fentanyl, uh, some kind of pain pill of some sort?

And they said, well, yeah, but. We have very recently had mysterious cases where we would respond to a setting where what appears to be a healthy young person is no longer breathing. And those toxicology reports just started coming in less than two weeks ago. That showed it was fentanyl. So we grieving families, call it the ultimate WTF experience.

What's this Fentanyl you're talking to me about? Why? Where does this come from? Now keep in mind, this was over two and a half years ago. There wasn't back then any awareness campaigns or ads or, or in the news every day about a fake pill or illicit fentanyl causing so much death. We were right at the beginning stages of it.

So at first I thought. Gosh, did Zach have a heart issue? But when it finally came to the surface and we were finally able to have conversations with the friend he was with and some of the other soccer teams, they were saying something about a pill, but there was very little they were able to share, and that's what made us wonder.

Maybe there was somehow it is fentanyl, and our biggest break was from his girlfriend who shared that. She and Zach shared the same passcode and we got access to his phone. And when we made that announcement to our district attorney's office, they had their lead counter narcotics Task force investigator get to Zach's phone and it took him 90 seconds.

To find a dealer on Snapchat and that dealer had just messaged Zach for a follow on transaction and so they call it a live fish and they, you know, that eventually led to this gentleman's arrest.

[00:14:57] Angela Kennecke: The toxicology report further confirmed the presence of a deadly dose of Fentanyl in Zach's system. Subsequent investigation revealed he bought what he thought was a prescription pill through Snapchat while shopping at the mall.

Have you lost a loved one to overdose or fentanyl poisoning? I'd like to invite you to share their story on our new Emily's Hope Memorial website called More Than Just a Number. They were our children, siblings, cousins, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, and friends. So much more than just a number. You can submit a memorial today on more than just a number.org.

[00:15:43] Chris Didier: In December of 2020, our mall, which is I believe the second largest mall in Northern California, had announced that they were gonna start opening up the mall. And Zach was excited to know that that was happening. And I remember talking to him about it and he said that, dad, this is really cool because we haven't really been able to live like high school kids like we thought we would.

This is like our last chance to just be normal kids. And you know, 'cause once graduation happens, we're all going our own way. And up until now, this hasn't been the way we envisioned being high school seniors, which made sense. So he was excited about it. But what none of us ever expected or understood is that this was an opportunity for drug dealers to also go to the mall and, uh, attempt to make contact for an exchange.

And that's what happened. Zach was at our mall with his friends. They were all connecting through Snapchat because there was a geo tag type of mapping feature where you can see your friends. When they leave their house and get to the mall, if they're in Macy's or if they're at the food court or wherever, you can kind of track each other down and and just hang out.

Well, the drug dealers are also doing that, and what we learned is the dealer was there advertising. What we understood is he put a short video. And geotagged it to that, that area in the mall where everyone in the mall would see it, everyone on Snapchat, that is, it was a short video saying, here's what I've got today.

I've got all these products, paraphernalia. It's all legit. It's all safe. I've got you. Come, hit me up. Later in that day, the dealer approached Zach and his friend that was caught on surveillance video. And the interaction lasted less than a minute, and Zach and his friend purchased what they were told was a Percocet pill.

That's what led up to Zach coming across a path of what we call a fake pill. A pill that looks legitimate, that has the same shape, size, and color markings of what would be advertised as a legitimate pharmaceutical grade product, but in fact, it's fake. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us tonight. I'm Brian Stern.

[00:18:01] Angela Kennecke: And I'm Susan Shaw. New tonight, the DEA says, fake prescription pills are flooding our streets. As journalists have reported, these counterfeit pills are causing a surge in deaths across America. The CDC issued an alert when the death toll doubled. DEA lab tests also revealed that a staggering seven out of 10 seized pills contain a deadly dose of fentanyl.

But when Zach died in 2020. Very few people even knew about the danger. 

[00:18:29] Chris Didier: Everyone was shocked and everyone was asking, what is a fake pill? Why would a fake pill be made? Why would dealers do that? I 

[00:18:38] Angela Kennecke: believe that children are very comfortable taking pills. We really live in a pill society where there's a pill for everything, and if they think they're getting the real thing, they don't know that all of the pills that they would buy on Snapchat or wherever are 

[00:18:51] Chris Didier: fake.

That's exactly right. Pills are far more common today than they were when I was in middle school and in high school. A lot of these teens see their friends take prescription pills, their cousins, their siblings. Our dog, Jake has prescriptions for seizure management. So when we live in a world normalized with prescription pills and teens think, well wait a minute, everyone has a prescription, or just about everyone has a prescription, it's safe in the mind.

Well, they don't make one pill that can kill. Well, that's true if it's a legitimate pill, but. One, there's deception in a fake pill or a counterfeit pills out there, and the youth don't know about that. And there's accessibility through these devices, these cell phones that the ZGN'ers have learned to make a reliable and trusted resource for them to solve their own problems, including be their own pharmacists and just get their own prescription.

They think it's a, it's a great solution when in fact it's the most dangerous. Method when Zach's friend talked to us about that exchange with the dealer, uh, they really didn't think of it as a high threat thing. This dealer was just a young kid himself. Uh, he was only 21 years old. He looked harmless, you know, non-threatening, and that their transaction was more innocuous.

So I could see that mindset thinking, well, hey, we've got a, a legitimate prescription pill that everyone takes. We wanna stay away from the, what he said, heavy stuff like cocaine and heroin. Not realizing the product in that pill, the acting agent in that pill is up to 50 times stronger than heroin. They didn't understand that?

[00:20:41] Angela Kennecke: No. No. They had no idea. And his friend who was with him, did he also overdose or what happened with his friend? 

[00:20:50] Chris Didier: He took his pill and admitted that he had no effect. He thought it was a death. 

Wow. 

[00:20:57] Angela Kennecke: Wow. So it's just, it is Russian roulette. You know which pill is going to kill, and most of them, the majority are, and a few aren't.

Right? Because the measurements that the dealers do are not exact by any means.

Not only are drug manufacturers changing how they produce illicit drugs, but traffickers are always searching for new tactics to sell the drugs. A few months ago, I sat down with DEA special agent in charge, Justin King. We 

[00:21:27] Special Agent Justin King: also see people becoming creative with how they advertise and connect with customers where it is, and so it continues to be something that is unique and these models get passed around from one city state to another.

[00:21:43] Angela Kennecke: So they might start with like a social media platform, but then. People are onto that maybe. And so then they switch to something else. Like what? Like what's been something 

[00:21:51] Special Agent Justin King: they go to an app like, you know, they can go to Snapchat or they can go to Signal or WhatsApp or they the next app. Or the next app, right?

The next one. And sometimes these are proprietary. Only a few people have 'em. We see Emojis being used as, you know, instead of some people saying a slang word, now they have an emoji for what something looks like and it. Sometimes we'll be geographically centered. Sometimes it'll be somewhere else that you see that our administrator likes to say.

The drug deal that used to be done in the back alley is now being done on a cell 

[00:22:22] Angela Kennecke: phone. Snapchat in particular, is facing criticism for its connection to drug trafficking leading to a lawsuit from the families of more than 60 young adults who died from fentanyl poisonings at Emily's. Hope we've been following this story.

You can check out the latest news headlines involving Fentanyl, our nation's drug crisis and substance use disorder by visiting the headlines section of our website at emilyshope.charity. Meanwhile, Chris is working to convince social media companies to make changes to prevent drug trafficking on their platforms.

[00:23:01] Chris Didier: I was part of a conversation with Snapchat executives as well and other big tech companies to say, guys, here's what happened to our family. Here's what we are seeing. Your platform is being exploited. What can you do about it? And I kind of broke it down in two pieces. One is to get the word out. Use your platform to educate.

And the other thing is we need to police that platform. We need to not allow people, uh, with nefarious intent to openly advertise and market a deadly product. In the seventy-five assemblies I did in the last 12 months, I usually ask students, uh, are you seeing dealers on social media? What's your favorite most common social media app?

Are you seeing menus? Are you seeing ads about the dangers of a fake pill? And I hear their responses. I, I think it's great that there's some ads out there, but that's barely scratching the surface, so. To answer your question, my position with social media is I absolutely don't, don't trust them. They've known for years that there's nefarious actors that are on their platform, and yes, there's a freedom of expression and all of that.

However, when actors are going on their platforms intentionally trying to deceive. And peddle something harmful that needs to be controlled. There needs to be appropriate safeguards, but because of the competitive nature of commercial businesses, like social media giants, having very stringent algorithms that restrict, uh, expression of selling or advertising, things may impact their bottom line in terms of profit.

So I fully believe the best way is to go to D.C and have them update current legislation that would require appropriate and meaningful safeguards on social media platforms because I really believe that Ford Motor Company and General Motors really wouldn't invest a lot of time and money on seatbelts, airbags and anti-lock brakes unless the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration.

Requires that you can't sell your car in our country unless you have these safety features. So if there are safeguards that are reasonable and appropriate in the world world, there needs to be enforcement of similar safeguards in the cyber world, 

[00:25:25] Angela Kennecke: right? Lip service isn't enough saying, oh, we're gonna sponsor Fentanyl Awareness Day, which all of those giant media companies do.

I mean, their name is right on, you know, the sponsorship for Fentanyl Awareness Day, or just putting out the occasional ad. Isn't enough, first of all to educate everybody and it's also not stopping the problem. Where it begins, which are the bad actors who are on there selling their products. 

[00:25:50] Chris Didier: Absolutely. I really feel where it would make the most profound difference is updating Section two 30 C of the Communications Decency Act.

That statute was codified into law in 1996 when the internet was just starting out way before. Facebook ever came into existence and certainly decades before Snapchat came about. It's willfully out of date. And if you go to social media and just ask on social media, Hey, I need prescription pills, or I need heroin, or cocaine or whatnot, you're gonna be, uh, able to connect with a dealer and it's too easy.

So we, we need to have safeguards that require social media. One to retain records of transactions for at least a year, in my humble opinion. And, and to respond to subpoenas for, uh, drug-related death for the purposes of an investigation. And then also to implement meaningful and measurable improvement with their algorithms to police their site.

And it needs to be something that. It's one thing to tell a restaurant, Hey, you can't store meat on the counter overnight. You actually have to go inspect it that their meat is in, in a refrigerator and they have a log of the temperatures of how they stored that produce or that meat in their refrigerator.

So social media needs to be subject of having inspections from a third party or outside agency to to show that, yes, here's our algorithms and here's how we're policing our site. Do 

[00:27:26] Angela Kennecke: you feel that when we met in Washington D.C over International Overdose Awareness Day and we met with some top officials with the CDC, with the Office of National Drug Control Policy, we, you know, heard from some top officials.

Do you feel like that makes any difference at all in this battle that we're waging to end these fentanyl and other overdose 

[00:27:48] Chris Didier: deaths? I absolutely do, although I look at it as a small little rudder. Attached to a huge ship, you can make that rudder move, but that ship's not gonna change direction right away.

It, it takes time. But I've been engaged with as just like you, with the director of ONDCP as well as CDC director, Mandy, Cohen. I'm fortunate that it's like you grateful to have had some conversations about this with a second gentleman, Doug Emhoff. Last week I had the privilege to meet with the U.S attorney General Merrick Garland.

I. I'm in talks with them this week to continue these conversations and just before this podcast, I was talking to my Congressman, Kevin Kiley about this, and they need to understand this is a much bigger problem than the drug problem of the past. This is so much more intense and more severe. 

[00:28:45] Angela Kennecke: Yeah, it bothers me because there's so many things politicians waste their time on, right?

Like issues that aren't even issues. And here we have something that's killing our young people at unprecedented rates and. Nobody is doing enough, in my opinion. What's being done today? There's some stuff being done, but it's not enough, and it's also multifaceted. You know, there's not just one simple, easy solution.

Yes, we need to police our borders. Yes, we need to cut off, you know, the cartels and all of the money that feeds into that, right? And we need to regulate. Social media, and we need to educate our children at a very young age about the dangers of taking something from anybody. So I think that all of those things combined, but we need to do it at a much higher level than what we're doing

at Emily's Hope. We've developed a substance use prevention curriculum to educate students about the risks of substance use while empowering them to make healthy choices. By focusing on age-appropriate evidence-based content, we hope to foster open communication between children, parents, and educators.

For more details about the curriculum, visit EmilysHopeEDU.org. You'll also find a link in the show notes of this podcast. Listeners, I wanna take a moment to recommend Sagely speaking with Mary Bono, a podcast that offers insightful conversations on a range of important topics. Mary, a former congresswoman and my guest on Grieving out loud hosts this thought-provoking show.

It features expert interviews on social issues, politics, and personal development. Join the enlightening discussions on Sagely Speaking with Mary Bono available on your favorite podcast platform. I. How have you coped with your grief and what has helped most? Because I, one thing I wanna point out to you is that we have a very large national audience for this podcast, and many people have just lost someone, you know, especially to overdose or fentanyl poisoning, you know, within the last few months or the last year, what can you tell me that you've learned about grief or from 

[00:30:58] Chris Didier: grief?

That's a really good question. I believe that grief is a unique journey for every one of us. We all grief differently, and that's okay. I've learned that there's no timeline and there's no right order on grief. It's a unique thing. I've learned that even though you may be surrounded by family and friends, you, you really do feel alone.

Uh, I think it was Anna Quinlan who spoke it well in a book called Option B, written by Sheryl Sandberg saying grief is like a whisper to the world. Yet a clamor within because people who surround you, your friends and your family who you know, who want to show you love and support tend to wanna stay away from the topic of what happened, such as I.

I'm sorry that Zach died. I'm sorry that you, uh, saw something about Zach's friend getting into college and now that's a trigger for you. They tend to wanna avoid it in fear of unintentionally bringing up that loss, but what the world needs to understand is for those who aren't in the club that you and I are in, is that no one's reminding us of that loss.

It's always there and the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning is the loss of my son, and it's the last thing I think of every night before I fall asleep with my head on my pillow. It's always there. It's like a clamor within, it's like a noise that's constantly going. So how to cope with it.

I cope with it very differently now than the first few weeks. I figured how to survive those first few weeks, uh, was not easy, but never wish this on anyone to ever go through. For me, what I have found is, uh, therapy is an excellent resource therapy with a professional healthcare advisor, but right now I'm feeling like I'm throwing myself into the advocacy world.

And as a military, as a tactician, I kind of compartmentalize things and I've formed the belief that the overall strategic goal is to get the message out to that. Teenager with a cell phone in their hand to say, Hey guys, the landscape is not the same as it was for your parents, and it's so unfair right now.

The landscape is more like a minefield. And so here's the danger, here's the deception that goes along with this danger. So how do we get that message to the kids? Because those are kind of my goals, and when I find an opportunity to advocate. Whether I'm talking to someone in DC or when I go to the schools, personally, I have found the biggest reward and fulfillment when I get to the schools and talk to students, and when we connect with these kids, it's the part that fills my bucket.

It's enhancing our son's legacy to wanna help other people because I feel like when I look in their eyes, there's sincere gestures of gratitude and appreciation is strongly felt, and I feel like those connections are incredibly meaningful and. Although it's hard to talk about what happened just like it was a few minutes ago on this podcast, I, I feel energized and I feel like this is good.

And I'm seeing signs from Zach when I do these, whether it's a form of a Snoopy or Woodstock or Air Force One shoes, uh, I see it more and I, I really believe he's pleased that we're helping his generation get educated. 

[00:34:45] Angela Kennecke: I sure hope so. I've spoken to 16,000 middle to high school students and I know exactly what you mean.

Also, it's very difficult to relive the day that my daughter died, just as this difficult for you to tell Zach's story, but I always say if just one person makes a different choice, if just one of those kids is alive because they heard Emily's story. And they heard about the dangers of fentanyl, then it'll be worth it.

So thank you for all the work you're doing. I really appreciate it, Chris, and I really appreciate you joining me on the podcast. 

[00:35:18] Chris Didier: I thank you for your advocacy. I like to express how Lisa Nichols expresses trauma is going to hit just about everybody as certain as the sun is going to set. And admittedly, tragedy is unevenly dealt, but when it happens.

One thing that is consistent is that we all have a choice and what we do to respond to that tragedy. We could choose to use our pain to build a fortress, to hide from the world or be a fuel to change it, and you're changing it when you go and advocate. You're changing it here with this podcast. You're changing it with keeping the lines of communication open.

To enhance a collaborative effort to help prevent these losses from ever occurring again. So I'm thankful for, for all of your work, and I appreciate it. Well, 

[00:36:13] Angela Kennecke: right back at you. Thank you for everything that you're doing in Zach's name and honor, so thank you. You 

[00:36:19] Chris Didier: bet. Take care

[00:36:25] Angela Kennecke: and thank you for tuning into this episode. If you found it helpful. Please consider leaving a positive review and of course, sharing it with your friends and family. Your support truly does help our mission of raising awareness, breaking down the stigma surrounding substance use disorder, and ensuring more people get the help they need.

Join us next week for a conversation with a remarkable woman. Who went through the unimaginable losing her son to fentanyl almost a decade ago when hardly anyone even knew about this dangerous drug. 

[00:36:55] Lauri Badura: We're losing our generation, 

you know, 300 and some people, and it's like no one cares. 

I don't understand why it's not an emergency.

[00:37:04] Angela Kennecke: Laurie Badura, who's been invited to the State of the Union and the White House three times to talk about America's Fentanyl crisis, isn't satisfied with the response. She'll share what she thinks needs to happen. And get this. She's now certified to guide others through the tough journey of grief. She shares real-life tips on how to navigate that process in a way that allows you to grow stronger even in the face of heartbreak.

That's all happening next week on Grieving Out Loud. Thanks again for spending your valuable time with us. Until next time, wishing you faith, hope, and courage. This podcast is produced by Casey Wandenberg King and Anna Fa.