In one decade, over 321,000 kids in the U.S. lost a parent to drug overdose

ByKatie Kindelan  October 4, 2024, 4:02 AM

On a dock off a river in Florida, a group of teenagers sit close to each other, some with their arms wrapped around each other, others with tears in their eyes and others staring down at the water below them.

In their hands, the teens each grip a letter they’ve written to the one thing they all share in common: Addiction.

“I remember feeling unwanted … then my mom started taking pills just to get high,” one teen reads aloud from their letter.

“I hate you addiction … I hate you for taking away my uncle and because you had my dad in your grasp …. I hate you for taking away good personalities, people that could have had a happy life,” says another.

“Your addiction will not define your entire life,” another teen writes in a letter addressed to their parent.

As each letter is read, the teens nod their heads in agreement and share knowing glances at each other, a silent acknowledgement that they too have experienced exactly what is being described.

In some cases, the words written on the page are too much to bear, and the teen simply chooses to crumple the paper around a rock and throw it into the river, their feelings wading out into the water.

“Whatever I write on that letter, I throw it in the water, and it’s releasing that anger because you kind of get angry when you’re writing it and thinking of everything that you’re writing about,” one of the teens, Madi, 14, of Sarasota, Florida, told ABC News. “When you throw it, it’s gone.”

Madi, whose last name, like all the young people in this story, is not being shared for privacy, was just shy of her 11th birthday when her dad, Mike, a beloved dad she describes as always laughing and making other people laugh, died of a drug overdose.

“He went to rehab a lot,” Madi said of her dad’s struggle with addiction, one she’s been told started before she was even born. “He tried really hard to get past it, but it just ended up not working out the way that we all wanted it to.”

On the night he died, Madi, then a fifth-grader, said she woke up on a family trip to Tennessee to the sound of her mom screaming.

“I remember waking up and my mom was just yelling in the living room. I kept hearing her yelling over the phone,” Madi recalled. “I was just kind of in shock. I was numb. I knew what happened, but I didn’t know how to process that.”

In losing a parent to a drug overdose, Madi unknowingly became part of a generation of loss in the United States rivaling extraordinary times in history like World War II and the coronavirus pandemic.

In just one decade, from 2011 to 2021, more than 321,000 children in the U.S. lost a parent to drug overdose, according to a study published in May in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Over half-a-million people died of drug overdoses in that same time period, meaning half of those who died left behind at least one child.

Both the “magnitude” and the “reverberations” of that level of loss are just beginning to be investigated, the study’s authors say.

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