Ed Ternan
“The best way to reduce fentanyl harms among our youth is for young people to get involved in spreading awareness. The solution is on your hands.”
Who is Ed Ternan?
I have had the opportunity to interview Ed Ternan, the founder of Song For Charlie. Song for Charlie is a non-profit dedicated to increasing awareness of fentanyl-laced pills. His work has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people including my own. Ed and his wife Mary got thrown into the world of illegal drugs, fake pills, and a new kind of chemical drug landscape against their will. In March 2020, their youngest son died after taking what he was told was a Percocet. What it turned out to be was counterfeit pills made of fentanyl.
Charlie, the youngest of their three children, was a 22-year-old senior in college at Santa Clara University. Charlie was living at home with Mary and Ed for a couple of months due to the pandemic. Charlie's parents knew that he was not suffering from any mental health crisis nor was he super freaked out about the pandemic. Ed and Mary saw no evidence of Charlie having substance abuse issues. When Charlie went back up to school he purchased a pill. That pill cost him his life.
Ed believes that it's kids like Charlie, ones with no previous history with substances and who are just experimenting or self-medicating with pills that are most at risk.
Creating Song for Charlie: Ed and Mary created Song for Charlie after Charlie’s death which was around the beginning of the upward trend of fentanyl-laced pill-related deaths. After Charlie’s death, the couple went to Google to find more information about this newly risen crisis. There were a few news stories about teens dying but the information was dispersed throughout parts of the media that takes effort to find. So Ed and Mary began Song for Charlie with the goal of warning young people directly by going where they are–on social media and in schools–to reach them directly with a mission to educate youth on the laced pills crisis. A common phrase in their presentations is: just like there's no real chicken in a nugget, there's no real Xanax on Snapchat.
Next Steps: He believes that incorporating drug education back into the school system is the next step that schools should be taking. Ever since the D.A.R.E. program got bad press, schools and educators abandoned drug education. “We went from just say no to just say nothing,” Ed says. Figuring out how to get it into the school day into the curriculum has now become a necessity as we can't afford to not talk about it anymore. On a more positive note, here's new legislation that was just introduced last month, and it's based on work done at Song For Charlie. Congresswoman Susan Bonamici introduced a bill called the FACTS Act (Fentanyl Awareness for Children and Teens in School) that is focused on funding partnerships between departments of education and departments of public health to figure out how to teach drug education accurately and effectively. It's been co-sponsored by a California Republican and a Democrat from Oregon to introduce the bill together.
I met Ed around a year ago when he came to speak at my school. His and Charlie's story made a great impact on me. It's a pleasure to have had the chance to not only reconnect with him but also have the ability to share his life-changing work on this platform!
For more on Song for Charlie check out this link: https://songforcharlie.org/
