PORT ANGELES — The inaugural Overdose Awareness Vigil, a candlelit gathering that traveled on foot across Port Angeles’ main streets Monday night, drew some 180 people together to express deep sorrow and hope.
Hard drugs — heroin, methamphetamine and opioids — have too many young people in their grip here, organizer Angie Gooding said at the start of the vigil.
Gooding, a leader of the Port Angeles Citizen Action Network, aka PA CAN, spoke in the Civic Field parking lot, a semicircle of women, men, teens, toddlers and babes in arms around her.
“I’m an eighth-grade teacher. I see it in my classroom,” she said of drugs’ effect on youngsters.
At this vigil, “we’re here to rethink how we think about overdose and addiction. And we’re here to remember.”
Monday’s vigil, held on International Overdose Awareness Day, was an event Clallam County jail nurse Julia Keegan has wanted to make happen for years. With the help of PA CAN, it did at last.
The event also had moral support from the city, Deputy Mayor Pat Downie told the crowd.
Marveling at the “extraordinary turnout,” he thanked PA CAN for its efforts to unite the community, and then handed the microphone back to Gooding.
It was time to march. Reaching for her 12-year-old daughter Gloria’s hand, Gooding set out northward. She led the scores of people up the sidewalks of Race, Front, Washington and Georgiana streets to Georgiana Park, where they stood together again.
Volunteers from Oxford House, a network of group houses for recovering addicts, served as guides, shepherding groups through the stoplights.
Once the crowd was reassembled, Joe DeScala, pastor of Port Angeles’ Mended church (www.wearemended.org), spoke.
“It’s quite overwhelming,” he began, “to see everybody gathered tonight for one reason.”
He said he’d lost a dear friend to drug abuse — but “tonight, I want to focus on life.
“Where do we want to put our energy? What attitude do we want to carry through life?”
When someone dies as a result of drug addiction, DeScala sees family members and close friends “ignited into action,” determined to prevent another loss.
“That’s how PA CAN started . . . someone will choose to find the good” and reach out to people struggling with alcohol and other drugs.
Port Angeles is “a town that’s crying out for change,” DeScala said.
It’s the largest city on the North Olympic Peninsula, where the two counties have opioid-related death rates higher than the state average. During the reporting period of 2012 through 2014, the state’s rate was 8.4 per 100,000 in population. Jefferson County’s death rate was 9.7 per 100,000, while Clallam’s was 13.4.
Also during the same period, opioid-related hospitalizations numbered 559 in Clallam County and 131 in Jefferson County.
Next, Gwen Hullette, another PA CAN member, invited people to come forward to say a few words about a loved one lost to drug addiction. Instead, a procession of men and women stepped up to simply give the names of those they had lost.
Thirty-two names were said.
Carey “Mel” Melmed, a community health nurse, offered another message: Let’s also remember the emergency medical workers who have saved people, along with those who have survived addiction, gotten clean and begun new lives.
“There are some good outcomes,” she said, “and I look forward to making a difference — with you all.”
Martin Shaughnessy, a volunteer with The Answer for Youth (TAFY), a Port Angeles resource center for homeless and at-risk young people, believes PA CAN’s efforts just might make a difference.
Many who’ve been sucked into using drugs “feel so alone, so disconnected,” he said.
But when he’s told TAFY’s kids about PA CAN, they’re impressed and enthused. The group demonstrates, after all, that people care.
PA CAN’s next meeting is, like the others before it, open to all concerned residents. It will be held at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 9 in the Board of Commissioners’ meeting room at the Clallam County Courthouse, 223 E. Fourth St.
The group is working on three main projects: providing mentors for the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Olympic Peninsula, assisting Oxford House in its work for recovering addicts and developing a drug education program in local schools.
With Monday’s walk complete, Keegan beamed.
“This is hitting it out of the park,” she said, adding that another Overdose Awareness Vigil will be held Aug. 31, 2016.
Meantime, she’ll be working with PA CAN. Information about the group can be found at www.RevitalizePortAngeles.org and on the PA CAN Facebook page.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
