Student and parents team up in effort to raise fake pill awareness, curb epidemic
Charlie Ternan had a job interview and wanted to cool the back pain that had flared on a long drive up the California coast. It was spring 2020, the COVID pandemic had just begun, and graduation was weeks away at Santa Clara University.
Ternan took a Percocet that a friend bought from his online Xanax source.
"It was a single pill," said Bridget Lattimer, Ternan's girlfriend and current first-year Master's of Public Health student in Population, Mental Health and Wellbeing at the Colorado School of Public Health. "That's just the way fentanyl works - such a little amount is lethal."
Alone at home, Ternan took the pill around 3 p.m. and died from fentanyl poisoning within the hour. With an exciting chapter ahead, a promising life was extinguished by an opioid overdose crisis that has claimed over 500,000 lives in the United States since 1999. Colorado has seen an almost 70% increase in fatal fentanyl overdoses during the pandemic, pushing the statewide death toll over 1,800.
Lattimer and Ternan's parents, Ed and Mary, have turned Charlie's tragedy into a positive. They started Song for Charlie, a nonprofit that is raising awareness about the dangers of "fentapills" - fake prescription pills laced with the synthetic opioid - and the opioid epidemic, which has hit the 13- to 24-year age group especially hard.
"It's a very deceiving industry now, and it's causing a lot of young people to die," Lattimer said of the burgeoning counterfeit prescription pill market.
Lattimer works in the Office of Student Health Promotion and participated in the recent National Fentanyl Awareness Day and Narcan training event at CU Anschutz. Event organizers included the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health at the Colorado School of Public Health. Narcan trainings will continue to be held regularly at CU Anschutz.
In the following Q&A, Lattimer discusses the fentanyl epidemic, how the Song for Charlie nonprofit is working to save lives, and what she'd like people to remember about Charlie. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
