Admiral Sandy Winnefeld — Losing a 737 Every Day

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective, and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill g. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. So in spite of my upbeat music and general demeanor, we're talking about a pretty serious issue today. We all deal with people. Whether you lead 10 or 10,000 or 100,000, we got to deal with human beings and addiction and the opioid crisis and mental health and a whole slew of related issues that people grapple with. So that's a topic, a pretty serious topic of our show today, but we want to take through the whole range of it. Hey everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach, host of our Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with something to do with the world of growth and leadership for your company. Getting the team right and dialing in your strategy, executing better, getting the cash dialed in and then all the leadership to take there. And the leadership and the people are by far the hardest part. A simple, differentiated strategy is a whole lot easier than getting people to buy into it and corralling your team. So that is really the subject of our show today. And we deal with this again and again. I'm joined now again a returning guest, a man of extraordinary accomplishment. Retired Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, who was retired as vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of staff, commanded the USS Enterprise carrier group, couple NATO commands, 6 Fleet, NORAD, et cetera, et cetera, Top gun instructor. Like, I'm really glad to have you back. Thank you.

Well, Bill, thank you for having me and thank you for taking on this really important topic that is not always popular on shows like this. And I think it's courageous for you to to meet it head on. So thanks.

Well, I know it was in your story and it wasn't in our last thing and I think we've all been touched in ways just very recently. My daughter lost one of her high school friends and it's all over the news all over the world. Connor Angus, a famous actor, celebrity from the show Euphoria, who ironically played a drug dealer overdosed on Fentanyl and just once again crushed her. Right. My daughter dealing with yet another friend. And she's worked with people like Juice World and others who have been taken accidentally or in stupidity or whatever, whatever, but, like, you know, shouldn't have passed. And I know you lost a son, so let's talk about that.

Sure. We. We did lose a son, Jonathan, who was the youngest of two sons growing up in a military family. We moved around quite a lot in the process. I think at one point he was in five different school districts in seven years. So imagine as a little kid showing up in a new lunchroom every day, particularly as you get into your teenage years, and that's harder and harder. So unlike his older brother, who's a very successful young man, Jonathan developed anxiety and depression in, you know, say, the seventh, eighth grade time frame. And he was misdiagnosed as being ADHD and was prescribed Adderall, which is probably exactly the wrong thing to give somebody who's got anxiety. And so he started to steal liquor out of our liquor cabinet, not because he was a party kid, but because he was coming down at night off of the Adderall. And that one thing led to another. He started smoking weed and got into Xanax and a few other things and had a couple of incidents. And we decided at one point, when he had a particularly serious incident, you know, wrecked his car, that kind of thing, that we could no longer keep him safe and that we needed to get him into some kind of treatment, which after a nail biting week of trying to find the right place because he was right on the cusp of his 18th birthday, we finally got him into a really high quality treatment program, which, by the way, is very expensive. And we were forking over the cash out of our own savings to do this. Jonathan was very, very successful in that treatment regime. He was in inpatient treatment for 15 months because that's how long it takes the brain literally to heal. Now, at the time, we did not know that he had any kind of an opioid issue. We were never popped positive in any of the drug tests that he was taking. It was all alcohol and weed, we thought. So we figured that eventually he would relapse or something like that, but we didn't realize the actual danger that he was in. Went through 15 months. It takes that long for the synapses in your brain, the opioid receptors to Reset themselves. Towards the end of his treatment, we decided that in order to come back into society that we would send him to college. He got into Denver University. We were very proud. He was very, very proud of himself in the last few months that he was in treatment, that he got his emergency medical technician qualification, was super proud of that because it was sort of not in the family line of business. You know, it wasn't a military thing. It was like that and a couple of interesting anecdotes associated with this transition out of treatment. Every first year freshman at Denver University is required to read a book and then write an essay. And the subject of the essay that year was who has had the most profound influence on your life? And of course, as his dad, I was hoping, like, hey, it's going to be dad, right? Well, it turns out he tells this amazing, compelling, beautifully written tale of when he's going through his EMT qualification and he finds himself on, on the, the floor of a bathroom at McDonald's in New Haven, Connecticut, literally trying to revive a man who was going through an opioid overdose. And, and, and he expresses how he thinks, you know, I wonder if this man's going to make it through the night. I wonder if he has a family, you know, how they're going to feel if they lose him and that kind of thing. And, and I decided right then and there that I was going to dedicate my life to helping people like this.

Yeah.

Literally five days after he, he began his college career, he died of an overdose himself because he relapsed. And what a lot of people don't realize is that the most dangerous time for somebody in that situation is actually coming out of treatment when your opioid receptors are reset, but you're very vulnerable to a relapse. And if you take the same amount of the drug that you needed before to overcome your, you know, sort of desensitized opioid receptors, you very quickly over overwhelm your resensitized opioid receptors, and, and that's how you die. And that's what happened to our son. So. Worst phone call I ever got. I was giving a lecture at Harvard. My phone rang and went out into the hall and answered it, only to discover that my son had passed away that morning in Denver. Very tough, obviously, for any parent to lose a child.

It's a gut. Yeah, I can't even imagine, like, I, I, I even worrying about my kids in danger is just, like, unimaginable. Somebody asked recently their kids were starting to get ready to go to college. And they, and they knew our kids were older and they said, so at what point is it when they go to college or later that you stop worrying about them? And I just, I started laughing uncontrollably. I'm like, you never stop working until you die.

Well, and the scary thought is we thought we were very attentive, learning parents, and at no step of this journey did we have the knowledge that we needed, that we really needed in order to cope with it correctly. We didn't know that he was on opioids. HIPAA kept the treatment centers from telling us that he had an opioid issue. And then even if we had known that, we didn't know the physiology of addiction. We didn't know the physiology of recovering from addiction and the psychology and the mental health issues. We just, we just didn't know, as hard as we worked to try to understand it. And it's one of those gut wrenching things where if I only knew then what I know now, having studied this in detail, we'd still have our son with us, no question.

Yeah, yeah. And see, that's the thing. I think all these things are so interrelated, right? So there's a mental health, there's an addiction that develops, then there's the no wiggle room of the current fentanyl crisis. Right. It used to be that, you know, if you just stayed away from certain things, then you're probably okay. Like, you know, alcohol took my dad's life, but it was a very slow decline, not like one of those sudden things. And, and this is the thing today that there's, there's just not the same wiggle room. I one another family friend had been to a party and he, like, needed to come down. He got. So he thought, well, I'll just take one of these Xanaxes and I'm going to go to sleep and it's going to be great and I'm going to have a busy day tomorrow. And he was upbeat and looking forward to stuff. He was a light user of some things, not heavily. He took something and he never woke up.

Yeah.

So years of beautiful young life snuffed like your boy.

Precisely. And it's changed over time, as you know from your own experience that alcoholism is a slow, steady decline into deep addiction. In the initial phases of the opioid crisis, it was sort of like, well, you can get addicted in five days using prescription pain pills, so be careful there. Now, with very deadly fentanyl making its way into not only counterfeit pills, but also street drugs like cocaine, methamphetamines, you don't have to be addicted. In fact, many people are dying who are not addicted. You can die on your first try. And that's one of the messages. Yeah, one of the messages we try to get out to people which happened to your friend and it's happened to so many people who were light users and somebody laced it with fentanyl and it's over.

Interrelated, deeply interwoven societal issues. We're going to talk about. What do we do about this? And you've got a whole thing about that. But I think it's useful to get the reality of it and how pervasive it is all around. One of the guys in my wedding party, a highly successful young man, accomplished, affluent, quite brilliant, found dead on his stairs at a young age. Right. An accidental overdose. And so. Overdose, suicide, Accidental overdose. Like it's all interrelated, interwoven. And, and that is. And a couple days ago we were with a friend of ours is an accomplished scaling up CEO and he's now the mayor of a major city in Canada, the mayor of Vancouver. And we were looking at, and going through the bad neighborhoods with him and talking about their programs they're trying to do to interrupt the homelessness. And they've got put all kinds of people in shelters and cleaned up the streets on a more regular basis. And he's like, there's this core group who has zero interest in things and they're struggling with addiction issues and they do not want to be anywhere. And we ended up talking like it's all around us in our communities. And then it's also with the people that, you know, like my friend who was highly successful and, and yet died alone on his stairs. You know, it doesn't have to be just street people. Right.

At a major college, like, you're so right, Bill. This crisis does not care whether you're rich or poor, male or female, black or dumb. Yeah. It just, it, it does not discriminate there. It can happen to anybody. And again, especially now, it can happen to somebody who's just doing light drugs or on their first try or can happen to somebody who's deeply addicted. It just doesn't discriminate. And it's, it's all across. And we're losing, as your show title says, 7:37 every single day. Another way of looking and it is a nine every 10 days. And if this, you know,108,000 people a year dying from drug overdoses were to happen On a single day, it would be the most incredible bad event that's ever happened to our country. But it's just sort of a drip, drip, drip, you know.

Single. Yeah.

And then of course. And public enemy number one is stigma too. Right? Which. Oh, these people are just dirt bags.

They're bad people.

Like. Yeah, they're not.

Yeah, they're not. They're not. They're not. My friend wasn't. My daughter's friends weren't there. And, and among them, there are some people who have a lot of dysfunction. But, but it's the whole range. Educated, uneducated, rich, poor, black, white. Like it's, it's everybody, everywhere, it's all around us. And I think it's great to connect. Like we know these stats. That's a staggering thing to wrap your head around. And it's great to turn 100,000 people into the 737 every day because we visualize that and we make that real. And then you start to think about it. It's a little bit like how a politician will talk about Joe the Plumber. Right. They try to take a, a profound phenomenon, take it out of numbers and connect it with people. Which is why I think it's important to think about our children and the people that we, that are friends and who are affected by this. It's not okay.

No, it's not. At. At. It's just devastating. You can't lose a son or a daughter to anything, whether it's a disease or drowning or an accident or an overdose without just, you know, you never recover from that. You learn how to deal with it better, which my wife and I have done. But you never recover from it. It's always there in the background.

One of my ancestors that my grandfather wrote about crossed the country with a covered wagon and he lost five children along the way. And one was born on the journey and survived and is the ancestor then that I'm from. And that's a beautiful story, except you think about like, who we can't even deal with losing one close person, especially a child. More than anything else, it's unimaginable and it's not normal for us anymore and it shouldn't be that way. Like, this is something that we should deal with together.

Yeah. We are constantly running into people who will say, we're really glad you told your story. My brother this, my son this, or my cousin or my neighbor. But it's always sort of off to the side in private. People are still self stigmatized over this thing, which is One of the reasons why my wife and I did what we did in starting a non profit and we figured, gosh, if we speak up and, and talk about what happened to us and try to do something about it, then maybe that'll be an example where you can fight, fight through stigma and not be, not be ashamed of anything. As hard as that is. It's just, let's go do something, let's fix this.

Yeah. So talk to us about what you started and what you're doing and take us through that.

Yeah. So I would, I would say about five days after this tragedy happened to us, my wife and I were sitting on the couch and we just sort of said, you know, with the network of friends that we have, with the problem solving ability that we have, I would feel very, very badly if we didn't try to step forward and do something about this. Now, we're not the only people who have lost a loved one who have started a nonprofit. Many of them are local, doing great work, you know, getting Narcan training and supply to local people. We wanted to do something broadly nationally. So we, we put together a non profit fairly quickly and we called it. Yeah, you know how you do your best thinking when you're running sometimes. I was trying to think, hey, what are we going to name this thing? And stop the addiction fatality epidemic came to mind, which is obviously the acronym safe. So we are SAFE Project. And we, we quick, we, we very quickly came up with at least the theory of what the nation needs to do to at least get this crisis under control. And there were six things. And then we decided, okay, how can we influence those six things? We can't do it all, but how can we influence those six things? So the six things were public awareness, which is essentially making sure that men and women across this country, parents, grandparents, friends, brothers, sisters, understand the true nature of this as a disease and that we can fight public enemy number one of this crisis, which is of course stigma. Because if we can beat stigma, then we can get the resources in place and the understanding in place. Much of what happened with the AIDS epidemic, by the way. So that was the first one is public awareness. The second was full spectrum prevention. Making sure that the most credible voices are talking to the most vulnerable people in terms of trying to at least inject the kind of behaviors that will protect people from this crisis. And then another line is, you know, prescription medicine and medical response, making sure that doctors and dentists are prescribing responsibly and that we have the right medical Responses in place to handle this crisis. The fourth one was law enforcement and justice. You know, we will not arrest our way out of this crisis. I think the FBI numbers show that 85% of the people who are arrested for a drug crime are users, not necessarily dealers. So there's work to be done and, you know, getting at the right people there. And also those who are incarcerated are particularly vulnerable to this and trying to get more programs into that system and then treatment and recovery, there just aren't enough resources available. And as we found out in this crazy week when we were trying to get our son into treatment, it's very hard to find the right place, a credible place that you can afford, takes your insurance, that does mental health, and, you know, and so we're taking that on and also the recovery journey. And then last was family outreach and support, because as I mentioned earlier, if I only knew then what I knew now, we'd still have our son. And there are parents out there who are desperately trying to find out, you know, what can I do for my son or daughter to get them through this? And we want to help with that, so we do that. We've spun it up through four essential threads of what our organization does. We have something called safe campuses, partly because we lost our son on a college campus and that's mostly focused on collegiate recovery programs. We can get into that. We have safe communities trying to help communities deal with the problem. Safe veterans, because I'm a veteran, and if you're a veteran, you're more than twice as likely to, to die of an overdose than any other walk of life. And then safe workplaces trying to encourage employers to, you know, have the best practices in their workplaces to protect their employees. So we're up and running. We've got, you know, let me, let.

Me just recap a little bit so it gets both in the notes and the, so public awareness. First of all, right, where this is some of that, like, let's just talk about it, shine the light on it, let people think about it. Full spectrum prevention, looking at all aspects of stopping it before it happens. Dealing with the prescription medicine and medical response in the medical world of that side of it, law enforcement and justice, prosecuting it in the right place in effective ways, getting treatment and recovery when someone is interested and open, helping them to get out of it and sustain being out of it, and then educating families and supporting families who are grappling with this so that they are watching for and dealing with the things that they might not know until it's Too late.

Yeah, exactly. And. And you know, there's a lot of specific projects we have within that. Those six things that are aligned to the safe campuses, safe communities, etc. And our philosophy is that where there's a lack of capacity that we can fill will work that. And where there's a lack of capability, something's not being done very well. We'll try to fill that. And. And that one of the first things we did was come up with a treatment locator that's anonymized. You don't have to put any personal information in there. The closest it gets to you is you put in your zip code, and then it's almost like TurboTax, where you answer a series of questions and then it narrows it down. And what it'll do is within less than an hour, it'll give you like, the top five places to call that seem to be most suited for you. And we've got a lot of hits on that. A lot of people are using that recovery treatment locator. And what was good for us in developing that tool was that there's an organization called samhsa, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which works with the federal government that keeps a database of treatment facilities across the country. And in fact, we convinced them that they needed to update it every day rather than once a year, which they do now. And that's where we get our data for the treatment locator. Well, it turns out there's no similar database for recovery houses, you know, once you leave treatment, getting into a recovery house. And so we are. We are building that data ourselves and trying to create a recovery housing locator. And we've also appended onto this thing a family resource support group locator. So those are. It's just like, you know, making things better every day.

I think that's really, really brilliant because that is a huge thing, is as families in our family and other families, you know, just figuring out what's available and where to go and what's next, because they don't. I mean, some will use social workers and that kind of thing who will help navigate the what's next. But a lot don't, or they do a bad job of it. And you've got to know as a friend or loved one family member what's going on so that you can be an active participant in helping to figure out what's next. Once you get out of this or that, like, where do you go and how do you sustain it? Because it. People fall back into stuff like so quickly. One of the, you know, I said my dad succumbed to alcoholism and mental health stuff, but he also was my hero. And when I was very young and I got a little out of control my first year of college and I was drunk and high on all sorts of things and my dad, I crashed a car and I nearly killed myself. And my dad, as I recovered, said, I think you need a little break and I suggest you pick a branch of service and spend a few years. I know you were going to go in the air force later, but maybe now is the time.

Yeah, yeah.

And it really saved my life because I interrupted the friend network. I got something a little that, that, that gave me more rigor at that point of maturity in my life that I college at that age, it was, I just was out of control. And so I went in the military and it really did, it was challenging to go in as enlisted, but it really saved my life at that moment.

Yeah. And our son was a little young for that. He was a, basically a senior in high school in spring when this happened.

Yeah.

And it was, it was, it was, it's interesting because it would, it was easy for his brother, his older brother to be stigmatized by that. It's like, hey, I'm doing great. I'm going to go to the Naval Academy. You know, what's, why can't you figure this out? And he didn't really understand what my younger son was going through. And as it evolved and as, and my oldest son actually wrote a really compelling editorial for USA Today in which he talked about how he had been stigmatized by what his brother was going through, but that he now realizes what a warrior his younger brother was against addiction. Jonathan was fighting it as hard as he could and he was successful. He got his EMT qual. He was, you know, after 15 months, he was bright eyed and bushy tailed. He was a human again. We could talk to him and, but you know, that lure when you're, you know, freshly sort of out there and what happened to him is in order to get a part time job as an EMT in Denver, he was going to get a job with the company that does all the Denver sporting events. You know, how cool is that? You know, you go do the Denver Broncos games and turns out a lot of guys have heart attacks at Broncos games and other NFL games. And so they asked that he would get his EKG qual. So he was getting his EKG qual and walking back to where he was staying one night and, and Ended up walking by the open air heroin market in Denver that's just out there and some guy offers it to him and, you know, it's very, very hard to say no, especially when maybe you have a little anxiety about college.

Good. Yeah, I could just a little, like, would feel good. I could. Yeah.

Yeah. Boy, it was tough. But we're doing the best we can. We try to save a life every single day. We are in a space where there are a lot of other organizations. We do not compete with any of these organizations that can creep into this if you're not careful. We want to raise all boats, and we've had some good successes with people recognizing what we're doing. We were recognized as the number one charity in the drug addiction space by a company called Donorbox, which a lot of people use on their websites to. To process contributions. And we were very fortunate recently to get a very nice, generous gift from the mackenzie Scott foundation, which was totally unexpected. You know, they don't. You don't sign up for those things. They just appear. And we felt that was real validation for what we're. We have a great team and they're slugging away every day trying to save a life.

We want to keep talking about this, but as we move on, let's throw the link on, if you would. SafeProject Us is the URL, the website for the program and all of its activities. And we'll put it again at the end as well, but it'll be in the show notes and that kind of thing, so people can go looking for it. I think that that is like, it's everywhere, all around us. And it's so multifaceted, complex, interwoven. It can happen in so many ways. It's a long, difficult journey to get past that and to fully navigate and escape it. It's extraordinary when people do because it's not. It's just not easy. Right.

It's not. And, you know, for. For a large chunk of your audience who are business people, business executives. Right. It's something to ponder in terms of what you're doing to make sure your employees are as safe as they can be in both their environment at work, but also at home. It's hard enough to find good labor these days. You don't want to lose people to this. And there are some fairly simple things to make sure that your workplace is not stigmatized, that people understand that if they are struggling with something that it's okay to speak up, whether it's struggling with a mental health issue that could lead to this or whether it's a struggle with substance abuse actually in process, and to do simple things like have some Narcan available very close, because it's very possible somebody could overdose at work. Making sure that your healthcare provider is adequately supporting people who have issues like this and making sure that they know how to talk to their families. I mean, there are a number of things that work with work, workplaces, leaders can do to protect their, their people from this, this crisis.

So the great thing is that we do have an audience of CEOs and entrepreneurs who lead organizations with lots and lots of people on them. And even if you're not the CEO, you're an influential person, likely if you're listening to the show. So for all those people, SafeProject US is a place to go and learn more. But there are things that you can do, and at least of my CEO friends have lost family in this way. So it's deep and close. And if that's the case for us, it's the case for the people on your team and their families. Right. And like, just bringing in basic things to your company can impact not only the company, but then also the people their lives at home. And you can't afford for them to be impacted anywhere than they need to. You need your people to be sharp and available and not, not overwhelmed with a family crisis.

Right, true. And, and the other thing is, is there, there are probably a lot more people in your organization that are struggling with this than you imagine. Because one of the things about addiction as, as I think you probably understand, Bill, is that there people are very good at hiding it. And very.

They can be very good.

Yeah. Fully functioning addicts are in every workplace. And if they know that they're not going to be stigmatized that there's help out there, then there's a chance that they'll seek it. Not always, but there's a chance that they'll seek it. And it's particularly tough for women who are in substance abuse if they have children because they're understandably worried that if they own up to this, that somebody's going to take their kids away. And yeah, and that's, that's. There are groups out there who are, who are actually trying to address that by having treatment programs where you can actually bring especially young children in with you and you're not separated from your children. But, but it's, There are a lot of natural inhibitors to people speaking up.

There are a lot of natural and, and morality judgments. All of that play a big part of It I'm a bad person, I'm a sinner, I'm a this or that. You're a human being, and you struggle, and the people around you are human beings, and they're struggling with something. And these things are designed. They're engineered to work in your brain at the. At a deep, fundamental level. And for sure, there are some of us who are more susceptible than others, but it's an awful lot of us who are highly susceptible. Yeah.

And, you know, there's a. I frequently have talked about three pathways into substance dependence, particularly opioid dependence. One is a strictly a physical path where you get an injury, you have a dental procedure, an operation, and you're given a painkiller, and you have a genetic predisposition to being addicted. And so that's one pathway. Another pathway is sort of the party pathway.

Yeah. Let's tell each one in turn. I had a wisdom tooth removed. I got some Dilaudid. It was. And. And I'm like, this stuff's fantastic. And I went back after a couple days. My doctor said, oh, no, no, no. You get no more of this ever. And you should be aware that your desire for this is a real problem. So it's good for a minute and stop. And then I suffered. But, like, he's like, I knew that I needed to. The woman who used to cut my hair, she lost her husband and the mother of her child because he's like. He went in for some back thing or whatever, and then he got this, and he just, like, boom. He was just gone. He was, like, on the streets within a month.

Yeah. Yeah. So. So the other two pathways, the party pathway and then the. The mental health pathway, where if you've got anxiety like Jonathan did. Now, in my humble opinion, and this is not scientific, but my. In my opinion, the most powerful pathway into substance dependence, opioid dependence, is. Is for somebody who has an injury or a, you know, a dental procedure or something who also has a mental health issue. And.

And the.

The opioid. Yeah, it handles the physical thing, but it immediately relieves the anxiety or the depression. And that's. And I know so many people who have had this happen.

A young woman like that works for me. I need that. I want this. Yeah. My whole life I've struggled with this, and that actually worked. And.

But so a young woman I know injured her arm badly while she was actually working out and was prescribed oxycodone or something like that, and within five days, was. Was fairly hooked. And. And what really. What really got her Attention was that one evening she was, you know, getting ready to take her dose, and she had laid out, you know, the couch, the blankets, just the way she likes them, had her favorite movie set up, had her favorite beverage at her side, and her. And her husband said, what are you doing? And she realized she was preparing for a date with a pill. And. And she's a very, very smart young woman and realized at that point, hey, something's wrong here. I gotta stop.

Yeah.

And she stopped. But it was very close.

Ritualized. Yeah. Yeah. And then you just don't know. Like, you could think that you're managing it, and maybe in years past, you could string that out for a long time, but now, in an instant, something could be off and you could be gone, or somebody close to you could be gone.

Yeah. And then, I mean, so many anecdotes. We had a young man who worked for us who's just an extraordinary individual, and he was a highly successful college graduate, president of his fraternity, most likely to say, succeed. Went for work for an investment banker and had. But had anxiety. He had an injury, a shoulder injury, playing softball or something. That's how he got dependent on opioids and was using pain pills and was a functioning addict. And then one day, before he had to give this really important presentation, his dealer said, I don't have any pills, but I've got something else. You know, I've got heroin. And. And so the guy starts rationalizing, okay, you know, I'd never. I'd never do that. But. But, you know, just. Just one time, and I'll go back to the pills when. When heroin's over and next thing. You know, and. And this courageous young man will relate that he tried to quit himself 40 different times. Deep withdrawal, painful withdrawal, 40 different times. And the thing that. That persuaded him to go into treatment was when he came home one day and his girlfriend was crying and he said, what's wrong? And she says, every time the phone rings, I'm sure it's going to be somebody calling to tell me that you have passed away. And that's what changed him. It wasn't the effect on himself. It was. He realized he was having an effect on his loved ones. And he has been in recovery since then, highly successfully. And he's just a remarkable young man. But, you know, it takes some sort of stimulus to get people to realize that, hey, I've got to do something about this. It's not something that just naturally happens.

I think it's a really powerful thing if you can connect with Somebody that matters to you and who you want to be for them. It can really help balance who you want to be for yourself because sometimes you're far more willing to give up on yourself than people that you care about. Right. And if you'll think of who the person is for you. For me, it's very clearly my grandmother on my dad's side, Granny Sally. And I can just picture her. And I like, I need to be a better person to live up to her expectations of me. Right. And I think we all have somebody that sometimes when you can't be that for yourself. Right. I remember I did a lot of marathons and triathlons for years. And one of the things that was really like a really helpful thing for me in dealing with, like, the painful runs. Right. You get past mile 18, it. It hurts generally. Always is. I'd say I'm a shining example of human being. And I knew that the people driving past me would be thinking about their fitness and their health. And I'm like, I want them to see my head held high and that I'm not giving up. And. And maybe one of them will be like, I'm going to get off the couch and get fit. And I'm like, I'm doing it for people I don't even know. Right. Like, because. Because for myself, I just wanted to go quit. My shins hurt. Like, whatever it is.

Yeah.

And whatever you're grappling with sometimes that. That might be a place Right. To. To relate to.

Well, my son will be running the Marine Corps Marathon this fall, and he will be wearing a safe T shirt. Some of his buddies will be. And. And hopefully that will inspire them to finish the race for Jonathan and all the other wonderful people in this country that we've lost to this terrible disease.

So I hear a couple big call outs. Tell me if these are the main things. But I think the takeaway for our audience as leaders in the organization is remove the stigma. Make it a public conversation, let it surface up because people may be grappling with it. And then bring in some services and some basics like putting arcan in your workplace. Get some training and education, access to services for people that are. Because you're not going to deal with it in your organization, but perhaps your insurance or healthcare provider might connect you with something. Look at the. Look at SafeProject us as a resource to find out what's appropriate. But bring those things into your organization because you impact lots more people than just you.

And I also think that executives should be in the Habit of challenging their, their institutional health care provider on how they give guidance to doctors and dentists in their program regarding providing painkillers. Now, now, don't get me wrong, I'm not against painkillers. There are people in our country, for example, who have chronic pain, who, who really need this to get through the day. But they can be, they can be managed carefully. They can be given doses that are titrated correctly so that they're, they're, you know, they're functioning well. But just willy nilly, you had your wisdom teeth out. Here's 30 Percocets. That's no way to do business. So I think it's, I think it's in a workplace's interest to make sure that the health care providers are doing this responsibly.

Yeah, there's something too culturally about, like wanting to blot out all pain. Like managing pain, getting it under control is one thing. Not relating to, like you should ever be uncomfortable. You know, is, is a, maybe a fallacy and would be healthy for us to embrace a little bit of pain and suffering, find a way to relate to it. I remember when I was learning to swim in the ocean in the cold water and I was miserable and I wanted to quit and it was dark and I was alone and I was afraid and uncomfortable. And I'm like, well, if I quit now, there's that. I'll feel a little ashamed, but I won't talk about it. But if I do this miserable thing now, tomorrow I could brag about it, right? And like, so the more miserable it was, the better bragging rights I had. And, and my ego loves a little bit of that. Right. So figuring out how to suck up a little pain is a useful thing to develop as a human being and to teach our kids. Yeah, yeah.

And Bill, I think you're, you're really right. And you know, in the origins of this opioid crisis, one of the things that accelerated it was insurance companies that were assessing health care providers on how they managed pain. And so now you're a doctor and you're under pressure to manage pain well, so you don't get a bad rating or something. And so, and the other thing is you don't want to get a call in the middle of the night because somebody's got a lot of pain. So it was just a natural act to start over prescribing. And that was bad enough. I think that's more under control than it used to be. And now, of course, the real prescient crisis is fentanyl finding its way into nearly everything and killing people, that's the emergency right now. Yeah, but it's still, it's. I did an informal survey for a year, it was unscientific, where I asked anybody that I knew who had a dental procedure or an injury or a surgery, did they give any painkillers? And if so, very simple question. Were you cautioned or counseled by your healthcare provider on the hazards of using these pain pills? And for. For a whole year, the answer was zero. Literally zero. In fact, I had a broken tooth and was offered 30 per step by my dentist. And when I said, I don't want that stuff, I lost a son to it. They kind of scurried off into the corner and said, okay, okay. And what broke the chain was after a year, I. We had a young intern working for SAFE who was a female collegiate soccer player. And she goes, yeah, I got counseled when I had a knee injury. And it wasn't my doctor or my nurse or anything that told me it was the athletic trainer on my team that said, be careful. If you're using this stuff, you could become addicted about that. So, anyway, yeah, but that's. That's almost old. It's something we gotta continue to work, continue to fix. But. But really, the desperate crisis right now is fentanyl making its way. And so we have a thing we call Keep the Party safe, where we encourage. You would think, well, why would you. Is this encouraging drug use? No, it's not. What it's encouraging is that if people are going to do it, that they have somebody at the party who's not using the drug, that they have Narcan present, that they use fentanyl testing strips, that they know how to call 911, and they set themselves up for success. Just including case somebody has an issue at the party. That's the kind of things we have to be doing.

Well, it's like. It's like saying, well, we're just going to say, no, absolutely, and then pretend it doesn't happen. But then it'll happen in the shadows. It'll happen somewhere. So it's not endorsing it, it's not supporting. It's saying, this is a reality. So now let's mitigate some of the potential damage. Let's apply a little bit, because it's going to happen.

Yeah. You know, one of the things we did, we distributed over 120,000 in home drug disposal kits to people for free. All they had to do is go to our website and we had a good partnership with a company called Datera at the time. And I'm not sure we're still doing that because it's run its course. But that's another responsible destruction of the drugs that are in your medicine cabinet because like, hey, I got 10 extra ones here, maybe I'll need them someday. So I'm just going to kind of put them in the medicine cabinet. Next thing you know, your teenager's taking them or your plumber's taking them, that kind of thing. So there's so many different angles on this. It's a very complicated solution to a very difficult problem.

Yeah. But home, workplace, communities, schools and so on, it's a great place. I think we've covered it. It's a complex problem. It's not going away soon, but we can begin to address it. It's going to take multifaceted things, sustained effort over time. I really appreciate you coming on and talking with it and sharing your story and, and what you're doing about it. Say project us. Put it back in there again is a place for people to go. We miss anything.

Well, I just want to thank you for shining light on this very important topic in front of a very important audience. So thank you, Bill. Appreciate it.

Thanks again for coming on. Thanks again everyone for listening, for watching, watching. Thanks to Wanda Mitchell, our show producer. Thanks for the folks at Plotfly, thanks to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish and to all of our listeners working on growing your companies and keeping your teams healthy, happy, safe, productive. Stay safe. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling until then.

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