A DEVASTED mother who lost her daughter to an overdose during the pandemic has issued a heartbreaking warning to other parents as drug deaths surged to an all-time high in the US in 2020.
Sherry Jo Matt, 57, told The Sun how she lost her 21-year-old daughter Siena Bott to an accidental overdose on September 14.
The straight-A student, who had once been courted by a number of Ivy League schools, was found dead inside her family home in an affluent suburb of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
It would later be discovered that Siena had consumed what's known as a "pressed Percocet" – a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl.
'IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE'
Sherry had been out of town with her husband Tom Bott, hiking and camping in the mountains at the time.
The couple received a call from one of Siena's friends, who told them she was concerned because Siena wasn't answering her phone or coming to the door.
"Something clicked inside my husband's head and he said, 'Pack up, let's go,'" Sherry remembered. "So we literally threw everything inside the car and started driving home."
But she and Tom were more than four hours away, so Siena's friend called the police. The officers who responded kicked down the front door and discovered a lifeless Siena inside.
From the car, Sherry said she watched as her daughter's body was removed from their home in a bodybag via a security camera feed.
"The very last time I saw Siena, I hugged her and told her I love her and that I was very proud of her for making good choices," Sherry remembered. "The next time I saw her she was in a coffin."
"This should shake every American to their core," she added. "Because if it can happen in our little suburban neighborhood, and happen to an affluent family like ours, it can happen anywhere.
"And if it can happen to our daughter, it can happen to anyone else's too."
EPIDEMIC IN A PANDEMIC
Sherry's tragic loss is one of tens of thousands suffered across the United States in 2020.
An estimated record high of 93,331 Americans died of overdoses last year, according to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The startling figure represented the sharpest annual increase in overdose deaths in at least three decades, with deaths up 30 percent on the estimated 72,151 recorded in 2019.
Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, told The Sun that the number of overdose deaths recorded during the pandemic has been "frightening."
"It's horrible because it's never gone up this much in the history of the United States, and clearly we are failing," he said.
"What we're currently doing is not working. What we're trying is not turning the tide. This could spread, spread, and spread. I wouldn’t be surprised if the death rate this year was over 100,000 people."
Patrick Cronin, the national director of community outreach for Ark Behavioral Health, also called the acceleration in overdose deaths last year "troubling," characterizing the crisis as an epidemic within a pandemic.
Opioid overdoses alone, Cronin says, are responsible for a staggering 128 deaths in the United States every day.
Cocaine deaths also increased by 26.5 percent last year, he said, and methamphetamine-related fatalities also soared by 34.8 percent.
DRIVING FORCES
Data shows that the surge in deaths in 2020 was driven largely by the proliferation of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin.
The use of the drug has spread across the nation in the last few years and is now frequently found mixed into other widely used illicit substances, such as cocaine, meth, and counterfeit opioids – often unbeknown to the user.
The coronavirus pandemic also drastically exacerbated overdose deaths, Humphreys said, because of "multiple reasons," including isolation, trauma, and job losses.
"You have all the added stress in a pandemic of economic uncertainty, people getting sick, losing people grief, isolation, strain, all that," he said. "That's not healthy for people, it will lead some people to use drugs more and others who are in recovery to relapse.
"Another aggravating factor is that the support systems that help people to stay in recovery have weakened and have therefore made it hard to get face-to-face care. While they exist online still, it’s a less intimate connection when you're interacting with patients over Zoom."
Overdose deaths already began rising at an alarming rate towards the close of 2019 because of the spread of fentanyl, but it accelerated further in March 2020 when pandemic-driven shutdowns and social distancing measures set it.
Many people who were receiving treatment for drug addictions or those who were seeking it were unable to get in in the first weeks and months of the pandemic. Those who could faced huge disruptions or drastic changes in service.
"As if the pandemic wasn't devastating enough, we've now lost a record number of people to drug overdoses in this country," said Anne Emerson, a Minnesota-based mental health specialist and recovered addict.
"And it angers me because I don't feel like our government is doing enough to help stop the situation."
SIENA'S STRUGGLE
Siena Bott struggled with addiction for several years before her death.
Sherry says her daughter experimented with pot and cocaine in high school but was brought into the "very dark underbelly" of addiction after she was sexually assaulted twice as a teenager.
"She was definitely self-medicating, trying to process the trauma of it all," Sherry said. "She was seeing a therapist and we thought the drugs were a phase she'd eventually outgrow, but then she started hanging out with the wrong crowd."
It was with that crowd that Siena starting taking Percocets, a type of opioid pain reliever, Sherry said.
"She really shifted after that," the mother continued, pausing to compose herself. "She didn't care about anything. She didn't care about life anymore."
Sherry heartbreakingly confessed that she feels as though she lost her daughter long before she died from an overdose.
But the darkness of her battle with addiction never completely extinguished the light of who she was at her core.
"Siena never lost her kindness. She never lost her compassion for others, she never lost her ability or willingness to try to help others. So she never had that dark soul that others battling addiction sometimes get," Sherry said.
"But she was withdrawing from life. She was once so smart. She had dreams and goals and offers from Ivy League schools for medical programs. And now she didn't really have a state of mind where she cared about anything at all."
'PANDEMIC WAS HUGE SETBACK'
In the early months of 2020, Sherry and Tom believed their daughter had finally turned a corner.
After moving home from college to escape bad influences, Siena began attending a local community college where she had straight A's in all of her classes.
She was also holding down a steady job as a waitress in a local restaurant, a role Sherry said she "loved and was darn good at."
Siena appeared to be thriving again but then the pandemic struck in March and suddenly everything changed.
"When the pandemic hit, her school went completely online, and then she lost all interest in doing her homework.
"She was also laid off from the restaurant when it was forced to close which was a huge setback for her.
"She really lost all sense of purpose," Sherry continued. "Not working and not having a concrete schedule I think just flipped everything upside down again."
Out of work and struggling for direction, Sherry said her daughter began using federal aid, such as stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits, to fund her addiction.
Sherry came to a head with her daughter in the summer of 2020 when she found a bag of pills in Siena's pocket after she returned from a party late one night.
Sherry flushed the drugs down the toilet and confronted her daughter in the morning, telling her that she needed to go to rehab.
Fearful of being judged Siena refused to go but promised her mother she'd get clean by detoxing at home instead.
'THIS IS MURDER'
By the time Sherry and Tom went away for a weekend of camping in September last year, they believed their daughter was finally clean.
Siena was left alone at home in Pittsburg for the weekend while her younger brother, Dylan, was away at hockey camp.
Unbeknownst to Sherry and Tom at the time, Siena had run into difficulties with some of her friends whom she'd loaned vast sums of money to but was met with reported threats and hostility when she asked for it back.
Sherry believes that Siena, who struggled with depression and had also been recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, was looking for something to ease her anxiety on September 14.
"I think she bought whatever she could find and it killed her," she said.
The pill Siena took, it would later turn out, was laced with a fatal dose of fentanyl.
Sherry told The Sun there is an ongoing homicide investigation into her daughter's death but declined to disclose further details.
She did, however, state that she believes all overdose deaths caused by laced pills or drugs should be "classified as murder."
"These people, or whoever they are, lacing these pills should be treated as murderers.
"Our daughter's drug of choice was Percocet, it wasn't heroin. But these people are mixing fentanyl with this stuff where it's not meant to be. It's not meant to be in your body this way."
'WE'RE NOT HIDING'
After their Siena's death, Sherry and Tom said they felt compelled to disclose in her public obituary that she died from a drug overdose.
Their reason for doing so, Sherry said, was to help tackle the stigmas that surround drug addiction that can often prevent others like Siena from seeking out the help they desperately need.
"I told my husband we were going to be honest," Sherry recounted. "We're not hiding, because until we as a country are honest about what’s going on and how our children are dying we're not going to be able to change this."
She continued: "Please stop judging these people that are addicted. They still deserve our love, they still deserve our compassion and kindness, because they’re not disposable in our society – they’re somebody’s child."
Sherry said they could have afforded to send Siena to the best rehab centers in the country but their daughter refused to go because of her fear of being judged by others.
"If people stop judging addicts and stop judging the parents of addicts – if we can eliminate the stigma of the judgment, and we get these kids help, and the parents get the kids help, then that goes a long way."
Anne Emerson, who lost her fiancé to a fatal overdose in 2017, similarly said that the "number one thing" that needs to be done to address rising drug death rates is to "educate our communities better on the dangers of drugs and the causes of addiction."
"People have to know that addiction is a disease and not just a personal choice," Anne said. "They need to know that these people are not their addictions and that their brains have been taken over by a drug.
"The more we can educated people on this, the better. Stigma creates guilt and shame, and that shame is what kills people and keeps them out there using."
LIFE EXPECTANCY PLUMMETS
Experts have warned of dire consequences if the rise in drug-related deaths is not drastically addressed – and the effects of the mounting crisis are already being felt.
The surge in overdose deaths last year, along with the pandemic, saw life expectancy in the US plummet to an average of 77.3 years – its lowest point since 1943, which was during World War II.
The decline, which was reported by the CDC in June, spotlights the country's system of poor health. Meanwhile, in comparable countries, life expectancy continued to increase last year – despite Covid-19 being a global pandemic.
Researchers estimated that an increase in deaths from accidents or unintentional injuries – one-third of which were drug overdoses – was responsible for 11 percent of the decline.
Deaths from Covid-19, meanwhile accounted for almost 75 percent of the reduction.
While the pandemic waining would no doubt help lower overdose deaths, Humphrey says drug-related fatalities were already climbing steeply before the virus began ravaging its way across the US last spring.
He contends that though there is "no easy fix" to turn the tide on the current crisis, "one thing we have to do is integrate the care of addiction into the healthcare system like we would any other disorder."
"Currently, if you reach out for help with an addiction you're very unlikely to get quality treatment. You're actually more likely to get the kind of treatment we'd be shocked and angered by if it was for, say, a cancer or heart disease patient.
"Then there's also just the prevention of it all," Humphreys added."Ultimately, people can't end up in this situation if they don't take drugs in the first place. So you need robust prevention programs that persuade people that the risks associated with drugs far outweigh the rewards, to begin with."
For Sherry, she says she knows no amount of grieving will ever bring her daughter back.
But to immortalize her memory she and Tom have set up a foundation in their daughter's name called the Stop the Judgement Project, which seeks to break the stigma surrounding drug abuse and mental health issues.
"Siena's death has had a tremendous impact on our family. We are a family in pain," Sherry said. "But if we can help even just one family avoid the trauma of losing a child to drugs then we will do it."
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