Ed Ternan and his wife, Mary Ternan, are on a mission. They are determined to teach as many children and parents as they can about the deadly dangers of fentanyl and how easily people can die from taking just one pill.
“My family was thrown into the fentanyl crisis when we lost our youngest son, Charlie, to fentanyl,” Ed Ternan told The Epoch Times.
Charlie Ternan died of a fentanyl overdose on May 14, 2020. He was just 22 years old.
‘A Guy on Snapchat’
Charlie was a senior at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, when he died.As his father explained, it was during the COVID-19 lockdowns that Charlie, like a lot of college and university students at the time, came home for spring break. Because of the lockdowns, students were told not to return to campus, so Charlie moved back home. About a month before he was supposed to graduate, Charlie “defied the administration and went back to campus,” his father said.
He drove from his parent’s home in the Los Angeles area to his fraternity house near the campus.
A week later on May 14, Charlie was in his room at his fraternity house. Most of his housemates had gone out for the day, but Charlie had a phone interview for a job at 5 p.m., so he stayed behind with the plan of playing video games until his interview. Police said they learned from an underclassman that Charlie had asked some of his friends if anyone had any Xanax, a tranquilizer often prescribed to treat anxiety and panic disorders.
Charlie had “a notoriously bad back,” his father said, a condition for which he had undergone surgery in December of 2018, but his back still bothered him.
Counterfeit M30
It is believed, Ternan said, that it was sometime during the early afternoon hours of May 14 that Charlie bought “a few Xanax” and “one pill he was told was Percocet.”The last time anybody reported speaking to Charlie was 3 p.m. that day.
“What we know is that he never made the 5 o'clock phone call,” Ternan said. “As far as the doctors could tell, it was sometime between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. that Charlie put one blue M30 in his mouth and was dead within 15 minutes.”
Round blue pills imprinted with an “M” on one side and the number “30” on the other are identified as oxycodone hydrochloride in a 30 milligram dose and classified as an opioid used in the treatment of chronic pain.
Under the Controlled Substances Act, oxycodone is classified as a Schedule 2 controlled substance, but many pills sold illegally are counterfeit and contain deadly doses of fentanyl, unbeknownst to buyers and users.
“Counterfeit pills may contain lethal amounts of fentanyl or methamphetamine and are extremely dangerous because they often appear identical to legitimate prescription pills, and the user is likely unaware of how lethal they can be,” the Drug Enforcement Administration says about the pills.
The only way to know if fentanyl is present is by using a testing kit, which the National Institutes of Health describes as “a harm reduction practice among young adults who use drugs.”
That evening, as Charlie’s friends began returning to the fraternity house, some passed by his open door several times, Ternan said. They saw him laying on his bed. His eyes were closed. His video game controller was in his hands, which were resting on his chest. They thought Charlie was napping. It wasn’t until about 8 to 8:30 p.m. that Charlie’s friends went to wake him for dinner.
He was dead.
Almost immediately, law enforcement told the Ternans that they suspected fentanyl.
“Charlie did not die of an overdose,” Ed Ternan insisted in the video. “Charlie was poisoned.”
‘Informed Choices’
Within a couple of months of Charlie’s death, his father said they “needed to tell other people about this,” quickly and effectively. They needed to prevent this from happening again. Their strategy was to “take out all of the middle-men” and go directly to as many young people as they could and “speak to them in a language that they understood.”“We need to engage them in the process of spreading the word as much as possible among their peers,” Ternan said, citing the data they have collected and made available on the Song for Charlie website.
Warning for Parents
Asked what message he would offer parents, Ternan said they needed to face the reality that “the drug landscape has radically shifted.”Over the past decade, “drug traffickers have learned that the chemicals they use in a lab are much more profitable than organic, plant-based substances when it comes to the raw materials for making street drugs,” Ternan said, describing it as “a mega trend-shift from ‘farm to lab.'”
“As a result, parents, your children are up against a drug supply that is much more volatile and unpredictable and therefore more risky than any of us ever faced,” Ternan warned. “That’s the first thing parents need to understand.”
“For years we’ve been telling kids that drugs are risky,” Ternan expounded. “But now, the environment has really changed. Once, they were risky. Now, they’re deadly.”
Ternan reflected on how things were much different when he was coming up in the world. Back then, drug education was like a journey. You engaged in experimentation. You tried things, then other things. Then you eventually settled into what suited you. When he was Charlie’s age, the only risk was taking too much of some drug or consuming too often, because if you consumed too often you could develop a dependency, then a physical addiction, which can lead to an accidental overdose.
“Now, it’s less like a path and more like a minefield where your very first foray into that field could be your last, because you have no idea what substances are in that pill, powder, or liquid,” he said. “That’s what makes this so deadly.”
After living in this post-Charlie world for two years, Ternan said he believes the country is slowly starting to wake up and is moving from awareness to solutions.
“A national conversation is starting to evolve, going from just ringing the bell and saying ‘The Barn is Burning’ to saying ‘We need to line up a bucket brigade and put the fire out,’” he said, adding that the greatest impact that can be made right now is in “equipping young people with the knowledge that this is going on.”
“Our mission is to go out and talk to kids in a relatable way,” Ternan said.
They decided to develop something somewhere between the “Scared Straight” approach and the “Try to be safe” conversation.
Warning for the Kids
Asked what advice he would offer kids, Ternan reiterated his warning that things are not as they appear.“There are counterfeit pills that are intended to look just like the prescription pills you are familiar with and that you think are safe,” he said.
He also warned that while these kids think they know how to dose themselves with the pills they obtain, they don’t realize that the pills are not real.
“You can’t take the word of anyone selling you anything,” he insisted. “This is the new landscape that you have inherited and this is the new landscape you need to learn how to navigate, and it’s not going to go way.”
Asked if there were any attorneys or politicians he was working with, Ternan said there are no legal avenues available to him and that the legislative world is “a slog with competing agendas involved, and it takes too much time.”
For Ternan, there is no more time.
“It’s about what we can control and how we can have an impact,” he said. “You have to make a decision whether you want to litigate the last death or prevent the next death. We choose to prevent the next death if we can.”
