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Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Woman Celebrates 10 Years of Sobriety After Using with Her Mother as a Teen. 'I Didn't Realize I Had a Problem' (Exclusive)
Darra Sargent opens up to PEOPLE about experiencing addiction at a young age The mom grew up with parents who frequently used drugs, complicating her teenage years Now 10 years sober, Sargent shares the moving message she would tell her younger selfOne woman is proudly celebrating 10 years of sobriety. In a video posted to TikTok and Instagram, Darra Sargent shared a clip reflecting on her decade of sobriety. The post showcased her over the past 10 years, sharing colorful shots from her life. Though she'd used for years with her mother, she quit when she was five days pregnant with her first child. 'My mom and my dad fell victim to the opioid epidemic when I was in 1st grade … Before that they always partied my entire life,' Sargent tells PEOPLE exclusively. 'They were huge hippies and had a big social life, but nothing too crazy. My dad was a drummer in a lot of local bands so I grew up around the scene. Once they fell victim to the opioid epidemic, my life started to go downhill.' As a kid, she remembers losing her home and needing to stay with various family members as her parents struggled with their addiction. When she was just 13, her father suffered a seizure and ultimately died of MRSA. 'That was when my mom really went off the deep end,' Sargent recounts. 'They were together from 16 years old and she didn't know how to do life without him after being together for almost 30 years. My mom started using harder drugs more frequently and truly didn't know how to be a parent due to her mental health struggles and grief.' Sargent went through a variety of living situations and says she was 'on my own for about a year-and-a-half,' living with various friends' families. When she eventually moved back in with her mother, 'she was already partying with my brother, who was a year younger than me,' she says. 'Once I started experimenting with partying in high school, my friends would always come to my house since there wasn't any parental supervision, and she started asking to join in or asking us to give her things,' Sargent continues. 'She was so deep in her own mental health struggles that she didn't even realize how unhealthy that was.' Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 'She started putting weed and cigarettes in our stockings on Christmas, drinking and partying with us regularly, and just acting like one of the kids," she continues. "It was a normal event to just hang out and drink, smoke, take pills, whatever together.' Sargent decided to get sober on New Year's Day 10 years ago. She says she was up partying and using drugs with her mother the night before, but decided that day she would get sober — a move she still calls 'divine intervention.' 'I was one of those people that didn't really think I had a problem,' she admits. 'My mom was the benchmark for a problem. I thought, 'Oh I have a decent job, I can afford what I need, I'm not letting this take over my life .. I'm just a young adult having fun.' I was only 21 when i decided to get sober.' She recalls a brief period when she had a move back in with her mother — when the two of them shared a room just big enough for a twin-sized bed — as the moment that she 'felt like my biggest fear was coming true before my eyes." 'I was becoming just like my mom. Even though I thought I was just a young adult having normal young adult experiences, I didn't want to go down that slippery slope,' she shares. 'So something in me made me get sober. I found out I was pregnant a month-and-a-half later and I was five days pregnant when I made that choice.' Sobriety hasn't been an easy path, she admits. Going sober at 21, Sargent says many of her friends at that age were partying and going out frequently, but she found art to be a soothing and grounding outlet for herself, coupled with the support from her partner and therapy. 'Following my dreams gave me a goal post, something to work towards and something to look forward to. Now 10 years later art is still a driving factor but I have an amazing support system in my partner and my children,' she shares, noting that she even started sharing her art on Instagram 'not long' after she went sober. Sargent's art is colorful, with most pieces including a rainbow of some sort — a move she says has become her 'signature style.' 'I think that's my way of signifying the rainbow after the storm. I live in the rainbows now,' she says. 'Color is truly one of my biggest passions in life, and I try to collect as many rainbow things as I can! Life is just happier when you're surrounded by color. Color is the way I communicate with the world, and most of the time I have so much to say it has to be a full rainbow spectrum.' As Sargent continued her sobriety journey, she says her mother continued to use until her death in 2016. When she'd initially told her mother that she was going to get clean, her mom asked Sargent if she thought she was 'better' than her. 'She was so deep in her own issues that she just couldn't be happy for me,' Sargent says. 'We had had a rocky life together up until that point already.' 'I reconnected with her in the summer of 2014 when she called and told me she had lung cancer. She was only back in my life for about a year-and-a-half when I decided to get sober,' Sargent continues. 'It was tricky navigating sobriety, while being a caretaker for my dying mother. Our relationship had its challenges, I was still incredibly angry at her, but I had to put that to the side because she needed me.' Now that a decade has passed, Sargent can look back with empathy on the young girl who got into drugs. 'I would tell that girl that's not who she is and she doesn't need to be the person her mom raised her to be,' she says. 'I'd tell her she deserves love, peace and happiness. She deserves to find out who she is, not who she's told she is.' 'Figuring yourself out takes time. We all make mistakes, every person learns and grows," she continues. "It's okay to change and to grow. That's what makes us human. We can go through life with shame about who we used to be, or we can be proud of how far we've come.' If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. Read the original article on People
The Independent
18-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
A judge could advance Purdue Pharma's $7B opioid settlement after all 50 states back it
All 50 U.S. states have agreed to the OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma 's latest plan to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids. A judge on Wednesday is being asked to clear the way for local governments and individual victims to vote on it. Government entities, emergency room doctors, insurers, families of children born into withdrawal from the powerful prescription painkiller, individual victims and their families and others would have until Sept. 30 to vote on whether to accept the deal, which calls for members of the Sackler family who own the company to pay up to $7 billion over 15 years. If approved, the settlement would be among the largest in a wave of lawsuits over the past decade as governments and others sought to hold drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies accountable for the opioid epidemic that started rising in the years after OxyContin hit the market in 1996. The other settlements together are worth about $50 billion, and most of the money is to be used to combat the crisis. In the early 2000s, most opioid deaths were linked to prescription drugs, including OxyContin. Since then, heroin and then illicitly produced fentanyl became the biggest killers. In some years, the class of drugs was linked to more than 80,000 deaths, but that number dropped sharply last year. The request of U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Sean Lane comes about a year after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a previous version of Purdue's proposed settlement. The court found it was improper that the earlier iteration would have protected members of the Sackler family from lawsuits over opioids, even though they themselves were not filing for bankruptcy protection. Under the reworked plan hammered out with lawyers for state and local governments and others, groups that don't opt in to the settlement would still have the right to sue members of the wealthy family whose name once adorned museum galleries around the world and programs at several prestigious U.S. universities. Under the plan, the Sackler family members would give up ownership of Purdue. They resigned from the company's board and stopped receiving distributions from its funds before the company's initial bankruptcy filing in 2019. The remaining entity would get a new name and its profits would be dedicated to battling the epidemic. Most of the money would go to state and local governments to address the nation's addiction and overdose crisis, but potentially more than $850 million would go directly to individual victims. That makes it different from the other major settlements. The payouts would not begin until after a hearing scheduled for Nov. 10, during which Lane is to be asked to approve the entire plan if enough of the affected parties agree.
The Independent
12-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
House passes bill to to combat fentanyl trafficking, sending it to Trump's desk
The House overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation Thursday that would solidify federal policies cracking down on the synthetic opioid fentanyl and its analogs in a bid by lawmakers to combat the nation's opioid epidemic. The HALT Fentanyl Act makes permanent a 2018 emergency rule that classifies knockoffs of fentanyl as Schedule I controlled substances, which results in harsher sentences for possession of the drug. The bill passed the House 321-104 and now heads to President Donald Trump for his signature. The legislation, which applies to what are known as known as 'fentanyl-related substances,' garnered support from nearly every Republican and many Democrats despite concerns that the bill does not address the root issues at hand and will add to problems in the criminal justice system. Senate Majority Leader John Thune hailed passage of the bill and promised more legislative action to come. 'I don't need to tell anybody about the horrible impact of drug overdoses in this country, many of them caused by fentanyl,' Thune said on the Senate floor. 'In the coming weeks, we'll be taking up legislation to address another aspect of the fight: securing our borders,' a nod to Republicans' tax package, which includes billions of dollars in additional immigration enforcement and border security funding. Proponents of the legislation argue that the bill will make it easier to stop drug traffickers by making the federal emergency rules permanent. Opponents say the framework does little to stem the epidemic and warn it will make it harder to conduct important research. Congress has regularly renewed the emergency rules since 2018, meaning there is no immediate change to federal policy. The bill does not include increased funding for law enforcement to conduct anti-drug trafficking efforts, nor funding for public health efforts meant to reduce fentanyl addiction and deaths. The bill's supporters say that the reclassification will give anti-trafficking efforts clearer standards to operate under as law enforcement combats the trade. Federal, state and local law enforcement have sought to break up the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. by targeting Mexican drug cartels and local gangs. The Trump administration has declared stemming the flow of fentanyl precursors from China a priority in trade talks with Beijing, an effort that follows a spate of initiatives by the Biden administration to reduce the importation of such substances into the U.S. from China and other illegal supply chains. 'A loophole that the cartels have tried to use to drive their illicit fentanyl into our country is by changing one part of the fentanyl chemical structure to create fentanyl analogs,' said GOP Virginia Rep. Morgan Griffith, one of the bill's co-sponsors, during Wednesday's debate on the House floor. 'The cartels did this in an attempt to evade our criminal laws,' said Griffith, who argued that the bill would help prevent further fentanyl deaths and increase the potential for research into the drug and related substances. And lawmakers appealed to the human cost of fentanyl smuggling. 'We must give our law enforcement the tools to combat this problem. This bill does exactly that,' said GOP California Rep. Jay Obernolte, a co-sponsor of the bill. Obernolte recounted the stories of families impacted by fentanyl overdoses in his district and noted that more than 100,000 Americans died of an overdose last year, mostly from fentanyl. The bill 'gives our law enforcement agencies the tools that they need to begin dealing with this problem,' Obernolte said. Democratic New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone said during debate that he opposed the bill because it uniformly criminalizes fentanyl related substances. Pallone said it will impede potential research into their benefits rather than provide an 'offramp to substances found to have potential medical applications.' Pallone also chided Republicans for saying they aimed to tackle the opioid epidemic while supporting the Trump administration's cuts to federal agencies tasked with research and public health policy. 'This Republican bill would also exacerbate inequities in our criminal justice system because drugs placed on Schedule I include mandatory minimum sentencing,' Pallone said. 'The bill is essentially recycling an incarceration first response to what I consider mainly a public health challenge.' Schedule I drugs are substances considered by the Drug Enforcement Agency to have 'no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.' Possession of a Schedule I drug is considered a felony and can be prosecuted as drug smuggling. Drugs currently classified as Schedule I include heroin, marijuana and methaqualone. Fentanyl itself is classified as a Schedule II drug, which the DEA designates as having 'a high potential for abuse.' Schedule II substances include cocaine, methamphetamine, oxycodone and Adderall.
Bloomberg
12-06-2025
- Health
- Bloomberg
FDA Head Says OxyContin Was Approved Illegally. Now What?
Hi, it's Sam in New York. Earlier this year, I wrote about the FDA's role in igniting the opioid epidemic. More on why this is back in the news in a moment, but first … Help us improve Bloomberg newsletters: Please take a quick survey to share your thoughts on your sign-up experience and what you'd like to see in the future.
Bloomberg
13-05-2025
- Health
- Bloomberg
Want to Keep Fighting Fentanyl? Don't Cut Medicaid
President Donald Trump says the opioid epidemic is such a clear and present danger that it justifies extraordinary actions against the foreign nations he accuses of facilitating the flow of fentanyl into the US. Meanwhile, his Republican allies in Congress are about to hobble the federal government's most important domestic tool for fighting opioid addiction: the Medicaid program. The result is that, just as Trump is demanding that other countries do more to fight the opioid epidemic, Congress is poised to do less.
