BALANCING ACT
The War on Opioids Gets Personal BY KELLEY FREUND
Following the loss of his son Jonathan to a drug overdose last fall, former Navy Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, AE 78, decided to do something to save others from a similar fate. “THE DEEPEST IMPACT EVER LEFT ON ME WAS BY A PERSON I HAD NEVER EVEN TALKED TO. I NEVER GOT TO FIND OUT HIS NAME, AND HE WASN’T EVEN AWARE OF MY PRESENCE. HOWEVER, WE BOTH HAD ONE THING IN COMMON THAT MADE AN INSTANT CONNECTION BETWEEN US. WE BOTH SHARED THE DISEASE OF ADDICTION.”
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—JONATHAN WINNEFELD
JAMES “SANDY” WINNEFELD wants you to know that no family is safe from the opioid epidemic. He’s speaking from experience—his son Jonathan wrote those words for a college essay one month before he died from a heroin
overdose in September 2017. Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans younger than 50. Last year alone, 72,000 people in this country died from overdoses— more Americans than have died in combat since the beginning of the Vietnam War. The addicted population is spread across every segment of society. It’s a disease that doesn’t care about your status—it hits those who come from all walks of life, even someone like Jonathan, whose father was an admiral in the Navy and the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It’s not only about people living under underpasses with needle marks on their arms,” Winnefeld says. “There are a lot of people who look just like Jonathan who we’re losing to this epidemic.” For Winnefeld, his family’s journey with Jonathan’s drug abuse was a wakeup call to the power of addiction. Even as one of the most powerful men in the military world, Winnefeld couldn’t stop it. When Jonathan died, Winnefeld decided to tackle the issue using the lessons his family learned along the way. What could they help change so others wouldn’t have to suffer? Winnefeld describes his son Jonathan as someone who didn’t have an enemy in the world. He was creative and a gifted baseball pitcher, but he grew up with anxiety and depression and was misdiagnosed as having
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attention deficit disorder. When Jonathan was prescribed Adderall by a psychologist—one of the worst medications you can give somebody who has anxiety—it contributed to his desire to self-medicate. Not only did he want to use it to handle his depression, but also to come down from Adderall’s effects. After Jonathan reached eighth grade, Winnefeld and his wife, Mary, realized Jonathan was experimenting with alcohol and drugs, and stepped in. From the beginning, getting their son the help he needed proved difficult. There wasn’t enough capacity around northern Virginia for outpatient treatment, and Jonathan was placed on a waiting list. During that time, his experimentation had turned into full addiction, so Sandy and Mary began looking into long-term inpatient treatment. But they couldn’t find a place that could handle Jonathan’s dual diagnosis of mental health and drug addiction. When they eventually found a facility, their insurance wouldn’t cover it, so they paid out-of-pocket for 15 months of treatment. But the high cost became an afterthought as Jonathan began to heal. “We watched our son recover before our very eyes,” Winnefeld says. “We could have a conversation with him. He got his ambition back, and he even received his emergency medical technician qualification.”
Kaylinn Gilstrap