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>> I'm a journeyman iron worker.
I've been in the union since 1996 off and on.
This disease will take everything from you.
It takes your life eventually, but I lost everything.
You know, I'm starting over again.
>> I didn't know how to brush my teeth in the morning.
I didn't know how to take a shower.
I had to go to a halfway house
to learn all these basic necessities about life.
>> Personally, I've had several friends,
especially from this area that I grew up in, that have overdosed
and died from heroin addiction, opiate addiction,
and they've left behind small children, their parents,
and other loved ones that are growing up without them.
>> Of course, we've seen a lot of horror stories before
and since I've been in this role for the union.
It destroys families.
It destroys young people's opportunities and potential.
It takes it away from them.
>> My family, with every bottom I hit,
I took them down with me also.
I was stealing from them, lying, and not only that,
like they didn't know my whereabouts.
I have a loving mother at home that doesn't know where I am.
My brothers -- my little brothers who are supposed
to look up to me don't want to be around me.
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My friends --
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Everybody disappeared with time including myself.
I didn't want to be seen.
>> One of the overdoses that we had here at Local 1,
that apprentice, his father is in the industry.
And the father, every day, would walk down the hallway
in his house, wake the kid up and say, "Come on.
Get up. Let's go to work."
This day he walks down the hallway and the kid's not
in the bedroom to go to work with them,
so he figures he'll find his own way to work that day.
He went outside, got in his car, went to back up the car
and noticed that there was a body laying in the front yard.
He walked over and it was his son.
That's how devastating and how brutal this is.
And it's something that I'll never forget,
that father will never forget,
and that family will never forget.
>> The impact has been drastic.
I've been the business manager for 32 years now,
and I can honestly say that I know of at least 20 people
who have lost their life to opiate addiction.
It's a very common thing in construction
where people get injured.
They go to the doctor.
They're put on prescription medication.
From that, they are no longer on prescription medication
but they're hooked and they're addicted to opioids.
It affects their life, affects their family, affects everybody
in the industry, their co-workers
and it's just too serious a problem to ignore today.
>> The mental health part of addiction brings a lot
of extra pieces into why addictions go along
with depression, suicide,
and a lot of people don't think of it but PTSD.
We talk about association.
So it's not that one causes the other,
but we know scientifically that there are associations with --
if someone is depressed,
that oftentimes leads to suicidal thinking.
If someone's had a trauma history and has PTSD,
they'll be depressed which increases the risk of suicide.
>> The closest it's affected me as far
as suicide was my younger brother.
He went through a lot of things.
He was in Afghanistan for a tour and then Iraq.
He was a Light Armored Recon Marine.
He saw a lot of action.
He didn't really talk about it.
I know it affected him, but he was a Boston police officer.
He got hurt at work.
They prescribed him Percocets.
He progressed into using heroin, and he was just too proud to ask
for help, and he committed suicide.
>> People tend to think of suicide as all or none.
As a psychiatrist, what I tell patients is suicide
or suicidal thinking is almost
like a gas tank that's emptying out.
When it's full, nobody thinks about suicide
but as things get more stressful,
then they start thinking things like,
you know, I don't like this.
I don't like what's going on.
I wish I wouldn't wake up.
And then when it gets a little worse,
it's like I hope I don't wake up.
Then when it gets a little worse, they go, you know what?
I may do something about this.
And then when the tank's really empty, then they have a plan
and that's when a psychiatrist jumps in.
But a psychiatrist is always asking, where is that gas gauge?
But the thing to remember, it's not that the person is weak.
It's just that they -- they're getting more
and more mentally stressed and so they're vulnerable to it.
The real game changer these days is fentanyl,
and it's really scary because even if someone is sober
for three years, the risk today is if they go out
and use fentanyl once, it might be the last time they do that.
>> I mean, for me, you know, it's not so much physical pain.
It's emotional pain connected to some family issues
that I've had and, you know, the opiates just numb it.
You know, you don't have to deal with it.
You don't have to -- if you can't deal with it,
you can't heal from it, you know, so it's a lot easier
to numb it than face it sometimes.
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