CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It's been five months since Camelia Carter's 25-year-old son died of a mixture of heroin and fentanyl. In the time since he died, she's had a lot of time to think about how other mothers might avoid losing their sons and daughters to the same opioid epidemic.
Building off her son R.J. Parker's journey through the courts, struggle with rehabilitation and ultimate death, Carter formulated a plan that she calls the Parker Resolution. Her idea is that state lawmakers should kick an unprecedented amount of money and fight the addiction scourge like they would a natural disaster.
"Heroin is bigger than a hurricane," she said.
Parker battled addiction for years. He served a few years in prison, then got sent to a community-based workhouse on a drug charge. He kept returning to the drug despite his best efforts to get clean. He died in May of this year at a home on Cleveland's West Side after weeks of hiding from his mother.
Since his death, Carter has worked obsessively to devise a plan she says will repair the system that she said failed her son within a year.
Nearly 12,000 people have signed her change.org petition calling on Ohio Gov. John Kasich to declare a state of emergency to combat the opiate epidemic to tap into the state's $2 billion reserve fund and allow state and federal agencies to expand treatment in a matter of days and weeks, instead of waiting years for legislation to pass.
Kasich's office said the governor's power to declare a state of emergency is limited, and that it would only grant him the ability to authorize an action not specifically given to him in the state's laws or to deploy the Ohio National Guard.
Even if Kasich were to declare a state of emergency, his approach to combat the epidemic would likely remain the same, press secretary Emmalee Kalmbach said.
"The governor's heart breaks for parents who've lost a son or daughter to drugs. We applaud Camelia's strength to stand up in our fight against drugs and her determination that no other parent should ever know the pain she's experiencing," Kalmbach said in an emailed statement. "The governor understands the devastation and tragedy the drug epidemic has brought to families and communities and that is why he has aggressively taken steps over the past six years to stay on the leading edge of this ever-evolving problem."
Carter called for the state to build detox and treatment centers, identifying empty prisons across the state as potential sites, and an end to a Medicaid rule that limits facilities that accept to Medicaid to only 16 beds.
The goal is to be able to provide treatment to anyone, regardless of financial situation, whenever they come looking for it, Carter said.
Ohio has laws that allow family members of a drug addict to ask a county probate court judge to mandate addiction treatment if they can show that the addict is a danger to themselves or the community and would benefit from treatment.
But Carter said those laws fail poor families in many counties because the family is required to pay for the treatment.
Her plan would also go much further, and would expand the government's ability to confine someone into treatment if they were arrested or treated for an overdose.
Carter argues that the state has an interest to force people into rehab because, paramedics have to rush to revive a person who overdosed, that takes services from other people. And when an overdose victim is hospitalized, that affects insurance rates, Carter said.
The plan also calls for the creation of public service announcements, expanding the distribution program for the overdose-reversal drug naloxone and needle exchanges.
Parker is one of more than 300 people who died this year from an overdose of heroin, fentanyl or a combination of the two in Cuyahoga County. The surge in deaths is likely to double 2015's death toll and has left public health officials, law enforcement and grieving families struggling to come to grips with one of the deadliest drug epidemics in decades.
"We have to treat this like the crisis that it is," she said. "Or else we're going to lose an entire generation."