It's the fourth time around for Windsor-Essex Community Health Centre's Not My Kid — Adolescents and Addiction Forum.
The addiction awareness event took over the Giovanni Caboto Club Thursday night in Windsor, it had previously been held in Amherstburg, Kingsville and LaSalle.
Essex County ranks near the top in opioid use in the province according to the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit — but it was cocaine that took the life of speaker Betty Niemi's 36-year-old son Ashley in 2016.
Ashley had been in several programs before finding Cocaine Anonymous, but after a long period of sobriety he had a relapse, and it was his last.
"It worked for him for quite a while and then he went out again," she says. "We all know that tolerance goes down as you are away from it for a while, it's not good, and he died."
Niemi joined several speakers, including recovering addicts, to stress the need to break the stigma.
"Nobody wants to tell anybody that they have this problem because we're embarrassed of the stigma. We think that we caused it or everyone's going to think we're bad parents because we can't take care of it on our own," says Niemi. "The truth is that this isn't something that we can take care of as parents."
She tells AM800 News addiction is a disease that can't be taken lightly.
"If we get sick, we go to a doctor, if we have diabetes we go see a specialist," she says. "If we have addiction issues we need to go to the professionals. We're lucky enough to have a lot of things in this town that we can take advantage of, and we need to let people know that they're out there."
Representatives from the Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, Windsor Police Service and WECHU also presented at the forum.