Children's prescription drug deaths are focus of ad campaign

Tammy Pasanella sobbed as she stood in front of a wall of television cameras and reporters on Friday and recalled how her son, Chandler Valley Christian High School football player Danny Pasanella, slipped into a prescription drug addiction and, ultimately, death.

It was a dramatic turnaround from the days just after her son died in September when, she said, she shunned the media because they were obsessively focusing on Danny's overdose death.

Now Tammy Pasanella is embracing the attention.

She and four other mothers helped launch an ad campaign Friday that will use TV, radio, billboard and print ads to warn other parents about the dangers of prescription drugs.

"The pain that we go through is unbearable and indescribable," Pasanella said at an afternoon news conference at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office in downtown Phoenix. Her son overdosed on a combination of OxyContin, Vicodin, and heroin.

More frequently than ever before, teens are turning to their parents' medicine cabinets to get high on painkillers, the mothers said.

The pattern, as the women showed, can lead to tragedy.

Debbie DiVello said her son, Shaun, became addicted to Methadone after a dirt biking accident.

"Little by little, he was able to 'doctor shop' and get all these prescriptions," she said.

Then on Feb. 3, it killed him. "I lost my son," she said.

One after another, DiVello, Pasanella and the other moms: Cindy Sierzchula, Patte Bielman and Karen Black told similar stories.

"For me, I really felt that something good needed to come out of the loss of my son," said Black, whose son Jacob overdosed on OxyContin a year ago. "If this is the good, then that's the way I have to look at it.

The five were brought together by the Drug Free AZ campaign of the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, which is organizing the local media blitz.

"Prescription drug overdoses by their children have caused great tragedy in their families," said County Attorney Andrew Thomas at the event. "I want to applaud the courage and strength of these mothers."

The campaign will cost nearly $700,000, which includes $60,000 to produce three television ads featuring the mothers which will begin airing on local television soon.