Click to print this article

Grieving mother worked to change law

Charlotte Wethington is convinced her son would be alive if she could have signed him into a treatment center and kept him there until he was free. But through her perseverance, families from Ashland to Paducah, Ky., who have someone struggling with addiction now can do what Kentucky law wouldn't let her do for her son.

Charlotte and her husband, Jim, watched Casey try repeatedly to withdraw from heroin over a six-month period. He'd tried cold turkey, tried methadone, he'd asked his parents to check him into St. Luke Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center in Falmouth, Ky.

Looking back, Charlotte says St. Luke was her son's last best hope. He signed himself out after six days. It didn't matter that he was addicted to heroin. Under Kentucky law, at least at the time, anyone over the age of 18 could not be legally compelled to stay in a drug or alcohol treatment program. His parents could do nothing to stop him.

Casey was 23. Six months later, on Aug. 19, 2002, he overdosed for the third time. This time, it was fatal.

"If I had known how to work the system, as one parent related to me recently, it might have been different," Charlotte says. She is 55, a retired elementary school teacher who lives in the rural Kenton County burg of Atwood.

"This woman knew the terminology to use. She knew to say that her son had a 'suicidal ideation,' that he had a 'methodology' and a plan. She knew how to say all those things. "She also knew she could tell the people at the treatment center, 'OK, if you let my son leave and he commits suicide, I'm coming after you.' "I didn't know how to say those things. I didn't know how to lie -- although I really wouldn't have been lying if I'd said Casey had told me he didn't want to be here anymore, because he did say that.

"But then everyone told me he actually had to say he had a plan. He actually had to lay it out for me to really believe he was serious. "And he was, in fact, through the overdoses. If that's not trying to commit suicide, I don't know what is. Intentionally or not, that was going to be the result. It was the result."

Almost immediately after her son's death, Charlotte began working to change the law. She asked Rep. Tom Kerr, R-Taylor Mill, to sponsor what would become known as the Matthew Casey Wethington Act for Substance Abuse and Addiction.

Initially, the bill was written to allow parents, relatives or friends of addicts or alcoholics to petition the court to order treatment. The person with the problem would have to undergo two professional evaluations to determine if the situation qualified as an addiction. Kerr first introduced the bill in January, 2003, but it died in the House health and welfare committee. "The issue was funding, which I refer to as the 'F word,'" Charlotte says. "So we rewrote it to make it a private pay, meaning that whoever petitions the court would be the person who pays for the treatment."

Charlotte didn't give up. She became a familiar face in Frankfort. She became involved in a grassroots group called People Advocating Recovery, and she learned to network. And she actively sought out speaking engagements, sharing the story of her son's descent into heroin addiction, evangelizing about the bill named in his memory with churches, women's groups, civic organizations, schools, political caucuses, even a prison.

She set about finding the buttons to push, and then she pushed them. Kerr introduced the bill again this past January. This time, it went to the House judiciary committee as House Bill 77. Again, the bill appeared to be going nowhere until Sen. Katie Stein, R-Fort Thomas, suggested it be added as an amendment to another bill that was focused on the hospitalization of disabled or incapacitated persons. That bill, House Bill 67, had already been approved in the House and was awaiting a Senate vote. The Senate voted 33-0 to attach Casey's amendment to House Bill 67 on Friday, March 26, which meant it had to go back to the House -- first, to agree to the amendment, then to approve the entire package for the governor's signature.

On the following Monday, the last day the General Assembly could take legislative action, the amendment underwent a last-minute revision so that only immediate family members could petition the court for drug or alcohol treatment. In what Charlotte will forever recall as a surreal turn of events, the amended bill was approved by a vote of 94-1 around 7:30 that evening.

The next day, Charlotte was back at her home on a ridge in Atwood, stirring a pot of vegetarian chili, telling me about the events in Frankfort and how her life had changed since her son's death. "I am so grateful to Casey for causing me to step out of my box," she said. "I would never have made myself so visible or vulnerable.

This advocacy work, it's what I'll do the rest of my life -- I'll also be in recovery the rest of my life. Not from addiction but from the results of addiction -- from the grief that happens when the bottom for someone you love is death. "The situations I used to feel most at ease in are the ones I now feel least comfortable in.

Now, the people I feel the most connection to are the homeless and helpless and hopeless. "I remember hearing someone say that he hoped to live to see the day when addicts and alcoholics are raised to the status of the aluminum can. These aren't throwaway people we're talking about."

Her next task is to look into ways to get funding for the Matthew Casey Wethington Act. I'm not betting against her. "When you lose a child, you could never believe your heart could hurt so badly, and you could still go on living," she said. "So I know the pain of other parents who are watching their children kill themselves little by little. And I don't want anybody else to have to suffer that same devastation. Whatever it takes. Whatever I can do."

Publication Date: 04-03-2004