Advocacy

Valentine’s Day is normally filled with roses and candy, happiness and memories of celebrating the ones we love. I had always been a mom to make a big deal of holidays and birthdays and just as I was staring at my son’s Valentine’s gift bag, our phone rang. At 8:37 pm, on February 14, 2021, our world changed forever.

On a Thursday morning in October, Sandy Snodgrass was given the news that no parent should ever have to hear. Her son, Robert Bruce Snodgrass, was found dead. He had died from a fentanyl overdose.

The detective said to me, “If we had a 911 Good Samaritan law or a Narcan law, your son might very well be alive.”

These were men that drank and played hard during a time when there was less discrimination over a swing and a swig. Men whose substance use were denied or protected, sometimes even by the sportswriters who sat at the bar with them.