Dave Kopeny

This work is personal. Long before it was my profession, it was my childhood.

I had tried marijuana, acid and mushrooms before I turned ten, all of it handed to me by family members and their friends. My father was an alcoholic carrying PTSD he never spoke about. My brother and my sister in law both died from drug abuse.

So when I sat across from a frightened parent later in my career, I was never guessing. I already knew what that house felt like from the inside.

I spent three decades working with families whose child was involved with drugs, and with everything that travels alongside it: the criminality, the mental health struggles, the high risk behaviour that frightens a parent long before anyone says the word addiction out loud.

As a school counselor, a juvenile probation officer, a gang investigator and a private investigator, I watched this country's war on drugs fail the people it claimed to protect. I watched it fail families who were doing everything they had been told to do.

That is why I wrote the book, and that is why ASAP Community exists. Not to tell parents they are failing. To tell them they matter more than anyone has bothered to say.