I just want to say that that I lost one of my close friends Thom Simmons last April due to Fentanyl overdose. He was a young, voracious autodidact prodigy that was always way ahead of the curve especially with technology. I met him through the #django irc channel about 7 or 8 years ago when I was starting out with python and django and we developed a friendship that lasted until he overdosed on fentanyl and died in a motel room alone last year. I had reconnected with him in his final weeks as he struggled to get clean and desperately wanted out of his situation but he felt trapped, afraid, alone, and hopeless. He broke down crying to me over the phone a few days before he died, after I helped pay for a night in his motel room because he had run out of money. I didn't realize the full gravity of the situation or know that he had already relapsed at that point and he was dangerously close to the end. I believe that Thom knew it was his last week on Earth and he was saying goodbye to me. He told me what a special friendship we had and how much that meant to him, how he hadn't met many people in his life that he could trust. We laughed a lot about the many memories of late nights programming, scheming on grand ideas for the next major social platform we wanted to build. He showed me Reddit when no one knew what it was, he showed me hackerne.ws before it was known, he helped me set up a trixbox server and program asterisk with voip connections, we built a custom PLC software for a startup and worked on other various projects. We also shared the disease of addiction and unfortunately he couldn't get the help he needed to stay clean and sober. Upon his death all he got was a short blurb in a rural Texas local newspaper, not a word about the amazing person, friend, genius he was. I later found out that 15+ people died of fentanyl overdose in his town that weekend, all of them addicts that lost the battle.

I had to get that out because every time I hear about fentanyl it reminds me of Thom and I hope that our society finds solutions to help addicts overcome the extremely dark and twisted pull of drugs and addiction so that other amazing people like Thom don't meet the same fate.

I'll never forget his memory and the amazing person he was, and that the very fact that I met him and we became friends was because of the same technology he was so fond of.

(http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/pearland/obituary.aspx?pid=...)