This is our second Moms Strong Quilt. Go to our Quilts page to see both. On both quilts, we share with you the tributes of parents to the children they loved and nurtured. These parents loved and sacrificed, only to have their children’s lives taken in their prime by the disease of addiction or by the careless acts of another, such as the case of a DUID traffic death.
Contrary to what the marijuana activists say, marijuana does indeed kill. We who are suffering the loss of a beloved child or family member can attest to that. This is the second memorial quilt designed by MomsStrong, to bring the threat of marijuana harms into stark relief.
We thank the parents who so bravely share these cautionary tales, with the hope of educating others about the dangers of cannabis. We grieve alongside them and hope that their happy memories will comfort them.
To see the quilt in a larger format, please click here: Memorial Quilt 2
Note: a larger digital file is available upon request.
Click here to see the original Moms Strong quilt.
Would you like to join us and help educate others? Visit MomsStrong.org/contact/.
I just saw these for the first time.
How very incredible.
My son Andy Zorn is on the first quilt. I now know so many of these families as we work together to bring awareness of the risks and harms of today’s marijuana.
It is heart breaking. We work toward not needing to create a 3rd Moms Strong quilt in the future.
Thank you Moms Strong for the awareness you raise.
Just wondering if you are as adamantly opposed to alcohol and legally prescribed opioids which are responsible for many more suicides and deaths than marijuana. Do you yourselves “social drink”? Many ppl could benefit medically from marijuana, but cannot afford the high cost of a medical card. Making it readily available would help those of us. It’s about being RESPONSIBLE, like with ANYTHING we do.
Sue, you are correct that alcohol and opiates have a strong impact on suicide risk, as do many drugs and other factors, including tobacco, amphetamines, cocaine, some antidepressant medications, access to firearms, economic hardship, divorce, abuse during childhood, and posttraumatic stress disorder, to list just a few. Fortunately, the use of opiates is a problem for a small fraction of the population, as only 0.1% used heroin in the past month in the U.S. (2018 data): https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/national-drug-early-warning-system-ndews/national-survey-drug-use-health, and therefore, although it carries a high risk for contributing to suicide deaths (about 14x the average risk; Darke and Ross, 2002), this does not translate into large numbers of suicides (most heroin deaths are accidental overdoses; Conner et al., 2007). Marijuana is the recreational drug that is second only to alcohol and tobacco in prevalence of use, https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/national-drug-early-warning-system-ndews/national-survey-drug-use-health and the numbers of users are still increasing. Its risk for being associated with suicide attempts in teens has been found to be as high as 7x in two studies (Silins et al., 2014 and Clarke et al., 2014), with about a 5x increase in risk for completed suicides in adults who are heavy users (Arendt et al., 2013). Because marijuana is used monthly by about 10% of the population (a hundred times the rate of heroin use), it kills more people by suicide than heroin. With regard to alcohol, it too poses a risk for suicide attempts (up to about 3x), but the use rate of alcohol over time has been relatively stable, unlike marijuana. Therefore, the need to get the marijuana message out remains the focus of the Moms Strong website, because too many young people and their families do not know the science on its harms. Moms Strong cannot possibly cover all the factors that increase suicide or psychosis risk, and was set up to focus on just one, the drug that led to the death of the son of the Moms Strong founder.