Meanwhile, the Fishman-Stampler family began advocating for policy changes at the local level. In 2014, one of Jack’s sons, Neil Fishman, a lawyer, successfully pushed for a law in Maine, his home state, that expanded the availability of naloxone for first responders and the family members of those at risk of overdosing. This past February, Joy traveled from South Florida to Tallahassee to speak to a room full of legislators in support of the Miami-Dade Infectious Disease Elimination Act (IDEA). The bill would allow the University of Miami to establish a pilot program to exchange clean needles and syringes for used ones. In 2013, when the bill was introduced, Florida led the nation in new HIV infections, according to data from the state Department of Health; today, Miami-Dade County still has one of the highest rates of new infections in the country, and there isn’t a single needle exchange in the entire state.
The bill has died in the Florida legislature three years in a row. Dr. Hansel Tookes, a resident physician at Jackson Memorial Hospital who helped draft IDEA, hoped Joy’s testimony might give proponents of the bill some of the leverage they’d been missing. “Who doesn’t listen when a mom tells the story of the loss of a child that’s completely preventable?” asks Tookes. “Had her son been in San Francisco, he and his friends would have had naloxone with them and could have reversed the overdose.” Joy didn’t bother to prepare a speech; she just spoke from the heart. “When my son died, I was pretty much alone,” she told legislators. “Now it’s a vast club, and now it’s time that we all rally and get together and clean this up.”
The Florida legislature passed the needle exchange bill, and it was signed into law on March 23. It was a modest victory—part of the gradual shift away from what Joy calls a “junky” mentality, the idea that drug users are worthless and at fault for their condition, and toward a medical, therapeutic approach to treating addiction. It’s happening across the country: A study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence found that in less than five years—from 2010 and 2015—the number of states adopting laws that allow drug users to purchase naloxone at pharmacies went from four to 43 . Joy has set up a private foundation through the DPA in her husband’s memory to fund overdose prevention, including the purchase of naloxone kits for recently released prisoners and, if all goes well, drug users at Florida’s first needle exchange. And she now keeps the antidote her late husband invented in her handbag, always ready to save someone’s life.
