What Heroin Sounds Like
Four in five new heroin users started out misusing prescription painkillers.
About
We are a community based collective of artists, activists, students and concerned citizens located in Lebanon Pennsylvania. Our focus is to draw awareness to the growing heroin and opioid epidemic ravaging our community. It is the aim of this group to create awareness, tear away the stigma of addiction and hold accountable both ourselves and local government to the responsibility we possess as a community to end this crisis.
What Heroin Sounds Like is a student-driven project creating a community based collective through activists and artists. The purpose of our projects is to activate the community through a combination of art and storytelling to give a voice to people without a sounding board to allow for their stories to arrive at places of power. As a community we must take responsibility of raising awareness and ending the stigma surrounding addiction, because this concern is not something a person can carry alone. Together we possess the power to create community change.
Our Stories
Our project's founder, Adam Delmarcelle, connected with others that have been affected from the Heroin epidemic in Lebanon. The following stories have been shared with us from family members that have lost their loved ones because of this crisis. Please take the time to read through everyone's story, it isn't the picture that you imagined someone struggling with a substance use disorder would paint. Our hopes in telling these stories is to break the stigma surrounding addiction and help those struggling with it and to let them know there are people willing to support them.
Drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the US, with 52,404 lethal drug overdoses in 2015. Opioid addiction is driving this epidemic, with 20,101 overdose deaths related to prescription pain relievers, and 12,990 overdose deaths related to heroin in 2015.
Projects
The What Heroin Sounds Like project encompasses multiple subprojects within itself to maximize reach and accomplish our goals through different means. The original set of projects: the posters, installation, and projections were headed by the project's founder, Adam Delmarcelle. Later, the project was introduced to students at Lebanon Valley College as part of an Arnold Grant to further the project with the website and Days of Making components. The latest project included Associate Professor Mathew Samuel's Design for Good class in creating a colloquium experience.
Days of Making
So far, two days of making with three families have taken place. These events are designed to give families the ability to express how the crisis affected has them and the life of the person they lost. Students and volunteers worked with those families to facilitate art creation in hopes of applying therapeutic properties as an emotional outlet. The artwork produced during these events will be displayed in other aspects of the What Heroin Sounds Like project.
Colloquium Series at Lebanon Valley College
As a component of the “What Heroin Sounds Like” project, Associate Professor of Digital Communications Mathew Samuel and students in his Design for Good course (DCOM 395), in collaboration with local activist and founder Adam Delmarcelle, will create a site-specific installation that seeks to re-create the physical and mental feeling of addiction.
Projections
What Heroin Sounds Like stages building projections in public areas in order to engage and bring awareness to the community about their message. Building projections became the next phase of our activist project after our guerrilla poster hangings were being destroyed. The idea of projections was chosen as a medium for our cause in order to reach locations otherwise untouchable and temporary. Projections also enable us the ability to speak to our audience through moving messages.
Posters
“I was making work to be able to deal with my grief.” Following the death of his brother on September 19th, 2014 to a heroin overdose, Adam Delmarcelle began creating poster after poster expounding upon his emotions surrounding his loss. Initially the posters had no explicit purpose, other than a way for Delmarcelle to vent his frustrations; however, most of the work was politically fueled. While they obviously displayed messages his grief and sadness, they were also of how the system failed Delmarcelle’s brother and his family, how poorly the local police handled the case, and how hypercritical he was being about the local government.