When April Babcock comes home to her Dundalk bungalow after a day of cleaning houses, her work is far from finished.
Babcock has set up a base of operations for her nonprofit, Lost Voices of Fentanyl, inside her son Austen’s old bedroom. The walls are plastered with photos – not only of her son, though there are many, but also of the hundreds of other children who have been killed by fentanyl poisoning.
“I call it my war room,” she said.
It’s here where she keeps tabs on news stories that break about fentanyl deaths: 10-year-old and 14-year-old siblings in Perryville, Maryland; the son of former Baltimore Ravens player Ray Lewis in Florida; and the list goes on.
Babcock founded the nonprofit on Oct. 7, 2020, a year and a half after Austen’s death on Jan. 26, 2019. For the past three and a half years she has fought to bring awareness and action against fentanyl poisoning, and she hopes to one day ensure that other families don’t experience the pain hers has endured.
Where everything started
Austen was “a good kid,” “an absolute sweetheart,” a “mama’s boy,” and the middle of three children, Babcock said.
“He was no drama,” she said. “He was the kid I would never have worried about.”
In kindergarten, he started playing soccer on his older sister’s team. That love of sports continued throughout his schooling, and as a goalie he earned the nickname “Sloth” for his long arms and his penchant for scooping the ball out of the air like it was stuck to his hands.
Austen was a dedicated student, but a learning disability caused him to be on a third grade reading level as a freshman. In his senior year of high school, he was kicked off his soccer team after receiving more than one failing grade.
“That is where I noticed everything started,” Babcock said.
Unable to play the sport he loved, Austen started hanging out with an entirely new group of friends. At first, he was just smoking cigarettes and pot. Later, he started popping Xanax pills, doing whippets, and snorting cocaine, Babcock said.
In January 2019, he ingested cocaine that, unbeknownst to him, contained fentanyl.
“My son started using drugs at 19 and he was dead by 25,” Babcock said. “You don’t have time in this day and age…. I used drugs from the age of 23 to 41 years old, and I am alive to talk about it because fentanyl wasn’t in the drug supply.”
She added, “I’m not condoning it. I’m not saying it’s a great life. But before fentanyl, in all reality, people had decades and decades and decades of survival and an opportunity to get clean and sober. My son’s chances of sobriety were stolen from him.”
Opening doors
For more than a year after Austen’s death, Babcock was lucky if she could get two or three hours of sleep a night.
“I was like a zombie,” she said.
Now, she’s able to sleep five or six hours. And in her waking hours, she is fueled by her passion to prevent the suffering of other families.
“I remind myself where my son is, and I remind myself that I have to fight for the living,” she said, “because honestly, I don’t fight for my kid. He’s dead. I fight for the living to live, especially these teenagers.”
Babcock doesn’t want other parents and loved ones to experience the pain she feels.
“I know what’s coming down the pike,” she said “Every day, 300 more families are going to be me. There’s going to be 300 more moms screaming.”
Earlier this year, People magazine named Babcock as one of the publication’s “Women Changing the World.”
“I was like, ‘People magazine? Am I getting punked?'” Babcock said.
After the disbelief faded, the significance of the honor set in.
“I feel like all my hard work is finally getting recognized,” she said.
Many Facebook groups for families affected by fentanyl are private, and the only way to join is to have a child who has died from fentanyl, Babcock said. She felt there needed to be a space that was open to all, in order to spread awareness to the general public and spur change. Today, Lost Voices of Fentanyl has more than 33,000 members in their public Facebook group.
“The days of crying behind closed doors are over,” Babcock said. “We can’t sit behind closed doors. We can’t stay silent. The world needs to know what’s going on.”
Babcock describes Lost Voices of Fentanyl as a “prevention and awareness and action group.” They lobby lawmakers for change, give educational presentations at schools and other community centers, and spread awareness through banners and other materials.
The group will hold its fourth annual rally on July 13 at the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. The event will run from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., with a rally taking place for the last two hours in front of the White House.
Although the nonprofit isn’t a grief group, they do provide support to families affected by fentanyl deaths. Babcock said she personally is on the phone every night from about 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., helping people who have lost loved ones to fentanyl.
“When there’s a mom in a hole, I’m gonna jump down in that hole with her,” Babcock said. “There’s a lot of moms that are very close with me right now that are in a hole because death of a child is debilitating.”
Through Lost Voices of Fentanyl, Babcock has connected with countless parents and family members like her, including the nonprofit’s vice president Virginia Krieger, whose daughter Tiffany Robertson died from fentanyl poisoning in 2015 after taking a Percocet pill for back pain. Like Austen, Tiffany didn’t know what she was taking contained fentanyl.
Babcock said she and Krieger met in 2022 when they were both among a group of about 20 people invited to a fentanyl roundtable in Ohio. Krieger was giving a presentation on ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases) codes on autopsy reports.
“I think she’s the most intelligent when it comes to this crisis,” said Babcock, who later brought Krieger on board to her nonprofit.
Together, they have worked to raise awareness and push for change.
Awareness and action
Lost Voices of Fentanyl has worked to educate people about the dangers of fentanyl and reframe how fentanyl deaths are portrayed.
The nonprofit argues that “overdose” is an inaccurate term when it comes to fentanyl and many other drugs. It has called on politicians, media outlets, and the general public to define these deaths as “fentanyl poisonings” instead.
“Overdose means there’s a safe dose to take,” Babcock explained. “You take too much of that substance and it causes death or harm.”
But there is no safe dose of non-pharmaceutical fentanyl, she said. Additionally, fentanyl is frequently snuck into the supply of other illicit drugs without the knowledge or consent of users.
“If you go and purchase one thing and die from something completely different, how in the world is that not a poisoning?” she said. “Anytime anyone disguises a harmful substance in anything for another person to consume without their knowledge and it causes death or harm, that’s the very definition of a poisoning.”
In 2023, overdose deaths decreased for the first time since 2018, declining 3% compared to 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. However, the death toll remains high, with the United States recording 107,543 drug overdose deaths in 2023 (including 81,083 specifically involving opioids).
Lost Voices of Fentanyl advocates for expanding the availability of the opioid death prevention drug Narcan.
“We want Narcan everywhere there’s a fire extinguisher,” Babcock said.
The nonprofit has also pushed for stricter laws for drug distributors, including Victoria & Scottie’s Law in Maryland, which would prohibit distributing fentanyl and heroin without lawful authority.
The legislation, which was named in honor of two victims of fentanyl poisoning, did not pass the Maryland General Assembly this session. But Babcock said she will continue to push Maryland and other states to make more progress on addressing the fentanyl crisis, including implementing drug-induced homicide laws in every state.
“There needs to be real penalties to make people not want to do certain things like sell illicit drugs without consequences to actions,” she said. “There’s too much money to be had in dealing drugs, and money trumps human lives.”
Babcock added that criminalization is not a cure-all for the crisis, but intervention for those who are jailed for drug crimes could give people a better chance at recovery.
“I know locking up drug users is not the fix to this crisis…. But if you don’t have drug court, jail might be the only thing that saves your child that is suffering from the morgue,” she said.
