SOMERSET – Students who took time and used their talents to create posters and write essays can be the seed for change that will reduce drug addiction, participants in the Somerset County Red Ribbon Campaign were told Friday.

“Obviously you get it,” District Attorney Lisa Lazzari-Strasiser said during the Red Ribbon Rally at the Somerset County Courthouse.

“I appreciate and applaud your every effort.”

Law enforcement can only do so much, she said. Prevention begins with children and families.

“You must believe that you are the solutions,” Lazzari-Strasiser continued. “Each of you individually, in twos, in tens, in thousands; in your homes, in your classrooms, at work and on the streets: You are the solution to this problem.”

Addressing the audience of several hundred people, Lazzari-Strasiser urged the students to resist peer pressure and make their own decisions.

“Each day, you must awake with the conviction that this day I will say no and I will not allow another person to make a decision in my life.”

Keynote speaker Jason Snyder told the students and their families that they can help fight the stigma of addiction.

Now the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs press secretary, Snyder is a native of the Portage area who struggled with his own addiction.

He told his family’s story, relating how his brothers, Todd and Josh, both died from drug overdoses.

Snyder described his family as a typical middle-class Pennsylvania household.

“Addiction wasn’t on our radar screen,” he told the audience. “Frankly it was never discussed.

But in 2005, Jason’s brother Todd died at age 28 from a heroin overdose.

“We had seen Todd’s life spiraling deeper and deeper into his addiction for several years,” Jason Snyder said. “We knew he was in a bad place. I think we we knew that death was a possibility. But we held on to somehow hope that he would pull out of his addiction.

“Especially because, at least in our minds, this didn’t happen to families like ours.”

When his brother Josh died of an overdose two years later, Jason Snyder said it was a turning point for him.

He was also struggling with addiction, but decided to get help.

“I can only imagine the fear that went though my parents when I told them that their last living child was potentially staring down the same path that their other two children had faced,” he said.

While Snyder said his own recovery has been remarkable, he knows one bad choice and put him back where he was five years ago.

He urged the audience to be open to accepting the change in former addicts.

He said his mother still can’t talk about his brothers with out crying.

“She says there are people in her community who believe that her sons got what they deserved,” Snyder said.

“They were junkies who deserved to die because of what they did. They were essentially throwaways.”

Addiction is a disease, he said, telling the audience to encourage those affected to get help and that treatment can work.

Randy Griffith is a multimedia reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. He can be reached at 532-5057. Follow him on Twitter @PhotoGriffer57.