Illinois Valley Community College’s Student Wellness Week will feature a presentation by Luke Tomsha, founder of The Perfectly Flawed Foundation, on November 1, 2024, at the Dr. Mary Margaret Weeg Cultural Center. The talk, focusing on drug facts and overdose response, aims to educate and provide crucial life-saving techniques.
The presentation, part of Illinois Valley Community College’s Student Wellness Week activities, is free and open to the public and will also be viewable via Zoom. Visit https://www.ivcc.edu/
Tomsha, who is a native of the Illinois Valley, will review local overdose prevention services, attempt to combat misinformation regarding drug use, and provide response procedures for overdose situations. The Perfectly Flawed Foundation non-profit in La Salle offers harm reduction, overdose prevention, and peer support services.
For the first time in several years, drug overdose deaths decreased slightly in 2023, though they still outpace traffic accidents as a leading cause of death for young people. Tomsha is encouraged by the decrease and believes his organization’s awareness and harm reduction efforts are making a life-saving impact locally. Overall, “we’re not seeing the fatalities. People might be overdosing, but not fatally.”
“There’s so much stigma surrounding it. Putting knowledge into their hands that they can spread to friends and their network is really important, as is having tools to know how to respond (to an overdose),” Tomsha said.