Matt Janicki, Flickr
Oct. 13, 2017
Jeremiah Lindemann was featured in a Vice article.
Jeremiah Lindemann never planned to be an advocate in the opioid epidemic. But that's the role he fell into after his younger brother, J.T., died in 2007 at age 23 of pneumonia that was related to OxyContin abuse.
The stigma surrounding the way J.T. died disturbed Jeremiah deeply. "The few people I tried to talk to about my brother were kind of dismissive, so I just didn't talk about it much at all," Jeremiah says of the early months after his brother's death. And as he began seeing more and more news stories about the spiraling opioid crisis, he felt a calling to take action.
As a solution engineer for the mapping software company Esri, Jeremiah harnessed his company's technology to create a story map, Celebrating Lost Loved Ones to the Opioid Epidemic. The map, which currently has about 1,200 faces on it, represents just a sliver of Americans who've died from opioid addiction.