Jason DeFord, known by his stage name Jelly Roll, gave an emotional opening statement on overdoses at a Senate hearing on fentanyl Thursday:
“My name is Jason DeFord but to most I am known as Jelly Roll. I, it is important to establish earlier, that I am a musician and that I have no political alliance. I am neither Democrat nor Republican. In fact, because of my past, my right to vote has been restricted. Thus far, I have never paid attention to a political race in my life. Ironically, I think that makes me the perfect person to speak about this because fentanyl transcends partisanship and ideology, gentlemen and women. This is a totally different problem. And I was speaking outside to the media and I gave them a statistic that said 190 people a day overdose and die every single day in the United States of America. That is about a 737 plane. That's what about a 737 aircraft can carry. Could you imagine the national media attention it would get if they were reporting that a plane was crashing every single day and killing a 190 people? But because it's a 190 drug addicts we don't feel that way. Because America has been known to bully and shame drug addicts instead of dealing and trying to understand what the actual root of the problem is with that. But the sad news is that that narrative is changing too because the statistics say that in all likelihood almost every person in this room has lost a friend, family member, or colleague to the disease known as addiction. I've attended more funerals than I care to share with y'all. This committee — I could sit here and cry for days about the caskets I've carried of people I loved dearly, deeply, in my soul, good people. Not just drug addicts — uncles, friends, cousins, normal people. Some people that just got in a car wreck and started taking a pain pill to manage it and one thing led to the other. How fast it spirals out of control I don't think people truly, truly understand.”
