'Not Even Once' A Powerful Tale of Opiate Addiction And Loss: Manchester Police

MANCHESTER TOWNSHIP, NJ - Shelley Lowe remembers keeping watch over her son when Adam was a baby, making sure he was still breathing while he slept.

A relative had lost a baby to sudden infant death syndrome and she wanted to make sure that didn't happen to Adam.

Her great heartbreak was that she wasn't there to protect him on the night the young man died.

"Nobody was watching Adam breathe that night," she said.

Adam W. Lowe Jr. died on Nov. 28, 2016, away from his family. He was 28 years old.

The middle-class boy who grew up in Whiting had a good life. He had a good life until he began hanging out with friends who used drugs. Eventually he began using opiates and admitted to his mother he was using heroin.

"You are the ones you hang out with," she said.

But his mother says she doesn't blame Adam's friends, but the lack of education he needed to know the perils of opiates.

"He had a choice," she says. "He would be knee-deep in addiction before he even knew what hit him."

Here's the video:

Shelley Lowe and her husband agreed to tell Adam's story in the hope it might steer other young people away from the opiate scourge.

"This is not a disease," she said. "This is a plague. You can't try opiates, not even once."

The Manchester Township police department is now training police officers in other departments about how to education students about the dangers of opiates.

“Mrs. Lowe agreed to assist our #NotEvenOnce program because she wants to prevent this type of tragedy from happening to other families," Manchester Police Chief Lisa Parker said. "Because of how moving this video is, I wanted to share it beyond the classroom and with our entire community with hopes that her message of prevention will be heard loud and clear.”

The video, entitled “Through the Eyes of a Mother, the Adam Lowe Jr. Story,” is a cornerstone of the Manchester police department's interactive high school opiate awareness program "Not Even Once."

"We invite all residents to view and share this video on the “#NotEvenOnce” page of our police website" Parker said.

The video link www.ManchesterPoliceNJ.com/Not-Even-Once also has more information and resources regarding the #NotEvenOnce program.

The Manchester program is taught by police officers in a collaborative effort between law enforcement and educators to inform students about opiate dangers before they leave for college or enter the work force, Parker said.

'The ultimate goal behind this program is to educate students about opiate abuse and give them the tools they need to make better decisions," Parker said. "This video will be shown to students so that they have a clear understanding of how drug abuse impacts families."

So far, almost 400 law enforcement officers and educational professionals have been trained by Manchester police to teach the program in local school districts, she said.

Photo and video courtesy of the Manchester Township Police Department