Perfectly Flawed Foundation to present during IVCC Wellness Week

The Perfectly Flawed Foundation founder Luke Tomsha will present drug facts and overdose response techniques in a presentation at noon on Friday, Nov. 1, in the Dr. Mary Margaret Weeg Cultural Center.

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/studentsuccess/events.php to preregister for the Zoom meeting and access the link.

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.

Drug overdose deaths decreased slightly in 2023 for the first time in several years, though they consistently 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.”

College-aged adults are likely to have encountered drug use, either in their own experimentation or from being around friends and acquaintances or exposed at concerts and other venues where it occurs, Tomsha said. "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),” he said.

He says he wants the presentation to be a safe place to share experiences, as well as being informative. “This will be a casual event, a safe space to ask questions without judgment. I bring lived experience, as someone who has used drugs,” he added.

Tomsha also expects to address drug use myths, noting that usage is a spectrum that includes experimentation, recreational use and prescription use – and does not automatically equal addiction. Trusting other misinformation about the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl or Good Samaritan laws can impede responses to drug crises -- and delays of even minutes cost lives, he said.