More than 300K kids have lost a parent to a drug overdose. At this camp, they're not alone

On a dock off a river in Florida, a group of teenagers sit close to each other, some with their arms wrapped around each other, others with tears in their eyes and others staring down at the water below them.

In their hands, the teens each grip a letter they've written to the one thing they all share in common: Addiction.

"I remember feeling unwanted ... then my mom started taking pills just to get high," one teen reads aloud from their letter.

"I hate you addiction ... I hate you for taking away my uncle and because you had my dad in your grasp .... I hate you for taking away good personalities, people that could have had a happy life," says another.

"Your addiction will not define your entire life," another teen writes in a letter addressed to their parent.

As each letter is read, the teens nod their heads in agreement and share knowing glances at each other, a silent acknowledgement that they too have experienced exactly what is being described.

In some cases, the words written on the page are too much to bear, and the teen simply chooses to crumple the paper around a rock and throw it into the river, their feelings wading out into the water.

"Whatever I write on that letter, I throw it in the water, and it's releasing that anger because you kind of get angry when you're writing it and thinking of everything that you're writing about," one of the teens, Madi, 14, of Sarasota, Florida, told ABC News. "When you throw it, it's gone."

Madi, whose last name, like all the young people in this story, is not being shared for privacy, was just shy of her 11th birthday when her dad, Mike, a beloved dad she describes as always laughing and making other people laugh, died of a drug overdose.

"He went to rehab a lot," Madi said of her dad's struggle with addiction, one she's been told started before she was even born. "He tried really hard to get past it, but it just ended up not working out the way that we all wanted it to."

On the night he died, Madi, then a fifth-grader, said she woke up on a family trip to Tennessee to the sound of her mom screaming.

"I remember waking up and my mom was just yelling in the living room. I kept hearing her yelling over the phone," Madi recalled. "I was just kind of in shock. I was numb. I knew what happened, but I didn't know how to process that."

In losing a parent to a drug overdose, Madi unknowingly became part of a generation of loss in the United States rivaling extraordinary times in history like World War II and the coronavirus pandemic.

In just one decade, from 2011 to 2021, more than 321,000 children in the U.S. lost a parent to drug overdose, according to a study published in May in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Over half-a-million people died of drug overdoses in that same time period, meaning half of those who died left behind at least one child.

Both the "magnitude" and the "reverberations" of that level of loss are just beginning to be investigated, the study's authors say.

A refuge where kids are not alone

For the past three years, Madi has spent several weekends per year at a place she and her fellow campers describe as a refuge from the realities they face at home.

The camp, known as Camp Mariposa, is designed specifically for children who have a parent with a substance abuse issue.

"It was really hard and then I started coming to camp and it just started to get easier as time went on," Madi said of grieving her dad's death. "The one thing I really took onto was ... I can’t control what happened but now that it’s already happened, I can better myself and grow."

In some cases, like Madi's, campers have lost a parent to substance abuse, most commonly, to drug overdoses. In other cases, the child is still living with the parent through the addiction, or is in the care of a loved one or a foster family.

Jeremiah, 17, started attending Camp Mariposa nearly five years ago when he was introduced to it by his foster parent. At home, Jeremiah said he was raised by a single mother who struggles with opioid abuse.

"It's very hard. My auntie that was like 21 at the time, she kind of had to take care of us," said Jeremiah, who has been in and out of foster care since age 12. "It was me, two brothers, three sisters. It was basically us living in a two-bedroom ... I felt like I had to be a man and take care of my younger siblings."

As a high school junior in Sarasota, Jeremiah said only his closest friends know what he's been through. At camp, he says he openly shares his story because he is not alone.

"It makes me feel comfortable coming here because I wouldn't get judged," he said. "I can work as a team, and make new friends, and they can become family."

Camp Mariposa was started in 2007 and exploded in growth over the next two decades alongside a growing opioid epidemic in the U.S.

In 2021, six times as many people died of a drug overdose as in 1999. Last year, there were an estimated 107,543 drug overdose deaths in the U.S., a 3% decrease from the previous year but still a high number of deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After seeing their young niece be impacted by her mother's addiction, former pro baseball pitcher Jamie Moyer and his wife Karen Phelps Moyer worked with an addiction expert to launch Camp Mariposa in Washington state in 2007.

Three years later, the couple's foundation, now known as Eluna, began a national expansion of Camp Mariposa, which translates in Spanish to butterfly, signifying the transformation that happens to children who attend the camp.

Each year, nearly 800 kids ages 9 to 17 attend Camp Mariposa weekends across 17 locations in 11 states. The camps are purposefully located in communities heavily impacted by the opioid crisis, according to Brian Maus, Eluna's director of addiction prevention and mentoring programs.

With as many as 2 million kids in the U.S. living with a parent with a substance abuse disorder, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, Maus said the camp continues to need to grow each year.

Campers pay nothing to attend Camp Mariposa, which Eluna supports through a combination of federal grants, corporate support and private donations.

In some areas, local organizations step up to help support and expand the camps in order to reach more kids. The teen camp in Sarasota is run by Jewish Family & Children’s Service of the Suncoast, Inc. (JFCS), a nonprofit organization that saw a need to increase support locally for teens impacted by addiction.

Along with camp activities like swimming, horseback riding, ropes courses and s'mores, Camp Mariposa offers mental health support specifically designed for kids living with substance abuse around them. The camps are technology-free zones, with no phones allowed.

Abby, a 19-year-old counselor at Camp Mariposa in Sarasota, started attending the camp as a camper at age 10 and now calls it her "second home."

As a child, Abby said her mom and dad and other relatives all suffered from addiction. She describes her childhood as a "dark part" of her life, while Camp Mariposa provided one bright spot.

"I remember being really hungry. I remember being alone for weeks at a time, and I was also an older sibling to my younger brother, so I was kind of like a parent already at that point," she said of her childhood. "[Camp Mariposa] always felt like an escape from all of the responsibility. Coming to camp really helped me be a kid again."

'I've learned that it's not my fault'

In addition to sometimes facing abuse and lacking basic necessities like food, water and shelter, children of addicted parents often face feelings of guilt, isolation, shame, depression and anxiety. The children of addicts are also more likely to struggle themselves with addiction, research shows.

Counselors at Camp Mariposa, many of whom, like Abby, were once campers, all have their own stories of living with a parent or loved one with substance abuse issues. Their conversations with campers include frank talk about the reality that addiction is genetic, and something they will have to proactively fight throughout their lives.

Camp Mariposa leaders cite success by pointing to a multi-year study led by researchers at Louisiana State University that found after attending camp, over 90% of campers reported both not experimenting with substances and staying out of the juvenile justice system.

Campers in Sarasota heard from a guest speaker whose mom, who raised him as a single mom, died of a drug overdose in 2016, while he was in high school. Now in his 20s, he told the campers how even his baseball teammates and coaches in high school didn't know his personal story, including that he was at times sleeping in his car and taking baths in the ocean before going to school and baseball practice.

As he opened up about his own story of a childhood exposed to addiction, the campers opened up about their fears and concerns, including feelings of guilt and like they were to blame for their parents' struggles.

Affera, a 14-year-old camper in Sarasota, said she grew up watching her dad abuse alcohol. Through camp, she said she has learned that her dad's substance abuse issues are, "not because he doesn't love me."

Campers at Mariposa learn early the seven "C"s of coping with a parent with an addiction: "I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it. But I can take care of myself by communicating my feelings, making good choices and celebrating myself."

"I've learned that it's not my fault, and that I'm not the problem in the situation, because for a lot of years I thought that it was me," Affera said. "It's hard to see somebody that is supposed to be your caregiver and be there for you and that you love go through that and kind of just ruin their life and not be able to control themselves."

Because she didn't feel like she could open up to friends about her dad's struggles, Affera said she developed "a lot of anxiety" from feeling like she was alone in having a parent with an addiction.

Abby said while she believes the statistics about kids impacted by a parents' substance abuse, she knows there is more to the story.

"Unfortunately, coming here, I've known that this is a much bigger issue than a lot of people even understand," Abby said. "We have no idea what's going on behind any closed door."

Most Mariposa campers say camp is the first place they've met and talked to other kids going through the same struggle, even though they're likely in classes and sitting in the same cafeteria as fellow kids touched by addiction.

"I tell my friends who I ask to support the camp, 'These kids are your grandkids. They're your grandkids' friends," said Barry Josephson, who has been a volunteer for Camp Mariposa in Sarasota since its inception.

Madison, a 14-year-old high school freshman, was 2-years-old when her dad died of a drug overdose. She said she did not really know kids whose parents struggled with addiction until she found Camp Mariposa.

"It makes me feel normal, like I'm not alone," Madison said. "It feels more like a way for me to just be somewhere where it is safe to talk about it if I need to, but somewhere where I can be around people who have experienced it too and need that distraction."

Giselle, 14, a high school freshman who has attended Camp Mariposa for six years, said when she's at camp, "It just makes me happier."

"It makes me get my mind off of stuff that's been going on at home," she said. "I feel more comfortable being around kids who know what it's like to go through what I'm going through. I can't really talk about it with other kids. I feel like they'll just make fun of me."

After hours spent having fun in an inclusive space, the final moments of each session of Camp Mariposa are spent in quiet as campers sit next to each other and write their own letter to addiction.

For the first time at camp, there is silence. None of the campers seem at a loss for words though as they feverishly write on paper.

"We take this as a serious moment, writing down our feelings and our thoughts ... anything that you're going through that you want to get off your mind," Jeremiah, who hopes to run track in college one day, said of the letter writing. "We put it in a rock and throw it in a river as hard as you can."

When the letters are gone in the water and their emotions are out, the campers gather for a group hug on the dock, holding each other tight.

Then they walk off the dock together, calculating out loud to each other how many weeks until they return again to Camp Mariposa.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the free, 24/7 SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.