Note: Although this posting comes too late to support their call for participation at today’s State House hearings on Rep. Denise Provost’s legislation (H. 1944, H.3813 – An Act to combat drug addiction among urban youth), there is still time to contact the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse to urge favorable action.

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The young men of the McLaughlin family and their peers  have lived through a dramatic shift in Somerville’s population: the city they knew as children is forever changed, and, in many ways, the community they looked to for support is gone.

Feeling lost in a changing world, too many of their friends have been lost to drug addiction.   You may have read Mark McLaughlin’s angry and elegiac speech about his fallen friends, published in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago and also posted here on Somerville Voices.

Instead of turning their backs on the City, Mark and Matt McLaughlin have become community activists, helping found and lead “Save Our Somerville”  in efforts to fight displacement, and to address the lack of adequate resources for supporting positive youth development and preventing addiction and further drug-related losses.

Matt and Mark McLaughlin were interviewed on SCAT’s Progressive Voices a couple of weeks ago.