All the speakers agreed on that message at the Nov. 19 “Beyond the Shadows” event.

“Addiction is not a choice,” said Seanna Herring-Jensen, director of the Arlington Community Resource Center. “You can’t just choose to go clean. I wish there was a silver bullet, but it’s a matter of recovering from trauma.”

Between self-medication, peer pressure and family circumstances, Herring-Jensen noted there’s no single reason why young people turn to drugs. She cited the importance of providing accessible, affordable mental health care to help combat addiction, and insisted it can happen to anyone.

“So often, you’ll hear people say, ’That couldn’t happen in our family,’” Herring-Jensen said. “But it happens in the best of families.”

Arlington High School counselor Shanna Crookes went even further, asserting that addiction is not a moral failing.

“Shame and stigma perpetuate the problem,” said Crookes, who emphasized that every child should have at least three positive adult role models, besides their parents, to help them thrive.

Crookes touted the importance of developing a sense of community to combat drug addiction, and praised Arlington for being “a little ahead of the curve” in recognizing that it is facing a drug epidemic.

“Parents don’t want to know their kids are addicts, so they dismiss the evidence they see,” Arlington Police Officer Rory Bolter said. “Parents go into denial about their children’s addiction because they find it embarrassing, but if you wait too long to deal with it, it gets so bad that it becomes that much harder to stay off it.”

Bolter has interacted with homeless youth who are caught in the downward spiral of self-medicating with heroin to cope with their circumstances, so he knows the difficulty of breaking the cycle.

“When all the friends you have left are addicts like you, what are your options?” Bolter asked. “Heroin is especially bad, because it leaves you chasing the dragon, just trying to get through the night.”

Lindsey Greinke founded Hope Soldiers to provide free support and resources to those impacted by addiction, after dealing with her own drug dependencies.

She’s been free of drugs and alcohol for four and a half years, but she remains dismayed at the number of drug-related deaths in the area.

Three of Greinke’s friends, from her high school graduating class, have died of drug overdoses in the past year alone.

“Drug addiction plunges you into an identity crisis,” Greinke said.”You don’t know who you are or where you belong.”

Arlington’s Lisa Martin shared her perspective as the mother of an addict. In April, the TV show “Intervention” filmed an episode about her 21-year-old daughter’s addiction.

“It hurts to watch someone you love commit slow suicide,” Martin said, recalling how her younger daughter’s dalliance with alcohol led into heroin addiction. “She fell in love with the feeling. She was mentally addicted from the very first, and became physically addicted within her first week.”

Martin recounted how her daughter slept on the streets and in her car, resorting to shoplifting to afford her next hit.

She also admitted that she’d been in denial about her daughter’s addiction, especially since they’d spoken several times before about drug abuse.

“It doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent if your kid has an addiction,” Martin said. “We need to get rid of that stigma. Addiction is a disease, like cancer.”

Martin was devastated when she first saw her daughter’s living conditions.

“There was garbage and rat feces and needles everywhere,” Martin said. “Addiction almost destroyed my family.”

Martin commended Arlington police for helping “to turn Arlington back into the Arlington that I know and love,” even as she exhorted her audience to think twice about the homeless people they might want to overlook.

“Those people on the street are not throwaway people,” Martin said. “They’re our children.”