Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited North Texas on Tuesday to take a hard line on drug abuse and ending the opioid epidemic.
Sessions spoke to a room full of law enforcement and anti-drug activists from all over the world at the 30th D.A.R.E. International Training Conference in Grapevine.
He called for harsher sentences for drug cases, holding drug companies accountable and cracking down at the border to keep drugs from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.
"This danger and the deaths that we're seeing is unprecedented in the history of the Republic," Sessions said.
The attorney general also spoke out against some of the Obama administration policies that he believes opened the door to more abuse.
"Sentences went down, but crime has gone up," Sessions said. "We need to create a culture and a climate that is hostile to drug use."
Sessions said that overdoses are spiking, with at least 60,000 deaths estimated nationwide last year.
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One of those victims was 20-year-old Jameson Hess, from Colleyville. He overdosed on the highly potent drug fentanyl in September 2016.
His family has since moved to Florida. Speaking to NBC 5 by Skype on Tuesday, Hess's mother, Jennifer Hess, said, "Everybody that knows Jameson loves him. He had just the kindest heart."
Hess shared the pain of watching her son grow from an athletic, outgoing teen to gradually experimenting with drugs, escalating to heroin and eventually that deadly dose of fentanyl.
"Doing drugs is playing Russian roulette," Hess said.
She welcomes the attorney general's tough-on-drugs stance and believes that if stricter laws were in place, her son might still be alive today.
"This drug epidemic does not discriminate," Hess said.
She knows no matter how hard she tried to help, an addiction once formed can be too powerful to fight.
"If you make one bad decision, just instantaneously, you can end up dead and you just can't risk it," Hess said. "It's too dangerous."
Jameson's mother is also advocating for a change in HIPAA privacy laws to let the parents of drug-addicted young adults speak to their child's counselors and doctors, to stay involved in their recovery.
Plus, the family started the Jameson Hess Foundation, hoping his legacy will be to keep other young people alive.
