An 11-foot, 800-pound burnt heroin spoon sculpture meant to call attention to the opioid crisis was dropped in front of the Massachusetts State House Friday morning, a gift to Attorney General Maura Healey from the Spoon Movement.
The Spoon Movement is a non-profit meant to call out those in the pharmaceutical industry who are responsible for the opioid crisis and well as highlight those who are fighting against the crisis.
It was founded by gallery owner Fernando Alvarez and sculptor Domenic Esposito, who dropped the 800-pound burnt heroin spoon sculpture in front of Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Connecticut back in June.
Now, Esposito and Alvarez are gifting the sculpture to Healey as a thank you gift for the attorney general’s efforts to curb the opioid crisis. In June — days before the sculpture appeared at Purdue, but after production on the sculpture already began — Healey announced a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma specifically, suing them for the opioid manufacturer’s role in the nationwide epidemic.
“When the lawsuit came out, I remember staying up pretty late into the night reading 77 pages of documents, and I said, ‘This is amazing, this is the first time in any of the lawsuits someone is actually naming executives, naming the Sackler family specifically,” Esposito said. “ Lawsuits like what Healey is doing are tremendously important.”
With that lawsuit, Massachusetts became a leader in fighting the opioid crisis as the first state to hold pharmaceutical executives personally responsible for their role in fueling the epidemic.
Esposito created the burnt heroin spoon sculpture after his brother, who struggled with addiction for over a decade, overdosed. It’s a dark symbol of his disease, he said — at the height of his brother’s addiction, his mother would call Esposito, panicked, to say she found “another burnt spoon” — but it also shows the dark truth of the overall opioid crisis.
“Eighty percent of addicts will admit to having started on some synthetic opioid, like oxycontin and percocet. That’s the link, that’s why the spoon,” he said. “You start off with this clean way of taking a drug … and then you run out of money, because they’re relatively expensive, and then you move on to heroin, and then it’s basically game over.”
What will happen to the Spoon Movement heroin spoon sculpture next?
Esposito wants Healey to know that the spoon sculpture is truly a gift, not a protest like when the Spoon Movement dropped the sculpture in front of Purdue. And he hopes she likes it, he said with a laugh.
“Not too many people are going to get an 800-pound spoon as a gift for their efforts,” he said.
Friday morning’s sculpture delivery was a surprise, Esposito said, and he hopes that the Spoon Movement can collaborate with the city of Boston and the state house to permanently display the burnt heroin spoon sculpture somewhere in the city.
Esposito will return the sculpture to his artist studio, he said, and hold it there until Healey decides what to do with the 800-pound gift.
