DENVER — A Colorado woman has joined the fight against the fentanyl crisis by creating a new product aimed at saving lives.
Jeanie Chung said she was moved to action after losing her son, Jackson Taesun Leddon, 19, to fentanyl in 2020.
Chung said her son was a sophomore at the University of Kentucky, where he played rugby. She said he had decided to come back home to Boulder and possibly attend the University of Colorado.
"The day before he was supposed to come back, he went out with his friends in Kentucky to say goodbye," Chung said. "When his friends came home, they found him. He had taken something unbeknownst to him that contained fentanyl."
Now in honor of her son, Chung is making it her mission to help save lives with an all-in-one fentanyl test kit called TaeSun, named after her son.
"It's not that I'm encouraging people to take drugs, but to test their drugs if they're going to," Chung said. "I think there's so many street drugs out there. Students who think they're taking Adderall to study for an exam or Xanax for anxiety, where they're self-medicating, but they don't know what they have."
The test kit provides results in a matter of minutes, according to Chung. But the product is still in development.
Last year, it was selected by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) as a winner of the 2023 $100,000 Start an SUD Startup prize.
Chung said they plan to apply for a grant in April.
"I think it's just so important to educate young people," said Chung. "They have a hard time believing something is going to happen to them. So hopefully, our kit not only provides kind of a safety net, but we hope to educate them in the importance of testing."
Chung is also raising money to help launch the product through a GoFundMe fundraiser.
She's hoping the product will launch by the end of the year.
