Emmaus Community Park was home to Emmaus Live! Aug. 22, a festival of music, art and poetry put together by Emmaus resident Tina Ralls.

The festival featured various performers from various genres of music, speakers on the dangers of addiction and how addiction affects the victims and their families.

Various local groups and businesses provided information, products and food for attendees. A number of local businesses also donated items for a raffle to help the event raise money.

Ralls, a graduate of Emmaus High School, lost her son James to a heroin addiction last August. She was approached this past spring about putting together a festival of music, one of James’ biggest loves, to celebrate his life and the lives of others who have been lost to drug addiction. The festival did not only that, but raised money for research and local groups who fight drug addiction and its many effects on people and the community in general.

“If nothing else, we’ve raised money for local groups and were able to come together to celebrate our loved ones,” Ralls said.

One of the more poignant parts of the day for Ralls was meeting the parents of the man who gave her son the heroin which ultimately took his life. Ralls wrote a letter to them to tell them she didn’t hold any grudges and the outcome could have very well turned out the opposite way. Approximately six months after Ralls’ son died, their son also passed away from a drug overdose.

“I think it must have weighed very heavily on his mind, because I know he loved James and he never meant for anything like this to happen. It was great to finally get to meet them and share our love for our sons,” Ralls said.

State Rep. Justin Simmons, R-131st, spoke to the crowd about having seen the ills of addiction when he was there for a colleague who dealt with helping his son battle through addiction. He spoke of the efforts to give police access to the drug Narcan they can administer to someone who has overdosed to help reverse the effects of the opioid even before the person is seen by any medical professionals.

“It’s huge,” Simmons said of events like Emmaus Live!. “As I talked about in my speech, it’s a major epidemic in our communities I think is not out in the light right now. With events like this and the powerfulness of it that speak about the people we’ve lost, I think it’s really important we’re made aware of it.

“I think we [as politicians] have to take a more preventative approach. Things like Narcan, that stops the bleeding, but then, what do we do to stop the addiction? I just talked to Tina [Ralls] about incentivizing 100-day stays in rehab, because a lot of times, 30-day rehab is just not enough time and if we could just start to incentivize insurance companies to do that, I think we could possibly prevent more deaths.”

One of the performers, J.C. – a.k.a. Phoenix – is a drug addiction counselor in the Bronx and was a friend of James Ralls.

J.C. bills himself as the world’s first hip-hop therapist and performed some of his own hip-hop songs, many written with the lives of those he has counseled and the effects of drugs, as the impetus for the lyrics.

One of J.C.’s projects is a program that allows at-risk kids the chance to have free studio time if they meet criteria, such as getting passing grades in school.

“At first, a lot of the kids didn’t really know what to think of all of this, but eventually, they started to warm up to it,” J.C. explained. “It’s been very effective in not just getting the kids to deal with life, but how it translates into their academic work and attendance. Of the kids in our group, their attendance rate at school was around 40 percent and it shot up to about 98 percent, because they wanted to get into the program.”

For now, Ralls is unsure whether the event will be an annual festival.

In the midst of all she was doing at Saturday’s event, she admitted to thinking she would never be able to do this again. In the same conversation, she admitted it might be nice to see the event carry on, if for no other reason than to raise funds for local addiction groups.

In addition to organizing the festival, Ralls commissioned a sculpture and bench in memory of her son, James, displayed at the Emmaus Public Library.