UPDATED WITH STORY: Fishing rodeo gives to Bolner Foundation

In 2017 and 2018, no one outside hospitals and pharmaceutical companies knew much about fentanyl.
It was, Berwick’s Barry Bolner remembers with a rueful turn of phrase, “before fentanyl was cool.”
But painful lessons about the abuse and the lethality of the synthetic opioid were ahead, for none more than Bolner. His son, Nicklaus, died of a fentanyl overdose.
Now his Nicklaus Bolner Foundation is devoted to helping young people avoid that trap. Sammy Cannata, representing the Morgan City Open Fishing Rodeo, brought a donation from the rodeo proceeds Friday to help the foundation’s work, and a fundraiser golf tournament was Saturday.
Bolner, the director of golf at the St. Mary Parish Golf & Country Club in Berwick, named his son for Jack Nicklaus, the golfing great who won 18 major championships during a long career.
The young man grew up with a tendency toward depression, his father remembers, and a history of substance abuse on his mother’s side of the family.
Nicklaus Bolner died of a fentanyl overdose in 2018 in Baton Rouge.
At the time, local officials in Baton Rouge were identifying methamphetamine as the major drug threat. But opioids were forcing their way into the illegal drug culture.
According to the Louisiana Department of Health, 28 people died of drug overdoses in East Baton in 2012. By 2019, the toll rose to 127, the majority related to opioids.
Statewide, opioid deaths jumped 25%, from 470 to 588, in a single year, 2019.
And in 2018, about 40% of the 1,140 overdose deaths in Louisiana involved opioids.
Louisiana’s overdose death rate is now 54.5 per 100,000 residents, the fifth-highest in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now Barry Bolner wants to help young people help each other.
The foundation is creating Hope Squads, through which students and teachers can receive training that will help identify students in need of help.
“We started a foundation to give some help to schools to help them with drug addiction and mental health problems,” Bolner said.