James Craig knows all about the opioid crisis.

He grew up in “abject poverty,” never knowing how long it would be before the heat in his trailer park would be turned off, and both of Craig’s parents, as well as his older brother, struggled with drug addiction. His mother and brother lost their lives to substance abuse, and it was around the time of his brother’s death—about a week before Election Day 2016— that he decided he needed to take action.

Craig, a 29-year-old real estate attorney, is running for the democratic party against Republican Sen. Camera Bartolotta for a Pennsylvania state senate seat in the 46th Pennsylvania Senatorial District. Craig’s ambition was inspired by the opioid crisis and what he felt was a poor response to the problem by politicians.

“I felt the opioid crisis was not being adequately handled or addressed,” Craig said. “I felt that people were abusing their opinions on moralistic grounds as opposed to actually wanting to help people get better. I felt that a lot of the politicians in the region, if elected, what they would do is schedule a press conference, have a round table, sit there and talk to people, and then once they got their news article and their pictures in the paper, they didn’t actually do anything. So I started with a chip on my shoulder.”

That chip grew around the 2016 election. Although Craig is a Democrat, everybody in his family aside from himself and his wife voted for Republican candidates.

But Craig feels that his party has forgotten about what built it and wants to be a candidate that helps bring it back to its roots.

“The fact of the matter is the democratic party started out as a party for working, middle class people, and it seems like we’ve lost our way a bit,” he said. “You have almost a political purity test some of these liberal democrats are trying to place upon democrats that are running outside of major cities. I just thought that it was time the democratic party had someone that was willing to be a champion for the working and middle class again.”

Craig grew up in Brookhaven Trailer Park in South Franklin Township but only stayed there until the age of six, when he and his family moved to West Finley Township, on the border of Greene County and West Virginia.

Craig’s father, an ironworker, suffered a leg injury, eventually led to his family’s battle with opioids. His father was given a prescription to help with the injury, and his mother started using pills around the same time.

“Well if I didn’t have the personal experience with being a member of a family who suffered from addiction, I think that I probably would have led a much more normal life,” Craig said.

“You have to be a little crazy to run for office, I suppose. I don’t think I would have had the same chip on my shoulder. Who knows where I would have ended up.”

Craig isn’t sure if he would be able to relate with others as well if he hadn’t encountered the struggles inside his own family.

“If I were running for office and I didn’t have this backstory, I don’t know that I’d be able to connect with so many people,” he said. “I don’t know that we would share that common bond. I don’t know that I would have known the suffering that’s going on in our community and I don’t know that I would have been as good of a person as I am today.”

Along with jobs and education, attacking the opioid crisis is one of the three main points of Craig’s campaign. One thing that Craig wants to change if elected is the law that says that patients can stay in care for a maximum of 30 days.

“If you talk to anyone in addiction recovery, they say that 90 days in [care] is the absolute bare minimum for any hope of success,” he said. “We need to ensure there are adequate beds available in patient facilities, so the people that actually want to break the cycle of addiction have the resources available to them [recovering].

Another objective of Craig’s is for recovering addicts to find their way back to normality once they return to society.

“We need to ease them back in the community,” he said. “We need to help them find jobs. We need to bring their families in so that we can have family counseling sessions… We need to ensure that there are resources available for counseling not only for people in recovery but for the families of the people who are in recovery.”

Craig said that while opioids once affected the community indirectly, it has spread to the point where everybody is aware.

“It’s touched everyone,” Craig said.

Having gone from living in a trailer park to running for political office, Craig hopes that he is able to help maintain what he feels the country was built on.

“I’ve realized the American dream,” Craig said. “I think that that path from poverty to realizing the American dream is so narrow and treacherous that we need somebody to come out and fight so that the American dream doesn’t die entirely.”