‘Pawn Stars’ Creator Rick Harrison Opens Up On Tragic Loss

Rick Harrison, the longtime host of popular auctioneering show “Pawn Stars,” has gone public about a tragic loss within his family in an attempt to save others from suffering the same fate.

Harrison, 59, spent time recently reflecting on the loss of his adult son to a drug overdose one year ago. In an interview with Graham Bensinger, the American businessman spoke about how his son Adam, 39, had his whole life ahead of him before he fell victim to an opioid addiction.

“I think about him every day,” Harrison shared. “In his 20s, he had the drug problems, and I put him in rehab so many times. Every time, he’d be doing great, and then it would fall back. You hear the same story from a million people. It got really, really bad, and apparently, it wasn’t heroin. He ended up getting some fentanyl that killed him.”

He admitted, “When you lose a kid, you second-guess everything” as a parent.

“Could I have done something different?” he asked. “I think I did everything right, but you just sit in your head (thinking), ‘What if I did this? What if I did this?’ … You have a hundred things go through your mind. There is nothing worse than losing a kid.”

Harrison was found dead in January of 2024 while staying at a guest house in Las Vegas, according to USA Today. Reports from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and coroner determined he died of a fentanyl overdose, according to a representative for the family.

“The fentanyl crisis in this country must be taken more seriously,” Rick Harrison told TMZ last year.

The Clark County Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner later said that the young Harrison’s mixture of fentanyl with methamphetamine hastened the overdose and that the manner of death was accidental.

Harrison said he knew his son was struggling with addiction and that “you try to give them tough love,” but “you never see the OD coming.”

“I never thought that would happen,” he said.

Today, the “Pawn Stars” founder copes with his grief by “thinking about the good times” and spending as much time as he can with his children and grandkids. He told Bensinger that Adam’s death has helped him “appreciate what you’ve got, because you’re not always going to have it.”

Over 81,000 Americans died from a fentanyl overdose in 2022, and an estimated 200 die each day, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The deadly synthetic opioid has been leveraged by cartels and other drug manufacturers to stretch, or entirely eliminate, the use of traditional heroin.

President Donald Trump has made cracking down on fentanyl trafficking from Mexico and Canada a centerpiece of his negotiations in ongoing trade wars with both countries. He has threatened to levy huge tariffs on imports if both neighboring nations do not get serious about the devastation their drug traffickers are doing to Americans. More than a quarter million U.S. citizens have been killed by fentanyl since 2018.