RAYNHAM — Joanne Peterson will step into a federal courtroom in Abingdon, Va., today, gripping an 8-by-10-inch photograph.
 She will keep the photo at her side as she details the deadly toll OxyContin and heroin has taken in Massachusetts.
 She will talk about a friend's 23-year-old son who thought he could dabble in the painkiller OxyContin, got hooked, turned to cheaper heroin and died.
 "He is just one of the thousands," said Peterson of Raynham. "I will tell the judge of the grief when you lose someone to death and the grief when you lose someone to addiction."
 Peterson — founder of Learn to Cope, a support group for families of opiate addicts — is one of 19 people expected to address a federal judge today before Purdue Pharma L.P., the maker of OxyContin, and three company executives are formally sentenced in U.S. District Court.
 The formal sentencing comes two months after the company agreed to pay $634.5 million
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in fines for claiming the drug was less addictive and less subject to abuse than other pain medications.
 There is to be no prison sentence.
 As she stands five feet from the three drug company executives in the courtroom, Peterson said she wants the men to know the pain families have experienced because of OxyContin.
 "I'm going to compare it to a tsunami," she said. "Everything is great and, all of a sudden, you just get wiped out."
 She wants them to know what it is like to attend a wake of a 24-year-old man, of an 18-year-old woman. She wants them to know what it is like to console their parents, their siblings and, sometimes, their children.
 "I want them to know there are still more dying all the time and it hasn't stopped," Peterson said.
 An examination of death certificates in 28 communities covered by The Enterprise found that between Jan. 1, 2004, and Aug. 31, 2006, there were 16 overdose deaths tied to OxyContin and its chief ingredient, oxycodone.
 The finding, reported in the four-day Enterprise report "Wasted Youth," also found 74
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people in the area have died of opiate-related overdoses, including heroin, in that same span.
 The overdose deaths continue. In the past 2 1/2 weeks, at least three people died of opiate overdoses in the area.
 Peterson's courtroom statement will be kept at two minutes. "I have to make sure every paragraph will pack a punch," Peterson said.
 Peterson and four other Learn to Cope members drove 14 hours to Virginia to attend the sentencing and a rally outside the courthouse.
 June Saba of Bridgewater, whose son became addicted to OxyContin then the cheaper heroin, expects to speak at the courthouse rally and read "I hate you OxyContin," a piece published in The Enterprise by Samantha Light, 14, Danielle Light, whose father died of an overdose.
 State Rep. Allen McCarthy, D-East Bridgewater, said he hopes people listen closely.
 "While OxyContin was created for good purposes, what clearly came out was the downplaying by the company of the addictive nature of it," he said. "They are delivering the message of the devastation that OxyContin has caused."
 Peterson said the extent of that devastation may never be known. "This is affecting so many people: Parents, siblings, children It is almost endless. We will never know how many lives have been changed by it," she said.