Brockton's overdose battle

Also: Looking back at the P-town COVID outbreak, one year later [View in browser](    [❤️]( July 12, 2022 Hello CommonHealth reader, Almost 2,300 people in Massachusetts [died from opioid-related overdoses]( last year — a nearly 9% increase from 2020. It can be easy to overlook this growing crisis amid the flurry of big news these days. But my colleague, Martha Bebinger, is making sure we don’t. Last year, Martha noticed the uptick in drug overdoses among Black people, especially Black men. She wanted to understand what was happening, so she began spending time in Brockton, a city of more than 100,000 people, where almost 44% of the population is Black or African American. Over the course of half a dozen reporting trips, and many more phone and Zoom calls, she met people on the ground who explained in moving detail [how drug overdoses are affecting their lives and their community](. She also learned how they’re working to combat the problem. I asked Martha to share some wisdom about how she reported this project and what we should remember about the overdose crisis. Why did you decide to focus on Brockton? Martha: We saw how Black overdose deaths really spiked in 2020. Around the same time those numbers came out, I was aware that Massachusetts was going to get a lot of money from NIH to test some ways to reduce opioid overdose deaths. And among the first wave of communities was Brockton. So it seemed like the perfect place to both look at the problem, and this intensive effort to try to do something. How did you persuade people to open up about such a sensitive topic? Martha: I talked to people a lot on the phone, and then started walking the streets. Once people in the tent encampments or in the park saw me hanging out and talking with people they knew, then they would come over and almost line up, like “I’ve got to tell you my story.” And it seemed really clear that so many people don't get heard. Nobody asks them, “How did you get here? What would help?” That part makes me really sad. What can readers and listeners take away from this story? Is there anything they can do? Martha: The overdose crisis looks like it's spreading because we have fentanyl in almost every illegal drug out there. That means that everybody needs to get used to carrying naloxone and be comfortable using it. Get used to that the same way you might think about brushing up on CPR. This is such a serious situation. The numbers are grim. Did anything about reporting this story give you hope? Martha: I don't know that we know how to prevent drug use — that's a much more difficult mental health conversation — but we know how to save lives. We know you can do it with supervised consumption. We know you can do it with a lot more naloxone out there. We know you can do it with fentanyl test strips and outreach to people with messages in all languages. We know the playbook. That's the hopeful part. The not hopeful part is that we're still afraid to do those things because we're still afraid to admit that we can't arrest our way out of drug use. Martha also shared some of the takeaways from her reporting [here]( Priyanka Dayal McCluskey Senior Health Reporter [Follow]( Support the news  This Week's Must Reads [The fight to fund abortions in post-Roe America]( In post-Roe America, money is even more determinative of who can get an abortion and who can't. Abortion funds are trying to close the gap, but they are now forced to navigate a murky legal landscape. [Read more.]( [The fight to fund abortions in post-Roe America]( In post-Roe America, money is even more determinative of who can get an abortion and who can't. Abortion funds are trying to close the gap, but they are now forced to navigate a murky legal landscape. 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