![]() His son Zachary, funny and fashionable and baby-faced, was a high-scoring high school hockey forward in the city of Lowell. “This was not something we foresaw would be a problem with our kids,” said Mickey Gys, a corporate procurement manager. Thousands of families, many of them prosperous, have been left to puzzle out how they ended up here. In most of the state, this year will be just as bad as last. Haverhill, an unremarkable town of 60,000, had three overdose deaths in 2011, more than 20 deaths in 2014. The killer drug once associated with urban poverty is more popular in the United States than ever before - especially among white people, women and the middle class, especially in the suburbs and the country, especially in the Midwest and northeast.Ī weeklong tour of the Massachusetts wreckage revealed glimmers of hope: families starting to speak out without shame, once-oblivious political and medical leaders innovating to save lives, a small-town police chief putting addicts in treatment rather than handcuffs.īut the body count is staggering and rising. The picture is just as ugly in the postcard towns of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. That is double the number who died four years ago, four times the number who died in car crashes. More than 1,200 people in Massachusetts died from overdoses of heroin or prescription opioids last year. On the shirt are (l-r) her father Walter, her mother Valaurie and her brother Michael. Kimberly Krawczyk wears a T-shirt honouring the people she has lost to drugs during a rally in Boston on National Overdose Awareness Day. Before he became chairman of the Learn to Cope board, he was another dad sobbing through a session. Jack Reilly is a lawyer and former human resources executive. Teachers, nurses, cops, at least one judge. “Sometimes people have walked into a meeting and thought they were at the wrong meeting,” said Joanne Peterson, Learn to Cope’s founder. This is how the families of heroin addicts look. This was the weekly Brockton gathering of Learn to Cope, a booming 20-chapter support group for the families of heroin addicts. ![]() ![]() In their khaki shorts and golf shirts, they looked like nothing so much as a parent-teacher association. Three dozen people were sitting in chairs scattered around the blue-walled “multi-purpose room” of a high school in a Boston suburb. She had not come to terms with how her son’s life turned out. BROCKTON, MASS.-Not long into the meeting, a mother began to cry.
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