Last week, 27 people in the Penn North neighborhood of West Baltimore overdosed on drugs nearly simultaneously. The incident is one of the largest mass overdoses in recent memory and a sobering reminder of the toll the opioid epidemic is still taking on the city as hundreds of people continue to die every year.
Now Penn North and the city at large are working to help the area recover and get to the bottom of what happened.
“We’ve never seen anything like it”
Bill Brooks, the CEO of Penn North Recovery Center, was sitting in his office around 9:20 a.m. last Thursday when he started hearing about people overdosing just blocks away.
“Every single person had started overdosing at the same time,” Brooks said. “We’ve never seen anything like it, so it was kind of an all-hands-on-deck type situation. We started going up in the alleys and in the back of abandoned houses. We were calling in there. ‘You guys need any Narcan. Did you hear what happened?’”…