September was National Recovery Month. To remember those who have passed from an overdose, Methuen’s Community Engagement Specialist Cole Caffrey, who is also executive director of the Merrimack Valley Prevention and Substance Abuse Project, and several volunteers placed 1,314 purple flags at the police station along Route 28.
The flags represented the number of overdose deaths in Massachusetts in 2024. This number is a decrease of 37.5% from 2023, when 2,103 lives were lost.
The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicates that there were an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2024. That’s a decrease of 26.9% from the 110,037 deaths caused by overdose in 2023…