In June, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced opioid overdose-related deaths in the Commonwealth had fallen below 1,000 for the first time since 2013. Citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an annual death toll that had risen to almost 2,400 in 2022 was tallied at 978 in 2025. WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes visited a Pittsfield support center recently and found a more complicated picture of how addiction is impacting Massachusetts. He joins Lucas Willard on Midday Magazine to discuss the circumstances further.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Willard: So, Josh, you stopped by Living in Recovery. What can you tell me about your visit? What does the organization actually do?
Landes: So, Living in Recovery is a peer-led center where people with their own experiences with addiction and recovery can help lead other people through that journey who are seeking relief from that disease. It sits in the heart of Berkshire County's urban hub. Of course, I speak of downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a few steps from where I'm speaking to you right now at the Berkshire Bureau. Pittsfield has a large population of homeless people, a large population of folks with addiction issues because it's the center of the county and the largest community. It has the most resources for people, and thus attracts larger quantities of folks who fall into those distinctions. We're hearing a lot about how the success of free visible naloxone supplies around Pittsfield and Berkshire County has helped bring down opioid deaths. Speaking with folks at the center, they had largely positive reviews of working with both police and the city hall in Pittsfield, certainly compared to years past. And you know they're really happy, obviously, about this drop in opioid-related deaths. But there are other things that are happening that are concerning them: increased usage of alcohol, stimulants, and the fact that the drug supply remains tainted across the board with some dangerous additives.
Willard: So one substance that's made headlines this year across the region is kratom, and Massachusetts has moved to outright ban kratom. What did the Living in Recovery team make of that move?
Landes: So this I was actually very interested in. Program Director Julie MacDonald framed the ban as actually a concerning move, a sudden and sweeping gesture that actually could leave some people dangerously high and dry.
MacDonald: That was actually a very huge harm reduction tool for some people. A lot of people went off of opiates, and then they went and they were using kratom, and they became addicted to it because it's an addictive substance, right? So, what's happening now with it being banned, where no more stores or gas stations or anything can carry it, is that there isn't something set up for, one, immediate treatment for withdrawal from that, right? So we're very concerned. A lot of us that work in the field are very concerned that people are going to return to opiates, right? Because ... if that was something that was substituting, and they go into withdrawal, then they move toward what they know.
Landes: Kratom has now been classified as a Schedule 1 drug in Massachusetts.
Willard: Legal marijuana for recreational use has been on the market in Massachusetts for almost a decade now. How does the team at Living in Recovery see that manifest in the addiction community?
Landes: When I was speaking with peer support specialist Loretta Scapin at Living in Recovery, she said that marijuana use and addiction was actually becoming one of the top issues that the group was encountering in the Pittsfield community.
Scapin: I think, like, when people hear the word recovery, they always think like harder drug substances… you know, especially now that marijuana is legal, I think a lot of people don't realize the concerns with it being an addiction for people, and people needing to be in recovery for that, or that doing things like participating in marijuana use and consumption can sometimes lead to a deeper addiction to things like alcohol and other substances.
Landes: Scapin thinks better education has to be in place for marijuana usage and the dangers it may pose and its addictive properties. She also suggested warning labels, like the kind you might see in a tobacco product.
Willard: So, Josh, we've talked about opioids, we've talked about marijuana, we've talked about kratom. Are the experts concerned about any other substances that are emerging in Western Mass?
Landes: Yeah, you know, what I heard from folks at the center, and in my own dive into data from public health officials in Massachusetts, is that methamphetamine has actually been increasing for some time now in the Commonwealth, sort of in the shadow of this larger, much more publicized opioid crisis. A National Institutes of Health study showed that intravenous use of meth in the Boston area actually doubled just between 2015 and 2018. A state commission back in 2022 found that stimulant-related deaths in Massachusetts have actually been on the rise since 2010, and put out a lot of calls for the Commonwealth to expand harm reduction and better oversight of all drugs, not just opioids. There's still that risk of fentanyl cross-contamination in stimulants as well as opioids. The volunteer coordinator of Living in Recovery, Wolf Valentin, agreed with the other staffers there that meth is visibly becoming much more of an issue in Pittsfield, and he attributed it to the economics of the world of illegal drugs, which are as suspect to a tough economy as anything else.
Valentin: Now everyone's seeing that it's cheaper ... to have someone cook up drugs in some basement and make millions through that than having being shipped — going through borders, customs. So methamphetamines, yes, has been around for a long time, but it's the new crack, the new crack that's cheaper, that can be made with household ingredients, just like fentanyl, xylazine. You can buy the components, put it all together, and make drugs out of a bottle ... can, or whatever you have in your closet.
Landes: So the success in battling opioid overdose-related deaths is definitely an accomplishment, but there's a lot more work to do in Massachusetts and certainly in Berkshire County.
