The Hatboro Blues

I think about it all the time - how lucky I am that myself or my brother stayed just one step away from heroin addiction. Like the author I tried percs early on with my drug experimentation and hated the feeling. I was more into uppers. Just a few years after I graduated, early on in the opioid epidemic, a lot of friends and old classmates just started dying. I remember one month in particular I must have went to a dozen funerals several of which were close friends. I would see people like coworkers, bosses, teachers, and second cousins at some of these funerals whom I had no clue knew this person. There was a weird reckoning of community grieving. I once lied about being sick to call out of work for a funeral only to then see my boss across the room during the service crying uncontrollably. I asked how she knew [Sara] who was good friend of mine. It turns out she was her neighbor and basically helped raise her. It was surreal.

That one month was horrible and looking back I wonder if this was one of the first times fentanyl started circulating around the community. So many people who were closet heroin users or light "party" smoker/snort users perished all in the same two weeks or so. Of course this was before we knew about fentanyl being sold as heroin or cut into it.