Statistics are people, too.

What we celebrate is what we value, and what we ignore is what we normalize.

Heads up: this one is a little heavier. -Charlie

Brian, Sean, David, Andrew, Rodney. These are pseudonyms for five guys I met between 2013 and 2018. I got to know some better than others.

None of them are alive today. All of them died from drug overdoses. 

About ten years ago, I was sitting at a table with Brian and Sean, two young men who were both newly sober. They both had personalities similar to a lot of men I’ve met: Sean was a pretty smooth, distinctly Louisiana wheeler-dealer. Brian was an affable suburban yuppie until he wasn’t. Then he ran pretty hot. When I met them, they were living in a halfway house together. 

It was later in the evening, and we were chatting about nothing in particular at a hookah bar. After half an hour or so the conversation lulled, and they both went to get on their phones. I noticed they were making the same repetitive motion, swiping from left to right or right to left. They would tap or linger on one picture for a while. 

A mutual friend knew that I had been sober for years, so they had sent me Brian and Sean’s contact info and asked if I could spend some time with them. With a warm introduction and some shared life experience, I felt confident enough to be candid with them about what dating apps might do or not do for them at this point in their journey. 

“Tinder?” I asked. 

“Yeah,” they both laughed. 

I explained that it’s probably not a good idea to get your life intertwined with someone else’s at the stage you’re at. I didn’t lecture them but shared my experience and the experiences of other people I knew. When you first get sober, emotional regulation, prioritization, and taking responsibility are all difficult. All these things being difficult means being in a relationship is next to impossible. 

Then I hit them with a simple, “let’s be honest–you’re getting things together right now, living in a halfway house, looking for a job. Would you want to date someone who wants to date you right now?” It looks harsh in writing here but it was tonally consistent for the evening and they received it well, even laughing. Sean put away his phone and agreed. Brian said he got my point but didn’t agree. 

A year or so later I started waiting tables with a guy named David who reminded me a lot of Brian. He was funny and sarcastic but kind of a live wire. He had a finely tuned and not-usually-well-aimed sense of injustice. He always seemed to have some kind of a grudge against someone in the restaurant. And he never had a small or subtle complaint–he was either chilling in the back doing the job or grabbing a pitchfork and wheeling in the guillotine. We worked together for about six months and then I saw him in various places on and off for another couple of years. 

Around the same time, another guy named Andrew reached out to me via a friend who thought we’d have mutual interests later. He was comically eager to be friends. We had a great dinner and hit it off but we were at slightly different stages in life. He talked about how he could lend me his paintball gear, or we could make music on his DJ rig, or play on his video game equipment. I wanted to hang out more, but the times he was available (later into the night, etc.) just didn’t work for a married guy with a full-time job. After a few weeks of not being able to make it work we both got busy. 

There was Rodney, who I ran into every year for like five or six years at a mutual friend’s birthday party. The first year we hit it off even though we didn’t end up hanging out anywhere else, it was kind of a funny inside joke to catch up every year after that. By the third year, I’d see him elsewhere and we became friends on Facebook. I invited him to a pickup basketball game a few times, and he was terrible despite being a former baseball star and looking like a mean jock out of central casting. I stopped hanging out with the mutual friend as much and one year he stopped throwing his birthday parties. 

For the last few years, we have been getting beat over the head with the news of the hopelessness of the drug epidemic. The reason I share these anecdotes isn’t to continue to drive home this narrative or to demonstrate that I know an extraordinary number of people who have died this way or to deliver a gut punch about the number of people dying from overdoses. Rather, it’s to share that we are finally getting some good news for the first time in a while. I feel pretty plugged in and just saw it late for the first time–so I wanted to share it. 

According to NPR¹, deaths from overdose are down 10.0% year-over-year as of our last reported numbers in April 2024. Meaning, over 10,000 fewer people died in April 2024 than in April 2023. That drop in deaths means there are 10,000 more potential whole families, 10,000 possible redemption arcs, 10,000 shots at a dream, and 10,000 more souls on Earth this month that wouldn’t be here had we not circled the wagons and done something. 

A lot of people don’t read the news, thinking it’s either too complex or too biased. It can all seem like spin, gossip, and tragedy porn. But flawed as it is, the news is ultimately stories about us, and I believe we still have a responsibility to make some sense of it and decide which stories are important. The stories we tell create the world we live in. What we celebrate is what we value, and what we ignore is what we normalize. Finding reasons to celebrate is arguably as important as doing the hard work worth celebrating. 

There are reasons to be skeptical and measured in our celebration. There are reasons to be upset about the root causes of overdoses in the first place. There are legitimate complaints that for every person saved this month, ten more didn’t make it. But there are always reasons to be upset.

And so I wanted to send this to you today, in small part in memoriam of the five young men I wrote about, but even more so to celebrate the 10,000 plus people still with us this month. The world is a little more bright and full and that is the kind of thing we should be focusing on and talking about. 

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From the Archive: Requiem for Sean in D Minor

The last two weeks of my life have been hectic: crazy news at work, two huge unexpected bills, two appliances crapped out, the pergola on my back porch started collapsing, the air conditioning in the car gave out . . . I’ve just had a ton of bad luck! I went so far as to ask my wife if I was doing something wrong that everyone could see but me, and she said, “no, hardly.”

Of all five men in the previous story, I got to know Sean the best. I even wrote an essay about our relationship. It was the second essay I wrote on Substack that got popular outside people I know, and the first one that got picked up by a much bigger account, when

Ted Gioia

featured it as one The Best Online Essays & Articles of 2022.

The worst part of the last two weeks reminded me of that essay:

I remember how Sean was there for me when I felt like I wasn’t good at being an adult or being a man.

Read the full essay here:

1. NPR Exclusive: U.S. overdose deaths plummet, saving thousands of lives