In pandemic, drug overdose deaths soar among Black Americans

“Mass incarceration and the war on drugs are the roots and all of this is the thorns,” she said. “It is a set-up for failure, a set-up to continue in the same cycle of poverty and death.”

Jerry Simmons sometimes imagines himself lying in one of those vacant houses where he sleeps, dead for days from an overdose before anyone discovers him.

He arrived in a church parking lot before dawn to be first in line for a mobile treatment van scheduled to arrive as part of a new state-funded effort to reach people like him.

“I just want to be a normal person back in society, working, living, loving, playing with my grandkids, making my kids be proud of me,” said Simmons, 49, who’s been addicted for 30 years, homeless and in and out of prisons.

When he climbed into the van, it had been about eight hours since he last snorted fentanyl, at 1:37 a.m. The crippling withdrawal symptoms would set in soon, he knew: aches down to the bone, diarrhea, shakes, insomnia.

To give himself strength, he wore a T-shirt printed with the face of his friend, killed in a hail of bullets 30 years ago. Simmons grew up near this church on the most murderous mile of road in one of America’s most dangerous cities.

“There’s death all around here,” he said. Three friends have died in the last month, two to gun violence and one to overdose. The drugs, at first, helped him escape.