Last week was National Overdose awareness day but that doesn’t mean that awareness efforts are over.
National Overdose Awareness Day organizers are working on a Remembrance Quilt Project to dedicate to those who have lost their lives to addiction.
Fifteen people died each day as a result of a drug overdose last year according to state statistics. The Pennsylvania Department of Health reports that so far in 2023 there have been almost 2,000 estimated drug overdose deaths. Drugs such as fentanyl and xylazine making the risk of death even higher, communities are left struggling with one of the largest national health crisis of our time.
According to the Pennsylvania Recovery Organizations Alliance, approximately 23.5 million Americans live in recovery. They hope to honor their lives and their passing with the Remembrance Quilt Project.
“Everyone will have the opportunity to represent the life of their loved one on a quilt panel, It will have their name and usually the dates, their birth and death dates and any kind of interests that they had or pictures of their children. They’ll have photographs and patches to kind of make up a picture of what their life was like.”
Organizers tell us that the stigma associated with addiction tends to marginalize those suffering from it and makes them largely ignored by all sectors of society. They say the project hopes to honor their lives and their passing.
“The idea behind it, families and particularly the people that were impacted by substance use disorder so often unfortunately they lacked compassion and respect and so we try to give those things back to each individual and give their families an opportunity to honor them for the people that they were and the lives that they lived as opposed to the way that they passed,”