Then came fentanyl and its very potent analogues and we were in a full-fledged crisis. It took just three more years to reach three hundred deaths and one year later, in 2015, we topped four hundred. It was this exponential surge, fueled by fentanyl, that brought me to the point of questioning. As a medical examiner, was I giving anything of value back to my community by just counting the bodies? The two opposite ends of the public health spectrum are prevention and assessment, and after having spent so many years on the assessment end, I began to give serious thought to what I could do on the other.

Disturbed by the number of young bodies showing up in his morgue, New Hampshire’s Chief Medical Examiner decided to do something about it.