This newsletter is the second of two delivered this year to all of our Patron and Guardian members as a special benefit for your generous support. Senior Editor Leonard Sparks revisits a special report that he and Michael Turton did in 2023 to provide background on their reporting about the ongoing opioid addiction crisis. The story was a follow-up to a series we published in 2017.

The resurgence of opioid overdose deaths in New York state after a downturn in 2019 is not just embodied in statistics, but also in obituaries.

Libby Funeral Home in Beacon posted Jonathan Bateman's obituary soon after his death on Oct. 8, 2022. Because he lived in East Fishkill, I did not include his family's tribute in the obits I compile each Friday for our website. But some of the usual "tells" - a young age (30 in this case) and died "suddenly" and "at home" - identified him as a possible overdose victim.

A year later, as I searched online for local people who had lost someone to an overdose, an interview that Yvonne Bateman gave to Spectrum News about her son's death appeared. I found two non-working numbers in her name during an online search, then learned on Facebook that she volunteered for Fareground, the Beacon organization that stocks tiny pantries and community refrigerators with free food.

Someone from the organization passed along to Yvonne my request for an interview. Within two weeks, I stood in her living room, taking the photo that appeared with our story and scanning a wall filled with pictures from Jonathan's too-short life. Those images - spanning childhood to adulthood - deepened his family's tragedy and the scale of loss that is worsening as fentanyl spreads and new poisons like xylazine emerge.

When Yvonne told me about her strolls with Jonathan along the Walkway Over the Hudson, I decided to begin the article with that image. Those moments seemed, for both of them, an island of hope after so much struggle. Jonathan's death months later says a lot about the nature of addiction and the lethality of fentanyl.

What is the solution? I prefer "What are the solutions?" Too many people believe that abstinence is the solution, or that addiction medications are the solution. It's OK to have more than one, as well as an open-minded approach to a problem as complicated as the humans it afflicts.

Seeking the perspective of someone with years of recovery, I read about the struggles of Terasina Hanna, the program manager at the Walter Hoving Home in Garrison, in her online bio. She agreed to a phone interview, and I drove to Walter Hoving several days later to photograph the California native and tour the program's central building, a Tudor mansion.

Many of her full answers from our interview had to be condensed or left out of the article, like when I asked Hanna to describe addiction. "It was a constant of trying to get clean and failing," she said. "And then there's this shame that goes on you because you keep failing and you can't stop."

I've interviewed many recovering addicts and alcoholics. I usually ask about the moment that changed their lives - the one where they decided to seek help. Sometimes they credit moments of introspection in jails or prisons, and other times, sudden flashes of reality when it's clear that death is the only outcome and the pain of getting sober is less than the pain of continuing.

Hanna, now sober eight years, began her journey after another stint in jail, when she decided to try Walter Hoving's program in Pasadena. "You just have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired," she said.

During the tour, I followed her up upstairs, where she showed me offices and then a room with rows of computers. Before the screens, women tapped away on keyboards doing their treatment assignments. For them, treatment is not an end in itself but a first stop on a long journey. Staying sober and rebuilding lives depends on the decisions people make when they leave treatment.

One of the most important, said Hanna, is d...