Crisis is the flavor of the week for politicians and the news media: opioids, borders, student loans, Venezuelan elections - to name just a few recent ones. Calling something a crisis does a lot of things - it mobilizes people towards a goal, opens up funding streams, allows policies to be implemented in the name of health, defense and democracy, and gets people to click on links. It’s a way to get people talking, and more importantly, to get some of them moving.

In the last several weeks, it was announced that people in the United States are now more likely to die from an opioid overdose than from a car accident. While this revelation is staggering, the opioid and overdose crisis in the US has been building for some time, claiming the lives of over 200 people per day according to US government tracking, and impacting communities across the country. Wanting to know more about the growing crisis, how the State is both responding to it in rhetoric as well as policy, and how communities are responding on a grassroots and autonomous level, we caught up with Codi, an anarchist and someone that works with people in recovery as an opioid specialist, on top of being someone with an intimate understanding of the crisis from her own lived experiences.