Recovery Month, and the smallest thing that actually works.
Fewer people are dying. Sixty seven thousand seven hundred and ninety eight is still the number.
On August 31, International Overdose Awareness Day, the CDC put all of its overdose data in one public place and published the latest count. Its monthly provisional data predicts 67,798 drug overdose deaths in the United States for the 12 months ending March 2026, a 12.3% decrease from the same period the year before. Read that twice, because both halves are true. The direction is the best it has been in years, and the number is still a stadium. "The most useful data does more than show us what has happened; it helps us decide what to do next," said Grant Baldwin, PhD, MPH, director of the CDC's Division of Overdose Prevention. One caution we always print: provisional counts are modeled and get revised by the agency that issues them. CDC
Addiction wrote a story into you. Recovery is learning the code, how this actually works, and rewriting the story, one line at a time. Nobody runs that rewrite for you. It's an inside job.
It's September, which means it's Recovery Month, which means a lot of people are about to say a lot of things about recovery. So here is ours, and it is small. Almost every long recovery we have printed in this letter started with one person making contact with another person. Not a program. Not a policy. A phone call, a roommate, a stubborn friend. This issue's Recovery Hero got clean because a woman she used to use with called her on day two of a binge for no reason at all. Also inside: reported news stories from three countries, a Colorado number we need to clean up, a Medicaid deadline 116 days out with letters going out this month, and a man in Tennessee who bought back the house he used in.
The Penington Institute released Australia's Annual Overdose Report on August 28. Using 2024 data, it counts 2,596 drug induced deaths, a 10.7% increase from the 2,345 deaths in 2023, and the highest total in the series. Unintentional deaths passed 2,000 for the first time. Opioids were involved in 1,083 deaths, stimulants in 843, benzodiazepines in 696. The comparison the report leads with: drug induced deaths were just under twice the number of road traffic deaths, which were 1,307. Three days later, ABC News reported Queensland's own record, 417 overdose deaths in 2024, with regional Queensland losing 7.9 people per 100,000 against 6.8 in greater Brisbane. Penington chief executive John Ryan said the findings "should be a wake-up call for governments, policymakers and the community." American numbers are falling right now. Australia's are not. Nobody gets to coast on a trend line. Penington Institute · ABC News
Maine's first recovery high school opened this fall. The Upper St. John Valley Recovery High School sits in Powell Hall on the University of Maine at Fort Kent campus, up in Aroostook County, and its first class is four students. It is free to families, paid for with $616,000 in opioid settlement funds awarded by the Maine Recovery Council in March 2025, with each student's home district covering 25% of the cost. Four students sounds like nothing until you meet four families. "I know if we can make a difference in just one child's life, it's going to be huge," said Brooke Nadeau, the educator who built it. Ryan Paige, who co-founded the AccessDirect Recovery Network, put the case for catching people early: "If you catch somebody before the riptide pulls them under, it's easier to swim them back to shore." This is what settlement money looks like when it turns into a room with a door. Portland Press Herald
On August 18, HHS added peer support programs to the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, which is the list that decides what child welfare services states can claim federal money for. Two got a rating of Supported: Family-Based Recovery, in home treatment for parents of children under five, and the Wellness Recovery Action Plan, a group program run by trained peer facilitators. Iowa is the first state to adopt one of them. Dry paperwork, real consequence: peer support is the thing almost everyone in recovery says made the difference, and it has always been the first line cut when a budget tightens. Getting it onto a reimbursement list is how it stops being a volunteer favor and starts being a job somebody can keep. HHS
At six in the morning on Monday, August 31, volunteers began planting flags at Lincoln Park in Grand Junction, one for every Coloradan who died of a drug overdose in 2025. There were 1,765 of them, purple for the state, 29 white ones for Mesa County. The day ran through Narcan training and a resource fair and ended at dusk with a time of remembrance. Statewide, 66.6% of those 2025 deaths involved an opioid (1,175), and 83.4% of those (980) involved fentanyl, both down from the 2023 peak of 1,273 opioid deaths and 1,097 involving fentanyl. Colorado was up about 10% over 2024 and had its second deadliest year on record. Mesa County went down 17%.
Dr. Ryan Jackman, the addiction medicine physician at St. Mary's who helped organize it, said the point of a field of flags is that it refuses to be a spreadsheet. "These aren't just flags. These aren't just numbers. These were somebody's parent or brother or sister or mother or friend." And he named the part the flags cannot show: "That's the tip of the iceberg. For every fatal overdose, there are dozens more nonfatal overdoses." Intermountain Health · KKCO 11 News
A patch on our own number. Issue #4 printed 1,554 unintentional drug overdose deaths in Colorado in 2025, from The Denver Post reading provisional federal data, and we told you on the page that we could not find a second source. Now two Colorado sources published in the last two weeks say 1,765, and that figure is not labeled unintentional. The most likely explanation is that the two numbers count different things, since "unintentional" excludes deaths ruled suicide or undetermined, but no source we could reach says that, so we are not going to pretend we know. What we will do is stop printing 1,554 without a label. Use 1,765 for total overdose deaths in Colorado in 2025, sourced above, and treat both as provisional.
Two things moved since our last issue. On September 1 the states suing over the federal Medicaid work requirement filed their motion for summary judgment, which is the filing that asks the judge to decide the case outright. The hearing is still October 20 (Georgetown litigation tracker). Nothing new has been posted for states by CMS since a July 27 overview deck (Medicaid.gov). The rule still takes effect January 1, 2027, which from today is 116 days.
The second thing is the one that lands in your mailbox. Colorado is notifying 377,000 of its roughly 1.1 million Health First Colorado members, adults 19 to 64, that the requirement may apply to them, and the state expects about 175,000 will actually need to do something. The standard is 80 hours a month of work, school or volunteering, or at least $580 a month in earnings. Renewals move from once a year to every six months. There is a Health First Colorado Work Requirements Screener you can run yourself. "The most important things that people can do to prepare is A: find out if it applies to you. B: if it does, do you have the necessary documentation," said Natalie Coulter, director of communications for the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (KKCO 11 News).
Read this part slowly, because it is the paragraph that matters to this letter's readers. The state's own FAQ says a letter goes out in September 2026 telling you whether you have to comply, and a second wave goes out in January 2027 to members with a March 2027 renewal date. And Colorado exempts, in its own words, "People in recovery from a drug or alcohol use disorder for 5 years or less that prevents them from completing 80 hours per month of work, school, and/or volunteer activities" (Health First Colorado). Notice the tail of that sentence. It is not a blanket exemption for everyone in recovery, it is for recovery that keeps you from hitting 80 hours, and somebody is going to have to document that. Notice also that most of the news coverage listing Colorado's exemptions leaves the recovery clause out entirely.
Open the mail this month. That is the whole first step, and it is the one most people will skip. Then: confirm your address and phone are current with your state Medicaid office, run your state's screener if it has one, and ask your treatment provider, counselor or peer specialist for written proof of enrollment or of your recovery status and keep your own copy where you can find it. An exemption you qualify for does nothing if the state cannot see it. Guidance is still developing and the court could still vacate the rule this fall. We track this every issue.
On August 31 a sober living home for up to eight men opened at 297 Keenburg Road in Carter County, Tennessee. Jason Stout runs it. He also used to live in it. That address is his old house, the one where his worst years happened, and he bought it back and filled it with beds. His last day using was August 30, 2018, so the ribbon cutting landed on his eighth year. Recovery Renaissance, which the Elizabethton Star describes as a nonprofit and which calls itself "a peer-founded and operated 12-step recovery program that emphasizes creativity as part of our addiction treatment services," is his. In between he robbed a pharmacy, went to prison, and started a recovery program for the men he was locked up with.
"I started using when I was 15 years old. It started out on weekends basically, and I remember saying in those early days, 'I don't know how somebody could do this every day of the week.'"
"Within a couple months it was an everyday thing for me."
"I think change is subconsciously what I wanted more than anything at that point in my addiction."
That last quote is about the day he walked into the pharmacy. He sat in the parking lot first: "I sat there for about 30 minutes trying to talk myself out of what I came there to do." Nobody tells you that part, that some people are already trying to get caught.
As reported by the Elizabethton Star · Recovery Renaissance
Montrose, Colorado · Clean since April 10, 2018
There's a kind of low that doesn't look like rock bottom from the outside. Valentina had been with the same person for ten years, and they were married for seven of them. From across the room, it probably looked like a life. Inside, she was slowly disappearing.
Her first drug of choice wasn't a substance. It was relationships. She was codependent in a way that consumed her, and after enough years, she had become an unrecognizable shadow of her former self. Look closely at that pattern, because many of us know what it feels like to depend on something so completely that it starts to feel necessary just to get through the day. You may call it love. You may call it relief. Either way, life without it becomes hard to imagine.
And that is the danger. The very thing that seems to nourish you can slowly become part of what is destroying you.
That was the same kind of relationship many of us had with substances, except Valentina was living it in two places at once. She was dependent on both the relationship and the drugs, and each helped keep the other going. She and her wife, Celina, enabled one another. They used together, and many of the habits they shared were also the habits slowly destroying them.
Then came the month Valentina now talks about openly, because someone reading this may be in that same place right now. She had lost sight of any reason to stay alive. For about a month, she thought every day about ending her life. She was too afraid to act on those thoughts directly, so she kept using instead. At one point, she mixed everything she had, and part of her hoped she would not wake up.
That's where the story turns. And it doesn't turn because Valentina suddenly became strong.
On day two of a three day binge, her phone rang. It was Denise. They had met at age nineteen while working at Applebee's and had used together back then. Denise was now five months clean and living in a sober house in Aurora. She called for no particular reason other than to ask how Valentina was doing.
Valentina lied to her for an hour. The marriage was great. Everything was fine. Denise kept talking anyway. Somewhere during that conversation, lying became harder than telling the truth. So Valentina finally said it. She was at the dopeman's house, deep in her addiction, and she had been thinking about how she was going to die.
"You are worthy and deserving of life and I believe in you."
Then Denise suggested she get to a 12 step meeting and find a sponsor. Valentina didn't argue. She had already seen recovery work in her own family. Her father had sixteen years at the time. Denise gave her the phone number of a woman who might sponsor her. Valentina called the next day.
APRIL 10, 2018
What came next wasn't neat or easy. She tried all kinds of meetings and sat in a lot of different rooms, tired, defeated, broken, and willing to try anything. Her first sponsor supported her for seven months before moving out of state. Valentina found another sponsor and completed her first set of steps within her first year. That's the method, and it isn't glamorous: keep showing up until one of those rooms becomes yours.
Today, Valentina has a sponsor of her own in a different fellowship from the one where she began, and she now sponsors other women through the steps. She performs service at the group, area, and regional levels. Four years into recovery, in October 2022, she began working in the field at Advocates for Recovery Colorado and became a certified peer and family specialist. She has been doing that work ever since and is now the Southwest Regional Manager for AFRC, mentoring people in her community who are standing in many of the same places where she once stood.
"I came in with my light flickering. Now I get to help other flickering lights find their light to shine bright."
There is one more part of her story, and she specifically asked us to keep it in. On October 31, 2022, Celina died of an overdose. Valentina was four years clean. It was the same month she had started at AFRC. She didn't use over it.
"Someone I loved didn't get another chance. I did. And I'm going to use mine to help someone else believe they can have one too. Her life affected me. Her death changed me. And what I choose to do with that experience can become a part of her legacy."
"There are going to be good days and bad days. No matter what, you don't have to use ever again, even on the days you want to."
If you're reading this from inside that month, the one where you already feel gone and are simply waiting for the paperwork, pay attention to what actually happened here. Nobody swooped in and rescued Valentina. One person called. One person refused to accept the polished version. One person reminded her that she was worth staying alive for. And the next day, Valentina made one phone call of her own.
That was the beginning. Eight years of recovery. A career helping others. A room full of women she now sponsors. All of it traces back to one honest hour on the phone and one decision the following day.
IF SHE CAN, YOU CAN TOO.
WE DO RECOVER.
If today is the day for you or someone you love, help is available. SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357, free and confidential, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.
Know somebody like Valentina? Somebody quietly showing up for people who have nothing to give back? Tell us:
recoveryhero@therecoverycode.org
Valentina said her first drug of choice was relationships, and that line stops a lot of people, because it names something nobody hands you a chip for. You can get clean and still be running the exact same program on a human being. Checking their location. Reading the room before you decide what mood you're allowed to have. Feeling calm only when they're calm. That is the same loop, and the substance is just a person now.
Two things make it harder to see than a bottle. It looks like love, and everyone around you praises you for it. Loyalty, devotion, being the strong one, holding it together. Nobody stages an intervention over how much you care. And in early recovery it is genuinely useful for a while. Somebody to focus on is somebody who isn't you, and not being you is what you were after in the first place.
So here is the practical part, and none of it is dramatic. Do not blow up the relationship. Test it instead. Try going one day without checking on them and see what your body does, because the size of the reaction tells you what you're dealing with. Get one relationship in your life where you are not useful to anybody, where you're just there. Notice whether you can name a single thing you want that is not about them. If those tests come back rough, this is a known thing with a name and there are rooms for exactly it, CoDA among them, listed below with everything else. And if the person you can't quit is still using: you can love somebody all the way and still not be the one who fixes it. That isn't abandonment. That's the only version of this where two people get out instead of nobody.
Valentina lied to Denise for an hour, and she wasn't lying to protect herself. She was lying because she was ashamed. That's the exploit this issue. Not complacency, not isolation, the thing underneath both of them. Shame doesn't tell you to use. Shame tells you to edit. Give them the version where you're doing okay, because the real version would cost you the only people you have left.
BOBO is malware, and this is his cleanest trick, because it uses your own decency against you. He doesn't have to keep you from calling anybody. He just has to keep you narrating. Every edited answer makes the next honest one more expensive, until telling the truth would mean admitting you lied about the last six. Then you're alone in a room full of people who love you, which is the state he needs, and the DIS-EASE has all the room it wants to run. If it does execute, that's a bug that got through, not a verdict on you. You roll back and you rebuild.
The patch: tell one person the unedited version this week. Not all of it, not to everybody. One person, one thing you've been rounding off. Notice that lying got harder for Valentina somewhere in that hour, because somebody kept talking. He never fully deletes. He only stays quarantined, and quarantine is a thing you maintain.
Week 1: Be Denise. Call one person you have not heard from in a while, for no reason, and ask how they actually are. Then stay on the phone through the first answer, because the first answer is usually the polished one.
Week 2: Open the mail. If you are on Medicaid anywhere in the country, find out whether the work requirement touches you and what proof you would need. If you are in Colorado, your letter is coming this month.
Work trip, family visit, rural road, 2 a.m. None of it has to stand between you and a room. Virtual meetings run around the clock, worldwide. This issue's stop is a path we have not featured yet, and it is one of the oldest ones on this continent.
When: Tuesdays, listed on the directory as 6:00 pm Mountain Standard Time
Where: Online by Zoom, listed on White Bison's circle meetings directory: whitebison.org/circle-meetings
Getting in: The circle is listed as open, and the Zoom link comes from the facilitator rather than the page. Contact Candice Jemison at candice@natsuhealth.com. Ask for the link a day ahead, not five minutes before.
White Bison calls itself "a Native American-operated 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to creating and sustaining a grassroots Wellbriety Movement," and explains the name this way: "The 'Well' in Wellbriety is the inspiration to go on beyond sobriety and recovery, committing to a life of wellness and healing everyday." Wellbriety circles are culturally Indigenous and are listed as open. Go as a guest, not a tourist. Clock warning of a different kind this time: unlike most directories, this one does not convert times for you, the facilitator types the zone in by hand, and this listing says Mountain Standard Time while most of the country is on daylight time until November 1. Confirm the hour when you email for the link.
Online Intergroup of AA · directory of online AA meetings running 24/7, worldwide
NA Virtual Meeting Search · NA's hub for virtual meetings, any time zone
In The Rooms · free live online meetings across many recovery paths, all week long
SMART Recovery Online · filter the meeting finder to online sessions
Recovery Dharma Online · meditation-based recovery meetings, daily, from anywhere
White Bison Wellbriety circles · Native American and Alaska Native centered circles, online and in person
Same rule as always: these are doors, not "the" way. Wherever you are tonight, one of them is open. Most of these directories show meeting times in your own time zone, so open the listing and confirm before you go.
Jenkins was the person nobody suspected, which is exactly why this one lands. Her publisher's own summary covers the ground: active opioid use, a life coming apart, 120 days in a Florida jail, and what came after. She is funny in places she has no business being funny, she does not sell you a program, and she is unsparing about the lying, which is the part most memoirs sand down. Fair warning: there is graphic withdrawal, incarceration, and a lot of damage done to people who loved her. Harmony, 2019, 384 pages.
Need a higher level of care than a meeting? A member of our community sent in this list of Colorado detox and inpatient residential treatment (IRT) contacts. It's a starting point, not a ranking or an endorsement: coverage changes and beds fill, so always call to verify, especially Medicaid (your RAE region). PHP/IOP/OP are day and outpatient programs. In crisis, call or text 988.
Denver CARES (Denver) · (303) 436-3500 · Detox · Medicaid RAE 3
Centennial Peaks (Westminster) · (970) 673-4980 · Detox
Landmark Recovery (Aurora) · (720) 702-9729 · Detox/IRT · most insurance
CuraWest (Denver) · (888) 687-5118 · Detox/IRT · Medicaid RAE 1 & 3
Mile High Recovery Center (Denver) · (855) 796-2102 · IRT/PHP/OP/sober living · Medicaid RAE 3/4/5 + private
Foundry Front Range (Broomfield) · (720) 807-7867 · IRT · Medicaid RAE 1
CeDAR (Aurora) · (720) 848-3000 · Detox/IRT · most insurance
Alpine Recovery Center (Denver) · (720) 704-2883 · Detox/IRT · Health First Colorado RAE 3
Rocky Mountain Detox (Lakewood) · (833) 433-4850 · Detox/IRT · private + Medicaid
West Pines (Westminster) · (877) 519-3108 · Detox
Valiant Living Detox & Assessment (Fort Lupton) · Detox · private + all Medicaid
Avenues Recovery Center (Denver) · (720) 704-0844 · Detox/IRT/PHP/IOP · most insurance
Sandstone Care (Denver) · (888) 850-1890 · PHP/OP · private insurance
Footprints to Recovery (Centennial) · (855) 628-2899 · Detox/IRT · Medicaid RAE 1
Recover Colorado (Westminster) · (888) 695-5407 · call to verify
Red Rock Recovery Center (Lakewood) · (855) 218-7588 · Detox/IRT
Denver Springs (Englewood) · (720) 643-4300 · Detox/IRT · most insurance
Valley Hope of Parker (Parker) · (303) 841-7857 · Detox/IRT · Medicaid RAE 1 & 2 + private
The Raleigh House (Arvada) · (720) 891-4657 · Detox/IRT · most insurance
Continuum Recovery Center of Colorado (Denver) · (844) 901-3066 · Medicaid RAE 1
Revive Health and Recovery (Denver) · (720) 573-6450 · Medicaid RAE 1
Colorado Medication Assisted Recovery (Thornton) · (720) 707-3593 · Medicaid RAE 1
Turning Point Center for Youth & Family Development (Fort Collins) · (970) 221-0999 · most insurance
ARTS: Addiction Research & Treatment Services (Denver) · (303) 734-5000 men's / (303) 336-1600 adult outpatient · Detox/IRT
Northpoint Recovery (Loveland) · Detox/IRT · most insurance
New Beginnings Recovery Center (Littleton) · (303) 830-2064 · IOP/DUI
Mountainside Women's Recovery Center (Aurora) · (970) 245-4214 · IRT/housing, women
Circle Program, Health Solutions West · IRT/housing
There are many paths to recovery, and none of these is "the" way; they're doors. Find your path, any path, just find one.
Hotlines: SAMHSA National Helpline 1-800-662-HELP (4357) (free, confidential, 24/7) · 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call/text 988 · Cocaine Anonymous 310-559-5833
Find treatment: findtreatment.gov · confidential, free, official locator
Find a meeting (every path counts): AA · NA · CA · CoDA · SMART Recovery · Recovery Dharma · Marijuana Anonymous · Wellbriety
Get connected, get moving: Young People in Recovery · peer support, life skills, local chapters · The Phoenix · free sober active community
Colorado readers: 5280 High School (Denver recovery high school, tuition-free) · Medicaid work requirements FAQ and screener · Colorado Consortium
Nominate a Recovery Hero: recoveryhero@therecoverycode.org
Contact us: support@therecoverycode.org
"Please help" might be the two most valuable words a person struggling with addiction can learn. So we'll go first:
Too many people are still stranded: cold, isolated, and convinced nobody is coming for them. We are coming.
Help us build a bridge from the icy island of addiction to a life filled with hope, freedom, and purpose. Help us cast a dragnet of hope wide enough to reach every person who is still struggling. A like may seem small. A follow takes only a second. But one share could reach someone on the night they are ready to give up.
Please:
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• Invite others to help us reach the people still struggling.
You may never know which share becomes someone's first step toward recovery. Together, we can reach more people. Together, we can save lives. We leave no one behind.
The Recovery Code · IT'S AN INSIDE JOB.
TheRecoveryCode.org
#TheRecoveryCode #RecoveryIsPossible #ItsAnInsideJob
A national number that fell 12.3% and is still 67,798. A field of 1,765 flags in Grand Junction. Four kids in a school in northern Maine. Eight beds in a house in Tennessee that used to be the worst address in a man's life. None of that started with a plan this big. It's Recovery Month, so people will ask you what works, and here is the honest answer from this issue: somebody called, somebody picked up, and somebody stopped lying about an hour into the conversation. That's the whole mechanism. It is available to you today and it costs nothing.
Your story is not over. You're mid-rewrite, and the next line is yours to write. Make the call. See you in two weeks. Keep debugging — and keep BOBO out of the build.
SAMHSA National Helpline · free, confidential, 24/7: 1-800-662-HELP (4357)
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline · call or text 988
// checksum: every fact in this issue was checked against at least one primary or two independent reputable sources before publishing: that's our checksum. Data labeled preliminary or provisional may be revised by the issuing agency. Where a figure rests on a single source, we say so on the page. A full verification log is kept for every issue. Spot an error? Email support@therecoverycode.org and we'll patch it, publicly, next issue.
Recovery Hero nominations: recoveryhero@therecoverycode.org · Contact: support@therecoverycode.org
THE RECOVERY CODE · Issue #5 · September 7, 2026 · Published every two weeks · It's an Inside Job.