NINE MEN, ALL OF THEM BLACK, gathered at Gateway to Change in early May, when I first visited the gray-and-tan-painted drug-treatment center that is planted next to a bustling corner grocery store on the north side of Milwaukee. Much of their talk was about a man who was no longer there and whose fate could be any of theirs.
Michael C. Williams had been born in South Bend, Indiana, before moving here as a child. When times were good, he worked as a home health aide. But he also, for years, battled drug and alcohol addiction that ultimately contributed to a number of criminal charges, a few stints in jail, and two stays at Gateway’s rehab program.
The first was back in 2010, when, in his late 20s, Williams and his fiancée, Penny, came to Gateway fighting cocaine addiction. They spent several months in counseling and were seemingly doing well—until they weren’t. When Penny overdosed in 2019, it was Williams who found her dead in a motel room.
Williams showed back up at Gateway at the end of 2021, in his late 30s and clearly still grieving Penny’s death—as well as that of his mother, who died last June—even as he worked to process the depth of his dependence. By all accounts, his second stay was far less successful than the first: Williams left after two weeks without completing the program.
A few days before Easter, Williams’s sister found him shirtless and unresponsive on the cold basement floor, next to her teenage son’s bed and the Xbox they’d both played that night. Paramedics discovered a glass crack pipe near Williams’s body.
When word made it back to Gateway, the men were not only heartbroken but scared. They knew that what happened to him wasn’t just a simple overdose—and that it could come for them next.
“When someone dies of an overdose, you’re like, Wow, I was probably using the same drugs, and I didn’t die,” DeWayne Dinkins, a 55-year-old patient, tells me as he shifts restlessly in a zip-up hoodie and jeans that hang off his gaunt frame. “I just cringe. To die of some dope? And his family will be like, ‘Wow, he never got it together.’ I don’t want that to be my story.”
Milwaukee and many other metropolises are now on the front lines of a raging overdose crisis the CDC estimates is killing roughly 100,000 Americans a year—about 11 every hour. And its body count has steadily increased over the past decade. In 2021, Milwaukee County had more fatal drug overdoses—644 of them—than in any other year on record, and this year is projected to be even worse. By the end of September, the tally had reached 405 confirmed overdoses already, with an additional 138 suspected overdoses pending final toxicology reports.
These mounting deaths are driven largely by synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, a very powerful pain drug that now contaminates much of the nation’s street supply of cocaine, meth, and heroin and that has fundamentally altered the face of the opioid epidemic. Although this epidemic was once considered a
