Drug Abuse

Ben Ferguson and Max Allaire

Ben Ferguson
This Drug abuse map is a collectively built map that displays the sites and extent of drug abuse in the Cambridge area, incorporating input from recovering addicts, doctors, addicts, police officers, and the general public. The soul of this project is to show how much drug abuse is going on in the Boston area. The project explores drug abuse because it is a major problem that is happening in the U.S. and the Cambridge area. In Boston there was between 28 to 52 deaths per one hundred thousand persons. This project allows recovering addicts and addicts to share their stories; local cops to advise the public on where people are doing drugs and to remind them to stay safe; and the general public to recognize the extent of the problem and add their input to the map: where they have witnessed drug use, come across drug paraphernalia, or experienced weird behavior. Each group of people affected by the problem will come in and mark on tracing paper that will overlay the map the answers to questions like: Where is Narcan distributed in the Boston area? Where have you seen drugs being used? Who did you talk to during the time you consumed? Where do you feel safest? This helps anyone from state and city officials to locals in the Boston area who want to be informed about the drug problem around them.

Max Allaire

This projects dwells into the severity of the opioid epidemic nationwide and locally. The maps are significant as their main purpose is to bring awareness to this problem. The project has many different layers and some of those are emotional and others are statistics. The colors represent the deaths per 100,000 people. There is not really any patterns regarding the different states except for the fact most overdoses occur in the eastern region of the United States. Further studying this epidemic brings awareness that not only are users are affected but the ones around them are affected as well. Another key fact in the research is the fact that Cambridge has been a hub of opioid abuse these past few years, but this past year there has been improvements in the amount of overdoses that happened. Cambridge needs help with bringing awareness to the subject of addiction and this map fives that help and awareness.