Everett logged 34 overdose incidents in 2025, four of them fatal, down from more than 180 in 2017, the fire department’s addiction recovery outreach worker told the City Council’s Government Operations Committee on Thursday, February 19.
Paul Guarino runs the Roadmap to Recovery program, started in 2017 when firefighters kept finding the same people on overdose calls. He gets a text from the fire captains and lieutenants on every call and follows up at the door. “The first thing is keeping them alive and keeping them safe and saying there is help,” he said. “Being myself in long term recovery, you know, it’s having that lived experience. It’s a little easier.” He writes his own grants, through RISE and Fenway Health among others, and uses the money to put people in a sober home for a month, “so they can stop, you know, paying their own rent” while they find work. He named sober houses on Devon, Hancock, Summer, Chestnut, Shute and Lynn streets and a new women’s house on Pleasant Street, but said he usually places Everett residents outside the city, away from “people, places, and things.”
The worry now is a different kind of call. From late May through December 31, a fire captain tracked more than 150 calls for anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation or psychosis. “Are they falling through the cracks?” Guarino asked. “They go to the hospital. They might get sectioned to Section 12, which keeps them there for 72 hours. What’s going on after that?” He said he works with Officer Nicole O’Donnell and that the police department is hiring a social worker to ride along on those calls.
Councilor Peter Pietrantonio asked how Guarino worked with the city’s former drug director at City Hall and whether he could use the state opioid settlement money. Guarino said that position “had his own agenda,” that the settlement money sat with the health department and he had no access to it, and that he had just agreed with health director Sabrina Firicano ten minutes earlier that the two offices “need to collaborate.” Councilor Stephanie Martins said the duplicate position has been terminated and asked the city to make sure the settlement money, roughly $400,000 by her recollection, is “not funding that expires and goes back.” She also pressed on language: residents who call in Spanish, Portuguese or Haitian Creole cannot always understand the call back. “That would be a help,” Guarino said, adding that firefighters see many alcohol-related calls across “different cultures.” Martins asked for his number on the record: 617-874-0489, his work cell. “If anybody needs Narcan, please call me,” he said.
Guarino, a pharmacist by training, said counterfeit pills are the message he brings to students with Eric Mazzio of youth development: “You show me a real pill and a fake pill. I can’t tell the difference.” The bigger problem in the middle schools, he said, is vaping. Chair Holly Garcia said her Girl Scout troop chose vaping as its awareness project in eighth grade. Councilor Michele Capone asked about 2026 plans: the Stop the Stigma week in September, International Overdose Awareness Day on August 31 and school talks. Garcia announced a ’90s-themed recovery dance at the rec center on Saturday, February 28, 6 to 10 p.m. A second item, Pietrantonio’s request that the inspectional services director explain the recent snowstorm, was pushed to the next meeting because the director could not attend.
