And that's when things got weird

There may be 1.5 billion reasons to buy a ticket for tonight’s Powerball  drawing , but  Massachusetts residents really  don’t need too much of a push to go  place a bet .  Last year   L ottery retailers  in Massachusetts  rang in  more than  $5 billion in ticket sales. Think about  the  math. The state boasts a n adult  population of  about  5.23 million, so it equates to each resident over the age of 18 dropping an average of $957 in lottery tickets annually.  That  ranks Massachusetts as the highest of any of the  52   North American  lotteries in terms of per capita spend.  In fact, tiny Massachusetts ’ per capita spend more than twice that of the next highest state (Georgia).  Combine our  state  lottery sales with the $10 billion a year that residents are estimated to spend at out-of-state casinos and the $5 billion estimated to be spen t  on online...

I took a couple of weeks off from writing my column in December. I wish I could say that I spent that time sunning myself on a tropical island, but really I was concentrating on penning something I had never written before: a eulogy. Since I started at The Item six months ago, rarely has a week gone by that an overdose hasn’t been listed in the police log or that a young person who “died suddenly” or was “stricken at home” has not appeared on the obituaries page. Sadly, it also is rare that the names and faces featured in those obituaries are unfamiliar to me. Childhood friends, former classmates, relatives of friends, and other acquaintances have graced page A2 in recent months, after succumbing to fatal drug overdoses. While rarely revealed within the copy of the obituary, the drug that cut their young lives short is heroin. But even with those dozens of familiar names I’ve seen in print and the numerous stories Item staff has written on the epidemic tearing throu...