Posted: Aug 31, 2026
Source: 9News YouTube Channel
Steve Carleton, a certified addiction counselor and the chief clinical officer at Porch Light Health, speaks about the importance of International Overdose Awareness Day.
Summary: In a 9NEWS interview marking International Overdose Awareness Day, Steve Carleton (certified addiction counselor and chief clinical officer at Porch Light Health) frames the day as both a remembrance for families who’ve lost someone and a prompt to act on preventable deaths, starting with treating addiction as a disease and cutting the stigma that keeps people quiet. He identifies fentanyl as still the leading driver at roughly 65% of overdoses, with the sharper emerging danger being fentanyl mixed into methamphetamine and cocaine, and explains Colorado’s divergence from the national trend (overdoses down nationwide but up in-state) as the crisis having started on the East Coast and arrived here last, a lag he expects Colorado to close as awareness, stigma reduction, and treatment access improve. On the personal side, he pushes back on the “rock bottom” myth, saying that in 20 years he’s never seen anyone enter treatment while life was going well, and that what actually sustains recovery is experiencing concrete improvement in the things a person cares about , so the real threshold is being able to picture yourself in the shoes of someone who’s already recovered. He closes by pointing viewers to Porch Light Health (porchlighthealth.com), SAMHSA, and Al-Anon for family members, emphasizing peer connection with someone who’s been through it plus a professional who can lay out the treatment path.
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Porch Light Health
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