Only two years into recovery after battling more than a decade of drug addiction, Thomas S. Gunning, executive director of the Boston-based Building Trades Employers Association Northeast, learned about the skyrocketing number of opioid overdoses in the construction industry and desperately wanted to help. A 2018 Massachusetts Dept. of Public Health study revealed that about 22% of some 2,000 deaths in the state two years earlier from an opioid-related overdose, up from 1,700 in 2015, were construction workers. Gunning, 37, wanted to use his knowledge of substance use disorder to help others and unite the construction industry in the fight against the opioid epidemic. “But I still had the tough guy mentality figuring nobody’s going to want to hear this,” he says.
Gunning survived two heroin overdoses in March 2016 after getting hooked on opioids prescribed after surgery for a torn labrum discovered when he was being recruited by his college baseball team. He was rescued by the life-saving drug Narcan and spent eight days in intensive care, including having to relearn how to breathe.