Sidelined –

Oct. 2, 2019 – 

I. THE VP On the morning of July 2, Eric Spofford awoke early, pulled on the gray suit he had bought the day before and left for work by six. He wanted to be on site when the Secret Service arrived.

At 34, with a buzz cut and thick, tattooed arms, Spofford is sometimes mistaken for a client of Granite Recovery Centers, the addiction treatment facilities he runs throughout New Hampshire. Growing up blue-collar in Salem, a town of nearly 30,000 just over the border from Massachusetts, Spofford started using Oxy at 14. By 16 he was dealing heroin. By 18 he’d have been dead if not for Narcan, the overdose-reversal drug. After getting clean in 2006, he started a sober living house, and in the decade that followed, as fentanyl poured onto the streets of New Hampshire, claiming close to 500 Granite Staters’ lives annually, Spofford became an authority on the opioid crisis. He once testified before a U.S. Senate committee.

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