The opioid epidemic has affected tens of thousands of people across Massachusetts, and later this year, vehicles on the state’s roadways will be able to offer reminders that survivors and grieving families are all around us.
The Registry of Motor Vehicles is working to produce new specialty license plates promoting a message of “Overdose Awareness,” the culmination of nearly four years of work led by Marlborough resident Cheryl Juaire.
Juaire and the nonprofit she founded, Team Sharing, got enough motorists to express an interest in a specialty overdose awareness license plate — and to commit $40 per plate up front — that the RMV has moved to the next phase in making them available, the agency confirmed to the News Service.
“Somebody’s going to see a plate pull up beside you and say, ‘Can you tell me about that plate for overdose awareness?’ They may have lost a child,” Juaire said in an interview. “I can say, ‘I have lost two,’ and I can direct them to resources for their grief.”
Qualified entities in Massachusetts can get specialty license plates produced and registered after achieving several prerequisites.
Groups must collect 750 applications for the new plates before the manufacturing begins. After that point, a sponsor organization needs to post a $100,000 bond, which the state releases after issuing 3,000 plates within five years.
It’s a personal mission for Juaire, who lost two sons, Corey Merrill and Sean Merrill, to overdoses.
She started the license plate campaign in February 2021 with her son Sean. At the time, Juaire recalled, Sean told her the “only thing” he wanted for his birthday in March was for volunteers to successfully gather the 750 applications needed to clear the first major hurdle.
“I thought because of the world I live in — the grief world, the recovery world, the addiction world, all the people that I know — I thought this is just going to be the easiest thing I’ve ever done, and I found out that that’s not true. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Juaire said.
Volunteers did not get enough signatures in the first month to check off Sean’s birthday wish. He died a few months later.
Juaire said she was “heartbroken” at first that she had not succeeded before Sean died, but she did not give up.
Over the next three-plus years, Juaire and other Team Sharing volunteers attended a suite of events, asking anyone and everyone if they were interested in acquiring a specialty license plate designed to raise awareness of the overdose epidemic.
“Whenever there was an event — 5ks, conferences — we were there. Somebody was there with a table set up with the license plate [design] and the applications,” she said. “It got real discouraging because sometimes we’d be at an event, and we would get just one application. But we continued. I just wasn’t going to stop.”
The group chipped away, and it launched a final successful push in 2024 after receiving a $10,000 donation. With that money, Juaire said, Team Sharing began offering to pay the $40 application fee for Bay Staters in recovery.
That was enough to get the final 75 applications, and volunteers hit the 750 application threshold in October.
People who signed up, in some cases years ago, were “thrilled” when they found out the plan is now moving forward, Juaire said.
RMV officials estimate new orders take about 10 to 16 weeks, with plates manufactured at MCI Cedar Junction.
The program also doubles as a fundraiser for participating nonprofit groups. Only $12 from the $40 application fee goes to the RMV, and the remaining $28 goes to the organization pushing the specialty plate.
More than 20,000 Bay Staters have died of opioid-related overdoses since 2014. The number of fatalities declined about 10 percent from 2022 to 2023, but still surpassed 2,000 for the eighth year in a row.
Juaire hopes that the spread of awareness plates on Massachusetts vehicles will help those in recovery and affected families realize they are not alone. Some parents who lost children, she said, are still afraid to tell others how their kids died.
“There’s still stigma out there. Stigma is alive and well. I am hoping that these plates will start a conversation,” Juaire said.
Her work will not end with license plates, either. Juaire wants to get Congress to require flags to be lowered to half-staff on Aug. 31 for International Overdose Awareness Day.
She was also one of the voices pushing lawmakers last term to legalize overdose prevention centers, also known as safe injection sites, where individuals could use their own drugs under the watch of medical personnel who could prevent any overdose from turning fatal.
The Senate embraced the controversial idea and Gov. Maura Healey’s administration has also supported it, but the measure did not survive negotiations with the House amid fears of federal prosecution.
“We’re going to continue with that right from the beginning again,” Juaire said. “It was almost there. It was so close.”
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: New Massachusetts license plate will serve as opioid epidemic reminder