Everyday life will be a lot more challenging in a true survival crisis; add to that the issue of addiction and desperate addicts and “challenging” can become downright dangerous.

Here is how the opioid crisis in NH is being met by one local law enforcement agency; it shows how pervasive the addiction issue is in so-called normal society.

Laconia, where Adams works today, is a former mill town in central New Hampshire surrounded by lakes. In midwinter, Laconia is home to 16,000 residents, though in summer that number swells to 30,000. Those are gleaming, sun-¬dappled days. Then winter falls on New England like a gavel.

A blight in the region is especially acute. Of the 13 states with the highest death rates from drug overdoses, five are in New England. New Hampshire in particular has more per capita overdose deaths than anywhere but West Virginia. In 2012, the state had 163 such deaths, a majority of them (as elsewhere in the country) from heroin and prescription opioids. In 2015, the state had nearly 500 deaths, the most in its history.

In Manchester, its largest city, the police seized more than 27,000 grams of heroin that year, up from 1,314 grams a year earlier. In certain neighborhoods, a single dose of heroin can cost less than a six pack of Budweiser. Waiting lists for treatment programs stretch as long as eight weeks.

‘‘We’re not getting anywhere,’’ he told his chief, Christopher Adams (the two men are not related), and his lieutenant. It turned out that they had already reached a similar conclusion. Until recently, Christopher Adams told me, he couldn’t recall ever hearing of a heroin case. ‘‘Now it’s every day,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a majority. Not just in Laconia. It’s all over.’’

He and his lieutenant sat down to consider what their department might do. It seemed that there were three conceivable approaches to a drug problem: prevention, enforcement, and treatment. To accomplish all three would mean regarding drug users, and misusers, as not only criminals. They were also customers who were being targeted and sold to; they were also victims who needed medical treatment. To coordinate all those approaches would require a particular sort of officer.

In September 2014, Eric Adams became the first person in New England — to his knowledge, the only person in the country — whose job title is prevention, enforcement and treatment coordinator. ‘‘I never thought I’d be doing something like this,’’ he told me. ‘‘I learned fast.’’ The department printed him new business cards: ‘‘The Laconia Police Department recognizes that substance misuse is a disease,’’ they read. ‘‘We understand you can’t fight this alone.’’ On the reverse, Adams’s cellphone number and email address were listed. He distributed these to every officer on patrol and answered his phone any time it rang, seven days a week. Strangers called him at 3 a.m., and Adams spoke with them for hours.

On a glass table in the bank lobby lay that morning’s copy of The Laconia Daily Sun. ‘‘Drug Sweep in Laconia Results in 17 Arrests,’’ its front page read. Headlines like that had become increasingly common, especially as the drugs themselves changed — first to opiates, then to opioids. They weren’t the same thing, Adams had learned. Opiates are derived from nature, and there are only so many, drugs like morphine, heroin and codeine. By contrast, opioids — though the word is now often used as an umbrella term for all these substances — technically means synthetic drugs like Vicodin, Percocet, fentanyl and OxyContin, all of which were invented in a laboratory. This is why detectives sometimes encountered new opioids that were 20, 50, 100 times as potent as heroin. In a lab, you can do nearly anything.

In so many towns all across the country, it is difficult to talk about an issue like heroin, not only because there is a stigma or because people worry about sounding impolite, but because everyone calibrates differently, based on neighbors and co-workers they see all day, how much of a problem it is or whether it is a problem at all. There were towns near Laconia — diplomatically, Adams declined to name them — that denied they had any drug crisis, even as the numbers they had showed otherwise. When presented with those numbers, some officials found alternative explanations. Those were residents from other towns who just happened to cross the border, they argued. This reasoning just contributed to the problem, Adams said.

Between 2004 and 2013, the number of New Hampshire residents receiving state-¬funded treatment for heroin addiction climbed by 90 percent. The number receiving treatment for prescription-¬opiate abuse climbed by 500 percent. But in terms of availability of beds, New Hampshire ranks second to last in New England in access to drug-¬treatment programs, ahead of only Vermont. The number who still need treatment is probably much higher. In October 2014, New Hampshire became the second-to-last state in the country to begin a prescription-¬drug-¬monitoring program, leaving only Missouri without one.

That very week, I told Engler, while tagging along with Adams for a meeting at the high school, I’d heard teachers mention a current student, a well-¬liked senior athlete, a team captain, whose sister had struggled with addiction and who had been open about the experience. Another member of the same graduating class, a girl whose grades ranked her in the top 10, had been walking with a friend in 2012 when a local mother, high while driving to pick up her own child from the middle school, swerved and struck them on the sidewalk. The girl survived. Her friend was killed.

Early in his tenure, Adams made a presentation to ‘‘some prominent people in the community’’ — he didn’t want to name anyone — and afterward, as much of the room applauded, a man approached to shake Adams’s hand. As he reached out, the man said: ‘‘It’s a really good job you’re doing. I think it’s great. But my opinion is, if they stick a needle in their arm, they should die.’’

‘‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’’ Adams said, startled. ‘‘I’d hope you would feel differently if it was your own family member.’’

But the man shook his head. ‘‘That will never happen.’’

This sort of thing happened all the time when Adams began. Today it happened far less frequently. So many others had grown into Adams’s approach: fellow officers, downtown business owners, the captain at the Belknap County jail. Police officers from around New England and even farther away had phoned or traveled to Laconia to learn what Adams was doing, and whether the model could be replicated. Other towns, independently, had been pressed by the crisis to conceive approaches of their own. Manchester had turned its firehouses into safe stations. Gloucester, across the border in Massachusetts, had a network of community volunteers.

In an empty conference room on the first floor of the department, I met a young man named Chadwick Boucher, an early client of Adams’s. The two men hugged when they saw each other, and then Adams disappeared upstairs to make calls while Boucher and I spoke. He was 27, though he had the calm demeanor of someone two or three times as old. As early as middle school, Boucher began sneaking his parents’ liquor, partly to fit in with older boys he admired, he told me. Soon he added marijuana. He played hockey then, and played well — invitations came from showcases in Boston and scouts from Division I colleges, including the University of New Hampshire, a national power. Instead, Boucher quit. It was too much pressure. He finished high school and moved in with a friend, who introduced him to OxyContin.

What followed was difficult to align into a neat chronology. He bounced from one friend’s apartment to another, from Oxy to Percocet and finally, when pills grew scarce, to heroin. There was a criminal distribution charge, probation, two treatment programs that he abandoned, feeling as though he didn’t belong. There were short-¬term jobs tending bar or waiting tables, collecting paychecks before inevitably being fired.

Suddenly he was high behind the wheel of his father’s Cutlass — not in the road, but in a driveway — startling awake to the police rapping on his window. Then he was at the Laconia police station, in a room with a plainclothes officer named Eric Adams.

‘‘He opened his arms to me,’’ Boucher recalled. It had felt bizarre, sharing the truth with a cop. But things had changed so quickly. Most of his family had stopped returning his calls, and all his friends had vanished. The only people around him now were strangers who shared his addiction, and he didn’t like or trust them. The difference in meeting someone like Adams was obvious. ‘‘He cares about my well-¬being,’’ Boucher said. ‘‘I needed that.’’

Adams wanted him to call every day, so Boucher called every day. Then every week. He entered another treatment program, and this time he graduated. He was now nearing a year sober. He owned a business and was caught up on his bills. He lived up the road in an apartment and had friends again, some of whom were in recovery, too.

They made a point to talk openly about it, to keep an eye out for one another. Some he referred to Adams. He knew that recovery demanded his full attention, that it probably always would. If he lost anything else in his life — an apartment, a business — he lost that one thing only and could do without it. If he lost his recovery, he would lose everything, all at once.

I asked Boucher how he preferred to be named in this article — by only ‘‘Chad’’? Or would he prefer anonymity? But he shook his head. It was important to him, to be honest about who he was. He hoped this would send a message to other addicts and to those who encountered them. ‘‘It’s important that people know there’s a way out.’’ Recovery from addiction was an achievable thing and, having discovered this fact, having discovered Eric Adams, Boucher intended to share it. The news might save lives. He knew it was possible that a business client might discover his unflattering past, that he might lose an account or two. ‘‘I’ve come way too far for that,’’ he said.

It is an often ignored reality that addiction affects all of us, even if we do not know it; it is not just a “city” problem and in a survival situation, that reality will affect everyone.

For example, as you read this, it is a better than even chance emergency assets are being diverted to address an addiction crisis rather than dealing with “normal” medical emergencies; that will be exacerbated in a severe survival crisis.

This article highlights how pervasive it is, how deep in denial some are and how if you want to be truly prepared for a survival situation, you have to factor in addiction and its offshoots as well as how to address them as one part of your Survival Plan.

To learn more about this major issue and how some are going about addressing it, check out The New York Times.