May 17, 2024 3 min read

HIT: Let’s say your grandmother died without telling anybody that she had a safe deposit box with jewelry and stock certificates in it, or a savings account that went unmentioned. Without heirs claiming it, the money and the valuables go to the state, where it is held as unclaimed property. Right now, the Pennsylvania Treasury is holding onto an eye-opening $4.5 billion in unclaimed property. The property it is holding also includes utility refunds, insurance policies, uncashed checks and more. It’s estimated that about 10% of Pennsylvanians have unclaimed property. During the 2023-24 fiscal year, more than $200 million in unclaimed property was returned to its rightful owners, and officials are urging Pennsylvanians to go to patreasury.gov/unclaimed-property/ to see if there is anything that belongs to them. Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity said, “Every dollar can make a huge difference for families right now, so I encourage everyone to search our website for themselves and their loved ones to see if they’re owed any unclaimed property…”

HIT: The news in recent years about drug overdoses in the United States has mostly been pretty grim, with numbers inching back up during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the National Center for Health Statistics actually offered news this week that was at least somewhat good. The federal agency reported that drug overdose deaths decreased by 3% in 2023 compared to the year before. There are still more than 100,000 Americans dying of drug overdoses annually – enough to fill a football stadium – but at least the numbers are starting to move in the other direction. Why did the numbers decrease just a little bit? It could be better access to naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses, and better access to treatment now that the worst of COVID-19 appears to be behind us. No matter the reason, we can only hope there will be an additional decrease when the data is announced in 2025.

MISS: The life of Dr. Cyril Wecht, the Allegheny County pathologist and politician, was not without accomplishment and controversy, as the many obituaries of Wecht noted this week following his death Monday at the age of 93. He was accused of misdeeds on a few occasions over his long career and was known to be temperamental. Wecht certainly received no small share of publicity thanks to his oft-stated belief that President John F. Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. But we were struck by a comment Wecht made in an interview with the Observer-Reporter in 2017. Wecht was born in the Greene County community of Bobtown, and he expressed regret that he had not asked his parents how they ended up there after coming to the United States from Eastern Europe. He said, “I am so angry at myself for not having pursued this to learn more, but I don’t know. I can only say in my defense that maybe some parents shared experiences and reminisced, but mine never did so.” That is a lesson from Wecht worth heeding – if you have older loved ones, ask about their lives and hear their stories now, before they are no longer around to tell them.