Could radical compassion work against America’s opioid crisis?
HOW TO SAVE A LIFE By Mike Fitzgerald
A few months ago, Kevin FitzGerald was driving along Interstate 44 toward St. Louis when his iPhone buzzed.
FitzGerald picked it up. The voice on the other end: a man in his early twenties in Ontario, Canada, who had just injected cocaine. “I already used, and I need to talk to somebody,” the caller said, as FitzGerald recalls. So they talked. The two strangers gabbed on and on as FitzGerald turned off the highway and looped through side streets. “We talked politics a lot,” FitzGerald says. “We’re comparing education and health care. He told me he was bipolar. We talked literally for two hours. He was a
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wonderful young man.” FitzGerald, 68, is a volunteer operator for an international program called Never Use Alone, a rapidly growing overdose response line for people using drugs alone. The group, which has no headquarters and exists virtually, runs a toll-free, 24/7 hotline (800-4843731) that connects substance users from all over the United States and Canada with volunteer operators. Volunteers such as FitzGerald stay on the line and talk to users, who provide contact and location information. Volunteers are trained to check in every two or three minutes to confirm the users are still responsive. If the person on the other end of the line stops responding, then the volunteer immediately calls for help. If the call ends uneventfully, as it does in the vast majority of cases, then the operator destroys all contact and location information. FitzGerald, a well-known St. Louis labor activist, contacted the Riverfront Times about Never Use Alone because he thinks it works. “My main thing is to get the word out about this program,” he says. “Because it can literally save lives.”
DECEMBER 1-7, 2021
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ever Use Alone, or NUA, began only a few years ago, the brainchild of a recovering heroin user in Tennessee who was inspired by a Facebook posting. So far, the service is already showing clear promise as one of the few effective ways to turn the tide on America’s raging epidemic of drug overdose deaths. In preliminary figures released in early November, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses for the twelvemonth period between May 2020 and April 2021 — a dubious alltime record that eclipsed the previous annual mark of 93,000 OD deaths. The overdose epidemic shows no signs of abating. More than 75 percent of America’s OD deaths were caused by opioids, a class of powerful painkillers that includes morphine and heroin and namebrand painkillers such as OxyContin. And more than 64,000 of the deaths were due to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. Fentanyl, a painkiller up to 100 times more powerful than heroin, is now pervasive both nationwide and in the St. Louis region.
Because of its highly addictive — and therefore profitable — nature, fentanyl is routinely added to heroin, but is also mixed in with a wide range of other blackmarket drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine as well as counterfeit versions of OxyContin and the antidepressant Xanax. Fentanyl, unlike heroin, is a synthetic drug. It can be made anywhere. The center of global fentanyl production is still Wuhan, China, because of the cheap and widespread availability of the precursor chemicals needed to make it. But it is increasingly manufactured in secret U.S. labs, which has made law-enforcement crackdowns much more di cult. Many people who OD on fentanyl don’t even realize they’re ingesting it at the time. And if they’re using the drug alone — which is common because of the stigma attached to illegal drug use and the isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — then the odds of a fatal overdose skyrocket, according to FitzGerald. Substance users whom he talks to on the NUA hotline have become especially wary, he says. Continued on pg 14
