npr:
When Priscilla Graham-Farmer went to get her hair done in Newark, N.J., recently, she noticed the elevator in the building was broken, so she took the stairs. And that’s when Graham-Farmer saw him: a young guy sprawled out, not breathing.
"He was literally turning blue," she says. "And everybody was walking over him."
But Graham-Farmer stopped. And looked closer. She saw that he had a needle and some cotton balls. The guy had clearly overdosed.
"I’m screaming in the hallway," Graham-Farmer remembers. "Nobody’s answering."
Though she lives in New Jersey, Graham-Farmer is a caseworker at a drug treatment center in New York City. And in her car, she had the silver bullet remedy for exactly this sort of crisis: a naloxone kit (or Narcan, the brand name it’s best known by). Naloxone is a drug that reverses the effects of an overdose of heroin, OxyContin, Vicodin and other opioids. The drug blocks the physical effects of opioids — ending the high, and stopping the depression of the respiratory system that can be their deadly side effect. Graham-Farmer carries her Narcan kit wherever she goes.
The version of Narcan that Graham-Farmer was carrying that day is easy to use — it’s a nasal spray. She popped a vial of the clear liquid into an atomizer, and squeezed half a dose up one of the stranger’s nostrils, and half up the other. Almost immediately, he started breathing again.
"He woke up," she says. "And all I could do was hold him and hug him, because he was 21 but looking like he was 15. And he cried."
Teaching Friends And Family How To Reverse A Drug Overdose
Photo credits: Kevin Hagen for NPR
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