Deep into a three-day heroin binge at a local hotel, Samantha told the newbie he was shooting too much. He wasn’t accustomed to heroin, she said, and hadn’t waited long enough since his last injection.

“But he didn’t listen,” she said. Sure enough, he emerged from a visit to the bathroom, eyes glazed, and collapsed from an overdose.

Samantha, who declined to give her last name to avoid trouble with her bosses at a nearby strip club, said she grabbed her naloxone, the fast-acting antidote to opioid overdoses. She was too panicked to place the atomizer on the end of the syringe, but her boyfriend wasn’t. He sprayed the mist into the nose of the unconscious drug user, who awoke minutes later.

Read more at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/thousands-of-drug...