Why I Carry Naloxone (And Why You Should Too)

5 min readJul 21, 2020

It was five in the morning, and I was peacefully sleeping in my bed in my basement room of the sober living house that I am currently living in when I heard this commotion outside my room. My housemate was banging on the assistant house manager’s bedroom door and frantically screaming for her to wake up: “Wake up, she’s having a seizure! Wake up! Wake up, please! She isn’t breathing!”

I shot out of bed and went to see what this was all about. At first, I was hesitant to go into the room because I didn’t want to crowd in during an emergency. But when the assistant house manager came out of the room, and I could hear my housemate on the phone with 911, I went into the room and saw our other housemate on the floor, blue. She was letting out guttural groans, but her chest was not moving up and down, and she was completely unresponsive when our roommate was shaking her.

Our house manager was out of town on vacation, but shortly before she left, I saw her carrying grocery store bags full of boxes of Narcan, so I ran out of the room to our assistant house manager’s room, and asked her “Do you have Narcan?” She quickly opened a cabinet and pulled out a box and handed it to me. I ran back into the room and pulled our housemate’s head back to open up her airway, and shot the first dose of Narcan nasal spray into her left nostril, and then I started chest compressions. When she was still unresponsive after a couple of minutes, I sprayed the other dose into her right nostril, then continued chest compressions while our housemate administered the rescue breaths between sets of compressions.

Soon, we heard EMTs come through the doorway, and I cleared out of the room to give them room to work. I went upstairs, made myself a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette. I looked down into the basement a few minutes later and our housemate, ghostly pale, was walking out to the ambulance with the EMTs. We had firefighters, EMTs, police officers in the house and when the parade of first responders finally walked out of the room, the three of us sat together and processed what just happened.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to give Narcan (or even sometimes just CPR when someone’s fallen out in front of me when I haven’t had Narcan), but it was the most dramatic overdose that I’ve witnessed, and it caught me off guard because we were in a recovery house where the expectation is that individuals who live there are supposed to be sober. I’ve witnessed other people get high, and seen people get kicked out for getting high, but this is the first time that I’ve seen a housemate on the brink of death where I had to act fast or watch them die.

At many points in my using career, I’ve had naloxone (but intranasal and intramuscular) available in my house or in a medicine cabinet, but it wasn’t until I recently got clean that I started carrying it with me at all times. A few years ago, I saw a post in my local mom’s group about a group member finding someone unconscious in their car, presumably from an overdose, and having to call EMT. At another point, my mother-in-law told my husband a story about finding someone fallen out in their car on their street. This was when I realized that basically every adult should be carrying naloxone on their person at all times.

I recently had a conversation with someone who asked me why I carry naloxone when I shouldn’t be associating with people who require naloxone in early sobriety. The issue with this particular line of thinking is that you never know when you’re going to come across someone who needs naloxone. According to the CDC , there were 67,367 overdose deaths in 2018, with opioid involvement 46,802 of these deaths. Addicts who have been sober for a period of time are particularly vulnerable to overdose, because their tolerance to opioids is not the same as it was when they were in active addiction , and people with substance use disorders have a relapse rate of 40–60% after completing treatment, according to the National Institute of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse . As a sober addict, I am a first responder in the opioid epidemic because I regularly frequent places that are frequented by other sober addicts.

In the age of coronavirus, drug overdoses are on the rise. Closed borders have disrupted the supply chain, resulting in an increase in synthetic drugs. And the social distancing rules have left many addicts alienated from their support networks and recovery programs . I recently published a piece about my own corona-triggered relapse that caused me to need to seek residential treatment, and I was flooded with personal messages from other people who were dealing with very similar situations. Recovery meetings might be shut down, but the dope man isn’t social distancing.

Today, I keep two doses of Narcan in my purse wherever I go. In my state, and many other states, you can have naloxone prescribed for you at the pharmacy — and billed to your insurance. We also have harm reduction organizations that provide both the nasal spray and the intramuscular naloxone for free. The North American Syringe Exchange Network has an interactive map of syringe exchange programs across the country, and can connect you with a local harm reduction organization that supplies naloxone .

In our current opioid crisis that the more people we have walking around with narcan readily available, the more lives will be saved. If you have an addict in your life (in recovery, or actively using) you should absolutely have narcan available. Keep it in your medicine cabinet, your car, or your purse — and also take a CPR class. We are the first responders in this crisis, and you never know when you might have to save a life.

Written by Nia Norris

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