HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) — He
found the woman slumped over the steering wheel, an empty syringe on the
floorboard and her skin dulling to a purplish blue.
Dave McClure, an EMS supervisor, counted four faint
breaths per minute. Without the antidote he carried, she'd be dead in
five minutes.
It was 3:25 p.m. on what was, so far, an ordinary
Monday. For an EMT in this struggling city, bringing an addict back from
the brink of opiate-fueled death counts as routine.
But as McClure searched for an unscarred vein in the
young woman's arm, dozens of others were shooting or snorting the same
toxic powder she'd just taken. They started dropping, their muscles
seizing, pupils shrinking to the size of pinheads. The heroin epidemic
that had been quietly killing by the thousands began boiling to a climax
that would traumatize the city and exhaust its emergency responders.
McClure's radio squawked as he pushed in the IV full
of a liquid called naloxone, which blocks the effects of opioids and
jolts those overdosing back to life. "We've got another overdose," the
dispatcher reported. "We've got two more."
The woman's eyes blinked open.
Red lights on the phone at the 911 dispatch center
flashed faster and faster until all 16 lines were screaming. They called
from the dining room of a rickety house, the parking lot of a fast food
restaurant, the bathroom of a gas station.
"People are dying everywhere," one caller said.
In the next four hours of Aug. 15, 28 people
overdosed in Huntington; 26 of them were saved. One man died at the
hospital that night, and another was found dead and alone days later.
Ambulances darted around town as cars pulled up at
the hospital, dropped overdosing people at the emergency room doors and
sped away. The drugs were so potent that the ordinary dose of naloxone
wasn't enough; responders had to use two, sometimes three doses to bring
them back to life.
"It was chaos here," says Yohlanda Dixon, a
55-year-old who lives in the neighborhood where dozens overdosed. "They
were all dropping the same time, like boom boom boom boom boom. That's
what was so scary. You knew they were fixing to die. And that's the last
thing you want to see, someone die right in front of you."
But it didn't stop there.
The string of
mass poisonings stretched across Appalachia and the Midwest. The chaotic
scene in Huntington has repeated day after day, in big cities and small
towns, in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. Health and law enforcement
officials in Tennessee alerted residents to the danger and asked them to
seek help to end their dependency.
In Louisville last week, an emergency room
doctor was so startled by the number of patients and the potency of the
drugs that he declared a public health emergency.
Law enforcement had warned for months that
batches of heroin were hitting the streets laced with potent drugs like
synthetic fentanyl or carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer 100 times
more powerful than heroin.
"We knew this day would happen. We didn't
know what it would be like, but we knew it was just a matter of time,"
says Jan Rader, Huntington's deputy fire chief and a registered nurse.
When the day came, a 36-year-old Huntington woman was among its victims.
The woman told her story to The Associated
Press on the condition her name not be used, for fear of retribution.
She's battled drug addiction for 20 years, starting with pain pills she
got for an ankle injury at 16. Her mother was an addict too, she says,
and it didn't take long to start crushing and snorting them. She turned
to heroin about three years ago, when law enforcement cracked down on
the painkiller trade that had ravaged Appalachia, and pills became
harder to find.
She and her husband live in a house on
Sycamore Street, adjacent to Marcum Terrace, a sprawling public housing
complex of squat brick buildings that has long been at the heart of this
city's drug epidemic. Police believe the laced drugs were sold there,
and most of the overdoses happened in the complex and the tangle of
narrow streets that butt up against it.
A friend brought the powder to the woman's house. Her friend took it first, then her friend's boyfriend, then the woman herself.
She knew something wasn't right as soon as she snorted it — she felt her throat closing.
Her friend dropped to the dining room floor.
The boyfriend turned blue.
She knelt over her friend and started CPR,
watching her own fingernails turn blue as she pushed down on her chest.
All the while, she struggled for air. It felt, she says, like she was
being stabbed with an invisible knife.
She remembers little after that.
Her husband got home and found the three of
them, their skin the color of his bluejeans. He thought they were dead,
tried CPR himself, then ran out to the street and screamed.
Around 3:30 p.m., a police officer arrived and shot her twice with naloxone.
She remembers opening her eyes, feeling
terror, then shame. She promised she'd never do it again, and still
hadn't, she says, two weeks later.
___
The calls kept coming.
At 3:35 p.m., a man overdosed in a car in a Burger King parking lot.
At 3:39 p.m., three people had collapsed inside an apartment.
At 3:45 p.m., McClure arrived alone at a
house and found a man in his 50s in the bathtub, not breathing. His
friends had turned on the water to try to revive him; they were
shouting, crying, smacking him in the face. A younger man lay dying in
the same bathroom.
McClure was alone with them for a few
minutes, but in the bedlam it seemed like an hour. Other medics arrived
and they used naloxone to bring them both back.
He got in his truck and left for the next call.
Huntington sits on the Ohio River at the
corner of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. It was once a bustling
railroad depot where trains packed with coal barreled through. But the
coal industry collapsed. People lost jobs, lost hope, and now nearly
one-third of residents live in poverty.
West Virginia's rate of drug overdose deaths
is the highest in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, and Huntington's is higher still. At least 944
people overdosed last year in the county, says Scott Lemley, an
intelligence analyst with the Huntington Police Department who estimates
that nearly 14 percent of residents are addicted to drugs.
It seems to be growing worse. At this time
last year, EMTs had administered 130 doses of naloxone, says Steve
Murray, the EMS assistant director. This year, they've given 307.
In the chaos, detectives started searching
apartments, trying collect evidence about who was handing out the
tainted drug. Within days, police would arrest an Ohio man named Bruce
Lamar Griggs in connection to some of the Huntington overdoses.
But they learned long ago that arresting dealers wouldn't solve the problem. People keep dying.
The city last year started an office devoted
to drug control policy led by former police chief Jim Johnson. They
train citizens every Wednesday on how to use naloxone; police officers
started carrying the drug; even the mayor keeps a dose in his pocket.
Many more would certainly have died on Aug. 15 without it.
Still, the people they brought back to life
have no place to go for help, even if their experiences scared them
enough to get clean.
West Virginia has only 28 detox beds. There
are just eight in Huntington, and they're always full. Medics revive the
same people, again and again and again.
___
The endless cycle of death and misery is
taking its toll on first responders, Murray says. Three EMTs left the
department last month alone.
Even Johnson, who heads the drug policy office, wonders if it will ever end.
"It consumes me," Johnson says. He considers
himself a tough old cop, one who struggles to deal with problems that
have no obvious solutions. "If you were working an armed robbery,
eventually you're going to be able to figure it out. There's not an
answer out there for this."
There are up days and down days, he says, and
Aug. 15 was both: Yes, responders saved 26 lives, but only because they
had had so much practice.
They brought people back to life in apartments, on street corners, in the bathroom of a gas station.
Dixon, who lives in an apartment in Marcum
Terrace, stepped out of her back door to take out her trash around 5
p.m. She saw a man, scrawny and staggering near the wood line in her
back lawn. She watched him topple over, face down into the grass, and
ran to him. His lips were already turning gray.
She screamed for help and the paramedics ran
over, shot him twice with naloxone and he finally came to. They told him
"he came within a hair of dying," yet he got up and walked to an
ambulance.
McClure recalls the rest of the day in
flashes: a man lying on a trail in the woods at 5:15 p.m., surrounded by
syringes; a man and woman in a house nearby at 6:20 p.m.; a middle-aged
man who'd been dragged to the sidewalk and left for dead at 6:30.
Some cried when they awakened and realized
they'd come within minutes of dying, McClure says. Some fought, some
shrugged, some said thank you and apologized.
"Most of the time they don't want that life —
what brought them there, I don't know. They don't want this for their
children either, and they feel terrible guilt. But they're caught in
their own battle," McClure says. "At the end of the day, we gave 26
people another chance at finding recovery. That's how I try to look at
it. Hopefully, maybe they'll all live."
McClure's next shift, a few days later, returned to routine: 12 overdoses. It was a good day, by comparison.
