Heroin ’s Grip on Huntington, West Virginia

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 fo...
Source: JEMS: Journal of Emergency Medical Services News - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: News Patient Care Source Type: news