What you're looking at is pretty shocking. A heroin addict overdoses. Her name
is Liz. She's been using drugs since she was 11. Today, she's 29.
Adam Wigglesworth and Louise Vincent were both with her that night in August.
They both volunteer with the program in Greensboro, North Carolina that provides
clean needles and other assistance to addicts. She seemed to be pretty unresponsive
and we were noticing a bluing of the lips, lack of oxygen, so her breathing
become quite shallow. Well, once someone's not breathing in, they're not
responding to any sort of stimulus. You give them breath and at that time, I
usually administer naloxone. Now watch what happens next.
We gave her about 60 units of Narcan. Narcan, also known as naloxone, can reverse an
overdose from heroin in other drugs, like oxycodone. Another sternal rub, another
shot of Narcan.
And finally, Liz begins to come to.
I can tell you, Erin, I got a chance to meet Liz, who you're looking at there,
and she's doing very well today. This drug, naloxone, has been something that's been
used for years in emergency rooms, but the push now is to get it in the hands of
first line responders, EMTs, and also potentially people who use heroin themselves.
It's controversial in some areas, but as you might imagine, as you saw there, it can
potentially really rescue someone from an overdose. The goal is to call 911 first and
then possibly give this medication, Erin.
So Sanjay, when we talk about, in the case of Philip Seymour Hoffman as an example, and
I know we don't have the toxicology, we don't have the full details, so you're not able
to give a medical point of view for sure, but the question for this drug is, could it
work on any overdose? Could it have saved a life like it?
Well, this works on specific types of drug overdoses, but heroin is one of those types
of drugs. Typically, you think of narcotics, morphine, fentanyl, these things that are
sort of these high dose pain types of medications, but heroin falls in that same category as
well. We don't know, Erin, to your point, because we don't know the full toxicology
report. We do know that there have been cases where heroin has been laced, if you will,
with fentanyl, which is another pain medication that works very, very quickly.
But there's an important point here, Erin, and that is that someone would have needed
to be there. You need to have somebody else there to actually give the medication.
This is what the kit looks like right here. It's a couple of vials, syringes, and again,
it comes with instructions, but the goal is to get these in the hands of people who might
potentially benefit from them.
