Anything but death
Addicts call Jessica Blanchard as they get ready to shoot up, said Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris in Slate. Her goal: To stay on the line and keep them alive, no matter what.
SHORTLY AFTER SHE realized she might soon die, Kimber King reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. There was a phone number on it, and a few promises: “NO Preaching. NO Shaming. NO Judgement.”
She was skeptical, she later told me. “I was wary to call. I didn’t know what was going to happen with the police and stuff,” she said. But she did dial the number.
When she called, a warm voice answered: “Let me get my book, Kimber. I’ve never talked to you before. I’m glad you called. Have you called us before?”
“No. This is my first time.”
“You got your door unlocked?”
“Let me check. Hold on. Yes, it’s unlocked now.”
“OK, so make sure I’m on speakerphone.”
King told the operator she was going to use heroin. “Probably fentanyl,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “Probably fentanyl. OK,” the person answered. On the other end of the line was Jessica Blanchard. Her voice is calm on the call. But she later told me she was worried right away. She was right to be.
I MET BLANCHARD on the front patio of her home in Albany, Ga. I was about 15 minutes early, and she was still in her pajamas, poking only her head out from the front door to greet us. “I’m on a call now,” she told us, waving us inside. That call, and others like it, was why we came to this backwoods area of southwest Georgia, the “trailer hood,” as Blanchard called it, about a three-hour drive from Atlanta.
Blanchard, known by her friends as Jessie B., is an operator and education director for Never Use Alone, a safe-use hotline for drug users. It was conceived of four years ago by a “bunch a drug users sick of their friends dying,” as she put it.
The hotline serves people who worry using alone makes them vulnerable to dying by overdose. And there is reason for concern. Total overdose deaths climbed to nearly 110,000 in 2022. Overdoses are often fatal, but the chances of survival go way up with urgent EMS care. Never Use Alone increases a caller’s chances of survival by promising to stay on the line while you use and send you help if you become unresponsive.
After Blanchard was finished with the call, she got dressed and met my colleague and me in her office, a modest-size room with its walls painted black and purple Christmas lights running along the ceiling, with a small desk and two futons. She has a bag with Narcan nailed into her wall by the door, alongside a little plaque that reads “Very little is needed to make a happy life.” Never Use Alone’s coverage area spans North America, and Blanchard receives calls directly to her cellphone, rarely ever missing a call. That can be a matter of life or death.
Before we could get started on an interview, she got another NUA call on her phone. Overhearing it, you’d be forgiven for thinking she was chitchatting with an old friend.
That’s on purpose. Blanchard wants to keep people talking so she can better monitor their state as callers use drugs. They chat about anything the caller wants to talk about. It could sound like an impromptu therapy session; she has a small plastic container filled with index cards with the handwritten personal information of past callers. For new callers, Blanchard has a script that she personally developed over her years of taking NUA calls. That’s how her call with Kimber King begins. With her permission, Blanchard played a recording of that call for us to listen to.
“Never Use Alone, it’s Jessie,” the call began.
“Hi. My name is Kimber.”
“Oh, hi! How are ya?”
“I just got out of rehab yesterday, and I don’t wanna use by myself.”
On the tape, Blanchard continues with her onboarding script. She asks for King’s callback number, her address, any details about how to find her apartment, and she also asks her to make sure the door is unlocked, to set out Narcan on her coffee table if she has any, and to make sure any pets she might have are locked away someplace safe. At this point in the recording, you can hear the concern rising in Blanchard’s voice. “So you know your tolerance is in the dirt, right? We’re gonna go real slow. We’re gonna go real slow,” she says.
Blanchard paused the tape, and offered a worried look. “You hear my voice change?” she asked. “I knew she was going to overdose. She’d just gotten out of rehab, had this period of abstinence. She was speaking with some speed, with some urgency. I just—I knew she wasn’t going to be careful,” she said. “My mama spirit kicked in. It’s a sixth sense you develop when you do these calls. Within about five minutes, I know I’m going to have to call EMS.”
BEFORE THAT DAY in 2020 when she called Blanchard, King had been in rehab. It wasn’t the first time. By then, she had been doing heroin for 11 years, and had been averaging about two rehab stays per year over the last six years. She started using as a teenager, after her older brother, 24, was brutally stabbed to death.
King had become a regular face at the
rehab center, but her stay that year would be abruptly cut short. After she was let out on a pass to attend an appointment with her therapist, she stopped in a convenience store on the way to buy a Red Bull. She felt it was harmless, but the rehab center took such violations very seriously after it had made its no-outside-contact rules stricter in response to COVID. And when someone who worked at the rehab saw her stop in the store, they notified the rehab center. “By the time I got to the therapy office,” King said, “my stuff would be waiting outside.”
King was embarrassed. She didn’t want to tell anyone that she had gotten kicked out because she was afraid what her family might think. So without speaking with anyone, she went home, where she was alone.
She relapsed almost immediately. She picked up some dope and took a walk down the street from her apartment to a local needle exchange. They didn’t expect to see her since they knew she was supposed to be in rehab. Worried for her, they handed her the business card. It read “Never Use Alone.” She put it in her pocket and returned home, not giving it much more thought.
But as she prepared to use alone in her apartment, she thought back to the card. “I knew that I had like 40 days of abstinence. So, I knew how risky it was,” she told me, recalling the exact moment she dug into her pocket and took a second look.
WHEN BLANCHARD references her “mama spirit,” she is being specific. There are only a few years’ difference between King and Blanchard’s daughter, Kaylen, who at 18 met a boy who told her he “had something for her that would feel better than any hug she got from her mama.”
“She’s 23 now,” Blanchard said.
“She’s the most magnificent creature I’ve ever met in my life. She’s also the raggediest bitch I’ve ever met in my life. She’s magnificent... she’s magnificent.” Kaylen has now overdosed 11 times.
Not long after Kaylen started using, Blanchard found out by word of mouth that she had almost died of an overdose. Blanchard hadn’t seen Kaylen in weeks, and she blamed herself. “She was hiding from me because every time I saw her, I gave her the business,” she said. She recalls driving her car around for three and a half hours each day (an hour before work, an hour at lunch, and an hour and a half after work), hoping to catch just a glimpse of her daughter. One morning, she found her, in the parking lot of a Krispy Kreme.
“I drove across five lanes of traffic, me in that little Jeep, and I ran up on her,” she said. “I ran up on her and I was excited. I meant to touch her shoulder, but I grabbed her shoulder. And when I did, she turned around and hit me. Being from West Tennessee, I hit her back.”
They had a fistfight in the parking lot.
“For a few seconds, she forgot I was her mama, and I forgot I was her mama. And when we got through fighting in the Krispy Kreme parking lot, we were both bleeding,” Blanchard said. “She threw her hands out to the side and said, ‘Mama, what the F do you want from me?’ And I threw my hands out and said, ‘If you would just not die, that would be great.’”
Blanchard’s relationship with her daughter improved when she began supplying Kaylen with clean needles and invited her to use in her home, at her dining table: “I would rather my daughter sit at my dining room table and do what she’s got to do than hide behind a dumpster or Burger King and die. Absolutely.”
“First box of syringes I bought her, I drove around the corner and I puked down the side of my Jeep,” she said. But still, Blanchard saw results immediately. Her daughter’s arms and skin began looking better, and she started looking healthier. “If what she wants to do is continue to use, she should be alive and healthy to do so. If what she wants to do is one day kick it, she should be healthy,” she said.
“‘Don’t die: That would be great,’” she repeated. “We can work with anything but death.”
ON THE CALL that day in 2020, King did become unresponsive. On the recording of the phone conversation, Blanchard calls out Kimber’s name over and over again to an eerie, hissing silence. After an excruciating 30-second period, Blanchard offers her one more chance to say anything before she dials for help. “I’m not panicked,” Blanchard told me about her mind state in that moment. “I’ve been a nurse 22, 23 years. Worked in an ER. Worked in a correctional facility. I don’t get nervous. That doesn’t do this caller any good for me to panic.”
About seven minutes after King goes unresponsive on the call, you can hear an EMS worker enter her home, shuffle around, and begin to work to revive her. That’s when the call ends. Blanchard hangs up. “I knew he had her,” she said. “Once I get there, I hang up.”
Stephen Murray, a paramedic who Blanchard calls her “harm-reduction BF,” happened to be the one who entered King’s home and saved her life. An overdose survivor himself, Murray was the one who had left the “Never Use Alone” cards at the safe-use clinic that King had visited to exchange needles after she relapsed.
“You want to talk about full circle? The man that put the card in the syringe access is the man that pulled that baby out of the bathroom! Her heart rate was
34. She was 15 seconds away from being unreversible. From being dead. In-the-dirt dead. If she had not unlocked her door like I asked her to, she’d be dead. The rig was still in her arm. She hit her arm. The needle was still in her arm when they pulled her out of the bathroom. That’s how fast she overdosed,” Blanchard recalled.
King survived. She later called Blanchard to thank her. But Blanchard remembers telling King that she saved her own life. “You called the line. I couldn’t have done shit for you,” she remembered saying. “Kimber calls me Mama. And I found out that Kimber’s going to make me a grandmama in September to a baby girl. And Kimber wants me in the delivery room.”