Narcan ‘street warriors’ saving lives
Compassionate response to US opioid epidemic
CAMDEN, N.J. − Roz Pichardo knows how to save a life.
She’s done it more than 2,200 times in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, where she lives and works. She records each save, noting the day, time and a detail or two in a pocket New Testament.
“I call them ‘Sunshine,’ because to call them ‘addict,’ or ‘junkie,’ or ‘zombie’ ... it’s dehumanizing,” said Pichardo, who came to Camden to offer compassion and lessons in Narcan administration.
Pichardo, 46, is something of a super lifesaver: one of the trained medical, police and social workers who may have saved thousands from fatal overdoses.
A RAND study found that more than 109,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses in 2022 − and more than 1.1 million this century.
Narcan, a brand name for naloxone, can reverse overdoses of opioids, both street drugs such as heroin and fentanyl and prescription versions such as oxycodone. Making naloxone more widely available is seen as a key strategy to control a nationwide overdose crisis.
“People ask, why write them down?” Pichardo said of her New Testament practice. “It helps me humanize them and remember them. After a while, it can be traumatic so you try to put that in the back of your head, but I still want to be able to go back later and say, I saved them.”
From survivor to savior
Pichardo, who leads Operation Save Our City, has survived more than her share of trauma. In 1994, a former boyfriend killed her boyfriend and nearly murdered her. Her twin sister died by suicide, and her brother was murdered in 2012, a case that remains unsolved.
Her organization recently opened a drop-in center for unhoused people, where they can pick up mail and messages, make phone calls to loved ones − and take a Narcan kit. Operation Save Our City embraces harm reduction: keeping people as healthy as possible, and alive, so they have a chance at recovery.
“My role is to keep them alive long enough to go home. I just want them to have their next breath,” she said.
‘A human being is a human being’
Other cities have their own saviors. Dana McCollough is the medicationassisted treatment manager at HIPS, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit offering harm reduction, health care and other services to sex workers, transgender people, homeless people and people with substance use disorder.
HIPS has distributed 11,000 naloxone kits and trained 3,000 people in overdose reversal. McCollough isn’t sure how many overdoses she’s reversed, but it’s “definitely more than 100.”
“A human being is a human being, regardless of their flaws,” she said. “I go through ups and downs, but I try to move on to the next hour or the next day, so I can help the next person.”
Amber Sheldon has reversed dozens of overdoses since she started with GLIDE in San Francisco as a volunteer in 2017, joining the paid staff a year later.
She’s passionate about harm reduction. In addition to offering testing strips for fentanyl and training in overdose reversal, “we pass out Narcan like hotcakes,” she said.
She remembered a woman who came into GLIDE’s office looking for her son, whose addiction led him to the streets. Later that day, Sheldon saved a young man from an overdose.
“When he came to, he started crying and apologizing, and he asked to call his mother,” Sheldon said – the woman who’d come looking.
“The war on drugs is a war on people,” she said.
Methadone and miracles
Joshua De La Rosa doesn’t keep track, but he has given many people another chance at life.
“At least a hundred,” the Boston police detective, devout Christian and father of five said. “Probably 200. Maybe more. During the pandemic, it was pretty bad, two to three people a day.”
As an outreach officer assigned to patrol Boston’s so-called Methadone Mile – an area of the city with homeless encampments and open drug use – De La Rosa’s job was not to arrest, but to help. A Massachusetts law allows involuntary commitment for substance use disorder, so De La Rosa was sometimes tasked with picking people up on warrants.
“I’d apologize and tell them, ‘I care about you,’ ” he said. “I’d tell them, ‘You weren’t created to be a drug addict. I don’t believe that’s your heavenly identity.’ Usually when I say that, they start to cry. They know they didn’t grow up to do this.
“They’d call me every name you can think of that first day,” he said. “But a week later, they’d ask forgiveness and thank me. I built so many relationships. It’s been a beautiful, beautiful experience.”
Like all people in his line of work, De La Rosa has his share of rough days. He remembered one man he was able to get into treatment. He heard the man was doing well in his recovery but eventually saw him again on the streets. Though the man assured him he was well, something didn’t sit right.
De La Rosa had his phone on “do not disturb” while off-duty. Later, he saw two desperate messages from the man. No longer assigned to the area, De La Rosa reached out to officers who were, asking them to look for him.
“They found him in a building hallway,” dead, he said. “I took that one really hard.”
But he also has joyful stories. De La Rosa recalled a beautiful young woman from a loving family who turned to sex work to support her addiction, and the agonized parents who came looking for her. He worked with the family to have her committed.
“She ran from me, told me she hated me,” he remembered. “But months later, she came to see me with her mother. She gave me a thank you card, and now she’s almost five years sober, doing amazing.”
De La Rosa believes people can find their way to a better life, even in a place like Methadone Mile.
“I like to call it Miracle Mile,” he said. Contributing: Ken Alltucker, USA TODAY.