The man had just risen from the dead.
He’s in his mid-20’s. Sitting on a couch in a house in Delray Beach. Pale as a ghost, sweaty, wide-eyed, disoriented. Like he just woke up from a nightmare.
“What happened?” asked Sgt. Ed McCabe, of the Delray Beach Police Department.
“I guess...I overdosed,” said the man.
The man’s roommates found him unconscious and turning blue -- not breathing. He was overdosing on heroin. They pulled out two auto-injectors of naloxone -- an overdose reversal drug -- and jabbed them into his thigh.
He came to.
“How much did you use?” asked McCabe.
“A cap,” said the man.
The residents of the house are prepared for episodes like this. It’s a sober home. The man is a recovering heroin user from Ohio. And like thousands of others, he came to South Florida to get well.
Sgt. McCabe says that over the past five years this has become routine.
“The overdoses. They’re like a dime a dozen,” McCabe said. “You just…,” he pauses. “You just get used to it.”
Delray Beach is at the epicenter of a South Florida overdose epidemic estimated to have claimed 1,000 lives last year. Medical examiners are still counting.
Three things came together to create this South Florida overdose crisis. Listen to the first:
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