Quincy, Mass., is a pleasant, working-class city of 92,000 people on Boston’s South Shore. It is saturated with history and, for the past decade or so, saturated with opioids.

Deaths from overdose of heroin and prescription opioids more than tripled nationally between 2000 and 2010. Overdose is now the leading cause of injury-related death, surpassing auto accidents. It kills twice as many people in the United States each year as AIDS.

New England is the epicenter. Addiction to heroin and to prescription opioids has become so common in the northeast that Pete Shumlin, the governor of Vermont, devoted his entire State of the State speech to the issue this year. The federal governmentreported that at last measure, the Boston area had the highest rates of emergency room visits related to illegal drugs, and related to heroin, of any of the 11 major metropolitan areas tracked. In Quincy, 47 people died of overdose during one 17-month period in 2008 and 2009.

Overdose is reversible. A drug called naloxone — brand name Narcan — stops opioid overdose nearly instantly. If an injection or nasal spray of naloxone is given to someone who is unconscious, blue and not breathing from an overdose of heroin or opioid painkillers, that person will almost always be sitting up and talking in one to three minutes.  Naloxone is non-addictive and has no black-market value. It is harmless; if administered in error to someone not overdosing, naloxone has no effect at all.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/an-antidote-to-overdose-in-time-to-save-lives/