In a brick plaza next to the Chelsea, Massachusetts city hall, Anthony, a bald but still-youthful man in grey sweats, tells me he spent the previous night in the hospital for what he says was his twelfth overdose.
Anthony and other users of illegal drugs agreed to speak to NPR for this story on the condition that we use only their first names. He blames his overdose on what his dealer told him was a particularly strong bag of heroin laced with the anesthesia drugfentanyl ā or something like it.
"He told me how strong it was," Anthony says, "but everyone says that to sell their dope. The potency now is so inconsistent, you don't know. So you'll eat a bunch of Klonopins and do a shot of heroin, and then you're dead."
[For more of this story, written by Martha Bebinger, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...etts-overdose-crisis]
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