In a Philadelphia park Friday night, Rachel Freeman watched as a half-dozen people slid into overdoses, a shocking display even for the drug-torn Kensington neighborhood.
But as paramedics revived them, they began to scream and shake — much different from a typical overdose reaction. “It was almost like being in a horror movie,” Freeman said.
Nonetheless, Freeman, a slight 50-year-old with brightly painted fingernails who is known as “Mom” by drug users in the community, prepared her own bag of heroin later that night. She felt safer using a bag stamped “Santa Muerte” (literally, “Holy Death”), a variety reputed to be some of the last pure heroin available in the city, uncontaminated by fentanyl or other adulterants.
Freeman didn’t realize that Santa Muerte was what everyone else in the park had bought, too. She woke up at Temple University Hospital after overdosing.
I remember Donald Trump saying he was going to make addressing the opioid epidemic a priority but he spends all his time in his own self-inflicted drama. While he’s absorbed in shouting out his idiot wind of bullshit, the real world goes on and the opioid problem just gets worse.
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