Rule No. 1: Stay alive. If you or a loved one wants to beat an opioid addiction, first make sure you have a handy supply of naloxone, a medication that can reverse an overdose and save your life. “Friends and families need to keep naloxone with them,” says Dr. David Kan, an addiction medicine specialist […]

In a refrigerator in the coroner’s office in Marion County, Ind., rows of vials await testing. They contain blood, urine and vitreous, the fluid collected from inside a human eye. In overdose cases, the fluids may contain clues for investigators. “We send that off to a toxicology lab to be tested for what we call […]

Mady Ohlman was 22 on the evening some years ago when she stood in a friend’s bathroom looking down at the sink. “I had set up a bunch of needles filled with heroin because I wanted to just do them back-to-back-to-back,” Ohlman recalled. She doesn’t remember how many she injected before collapsing, or how long […]