Four milligrams of naloxone stocked behind a pizza shop counter helped save the lives of two people in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Monday.
Employees at Isadore’s Pizzeria noticed two people passed out in a car parked in front of the shop.
“Her lips are purple, there ain’t no telling how long they’ve been sitting here,” an employee can be heard saying in a video which captured the chilling scene.
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The couple in the car had overdosed on heroin and the woman was barely breathing.
“I thought she was gone,” employee Desiree Patterson told NBC affiliate WLWT.
Stacy Patterson said she and her co-workers see paramedics helping drug users “two, three times a week” outside of the pizza shop.
A nurse had dropped off naloxone — which can save the life of someone who has overdosed on an opiate — at Isadore’s when employees informed her of the ongoing heroin problem in the neighbourhood.
The drug crisis is at an all-time high in Ohio, according to the state’s Department of Health. Figures from the department show that someone died from an overdose every two hours and 52 minutes last year.
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Nearly half – 46.7 per cent – of those deaths were caused by heroin. A third of the deaths were from fentanyl, a powerful drug that is also causing major problems in Canada.
Health Canada approved naloxone in the summer in an attempt to curb Canada’s own opioid crisis.
Some provinces in Canada have made take-home naloxone kits available to the public, including B.C. and Nova Scotia. In Edmonton, police officers will soon be carrying the life-saving drug.
“The drug doesn’t discriminate,” said Desiree Patterson. “It doesn’t care about your race, it doesn’t care about your age and it doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor.”