A little preparation
Before you go out.
Not a lecture and not a list of reasons why you shouldn’t. Five things that take two minutes and completely change what happens if the night goes wrong.
The five
- Charge your phone.
A dead phone is the difference between an ambulance in six minutes and an ambulance when somebody sobers up enough to find one. This is the boring one and it’s the one that matters most.
- Tell one person where you are.
Not the group chat. One specific person who is not there, who would notice, and who would come and get you.
- Don’t be alone when you take something.
Nearly everyone who dies from an opioid overdose is by themselves when it happens, because the thing that kills you is breathing slowing down and there’s nobody there to notice. If you are on your own, Never Use Alone will stay on the phone with you and send help if you stop answering. It is free, they don’t take your name, and they don’t call the police.
- Have naloxone in a pocket, not at home.
It’s free, it’s over the counter, and it does nothing to somebody who isn’t overdosing, so there is no version of this where carrying it makes anything worse.
- Start low if it’s from a new source.
Pressed pills look identical to real ones and the amount in them varies wildly from pill to pill in the same bag. Test strips tell you fentanyl is present, not how much, and it is never mixed in evenly.
If you’re with someone who’s using right now
Different page from someone already unconscious. This is the hour before that, when you’re just uneasy.
- Stay where you can see them. Most of these go wrong in a locked bathroom.
- Check they answer you every so often. Not a conversation, just a response.
- Know the address of the building you are standing in. If you don’t, the emergency page will find it.
- If they fall asleep, roll them onto their side so they can’t choke if they’re sick.
- Snoring that isn’t their normal snore is not sleep. That sound is the airway closing.
Nobody here is going to tell you to stop
You can ask anything on the chat without a quit date coming back at you. If you do want to stop at some point, that page exists too, and it will still be there whenever.