HERE COMES THE NIGHT
As Southwest Florida laid down to sleep, Ramona Miller went to work on the streets of Lee County, answering the texts and phone calls of opiate addicts who have her on speed dial.
“You don’t know you’ve overdosed until you wake up and your friends are like, you were dead,” said Lucy Tapia, who had phoned Miller from a Publix parking lot in Fort Myers after shooting up with her girlfriend. “If it weren’t for Narcan I’d be dead.”
Like J.D. Salinger’s “A Catcher In the Rye”, Miller, through her nonprofit A Voice In the Wilderness, catches the Tapias of the world before they fall off the cliff; giving them the opioid blocker for free and training them to use it.
In the medical world it’s called harm reduction; the first line of opioid defense. With money from Gov. Rick Scott’s opioid emergency declaration last year, Voice In the Wilderness is among several groups making Narcan easier to get in Southwest Florida.