Our newspaper staff is small—three full-time writers, and usually a couple of interns—but we often have an outsized impact on our community because of the tough stories we tackle. This story is a prime example. When Erin joined us an intern, she showed enormous promise, drive and curiosity. I asked her to look into a tip that Oregon has the nation’s highest rate of opiate abuse among people under 25. She found heroin was the top killer in Multnomah County, where Portland is located, and addicts say they first got hooked on prescription pain meds such as OxyContin and Vicodin. I asked her to keep digging, and Erin soon came back with a tale of a drug called naloxone, otherwise known as Narcan, that has been used by medical professional for years to snap addicts out of overdoses. Erin discovered that cities, including Chicago and Seattle, had widened the use of Narcan by putting it the hands of others—clinical workers, friends, family, and even other addicts. Yet with this epidemic going on here, many state and local leaders had ignored expanding Narcan. State officials feared the political backlash from the public and the appearance they were excusing drug users’ behavior. Portland has prided itself for being progressive when it comes to public health, but the region’s leading health officer, Dr. Gary Oxman, told Erin people were too afraid of the issue to even talk about it. Erin saw the need to bring this story to light. She dug through thousands of pages of public documents, spoke to experts around the country, interviewed addicts who had been saved by Narcan and profiled one person, Jake Rhew, whose life could have been saved if Narcan had been readily available.
