Mary Harris
speaker
236 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 25 May
Mary Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The woman taking this call, her name's Jessie. She's a nurse. And she's taken thousands of these.
Probably fentanyl. Okay. The hotline is called Never Use Alone. And the idea is, if you're going to inject heroin or do a speedball, something like that, and there's no one around, you can dial them up. Someone will stay on the line, make sure you're okay. If it seems like you've overdosed, they'll call the paramedics.
Jessie gets the caller's phone number and address, just in case she has to call the ambulance. The caller, Kimber, is in Massachusetts. Jessie is down in Georgia.
She's like, she's like, just I'm here to get this done. She was there to do a job.
Is that because you do that when your other veins are like blown out? You're using terminology I don't understand, like half a point. What does that mean?
Small doses are one way to try to stay safe when you're using a drug like heroin or fentanyl. But the truth is, you really have no idea what you're getting if you're buying drugs off the street.
Sometimes a personal call in wanting to talk. With her regulars, Jessie knows the names of their pets, keeps track of their birthdays. But her main job is just to stay on the line and check in every now and then. For this call, she was sitting at her kitchen table. Her husband walks in at some point for help with a Ziploc bag. But every minute or so, she's trying to get a read on Kimber.
About 60 seconds later, Jesse checks in again.
What are you thinking in this moment?
Jesse stays on the line. And then after a little while, you can faintly hear in the background over the phone, someone shouting, anybody home? The ambulance got there just three and a half minutes after Jesse disconnected from 911. Jesse hears him say, you awake? Then move that suitcase. And then she hangs up.
It's easy to read the statistics and still not be able to imagine what the overdose crisis looks like in this country. More than 100,000 people die from an overdose each year. That means that Americans are now more likely to die from an overdose than from a car accident. This hotline's purpose is simple and very single-minded. It's not to get people sober or push them into treatment.
It's just to keep people alive. One injection or snort after another. I wanted to know what it was like for everyone, the callers and the people like Jesse, who sit there while someone uses, knowing they could die right there on the phone. Jesse talks to people week after week, and sometimes they just stop calling. Maybe it's because they're not using anymore. Maybe it's because they're gone.
Actual overdoses on the hotline don't happen that often, and Jessie had no way to know what went on after she hung up that day with Kimber. She kept answering calls on the line, tried to distract herself. She says she probably walked around her yard, poured herself a Sprite. Then she got a text from a pretty close friend of hers, a guy named Steven. He's a paramedic, so he sees a lot of overdoses.
She has him in her phone as bruh.
Immediately, her phone rings. It's him. Like, instead of texting, he wants to talk. She answers. He said, where?
Act 2. Stephen. Stephen Murray, the paramedic who responded to that overdose call Jesse took, he had a lot of jobs before working in an ambulance, each with a very different uniform. The first was a black t-shirt. He was in a metal band. Then, a suit and tie. When he was in college, he ran for a seat on the village council and won.
Being a paramedic meant wearing a button-up with S. Murray on one pocket and a badge above the other. He carried his dispatch radio pretty much everywhere, which is how he got the call that day.
It was right up the hill from the ambulance station, basically on the same street.
How many people?
He bangs on the door, doesn't hear anything. Then he sees a little stairway, runs up, finds another door, which is unlocked. He lets himself in.
Showing 141–160 of 236 · page 8 of 12
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