In late 2016 in North Carolina, Jonathan Hayes was driving his pickup truck on heroin. He overdosed behind the wheel, lost control, and hit another vehicle. Two-year-old Mason Richardson was inside, and he died on impact. Mason’s pregnant mother was driving, and had her sibling in the passenger seat. Both were injured. However, no injury was as severe as the broken heart of Mason’s mom.
When the fire department and EMS arrived, they found Jonathan passed out from his heroin overdose. They administered Naloxone, better known as Narcan, a drug that counteracts opioid overdoses like those from heroin or OxyContin. It saved his life. This was the fourth time Narcan had saved Jonathan Hayes in the last six months . Also, since 2009, he has had fourteen criminal cases filed against him. This time around, it’s the second degree murder of a toddler.
“We are going to do everything we can to treat this like the violent crime that it is,” said District Attorney Ben David. However, there seems to be a debate forming around this incident and others like it. The debate is as to whether there should be a limit on the amount of times someone can receive Narcan and be saved from an opioid overdose.
Here is a comment from the Wilmington Star News article on Hayes and his murderous accident: “It’s a shame that he was given a second chance to live today, the little boy didn’t get one at all.”
It’s easy to see how people feel about drug addicts. However, drug addiction is a disease, and as hard as this may be to believe for some, those caught in an addiction sometimes make several mistakes before straightening out. Mike Page is a resident of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Jonathan Hayes killed the young boy in a heroin-induced car crash. Page is a former heroin addict, and is currently a peer support activist and champion of addiction recovery for his community. Page has been revived with Narcan three times in his life.
Daniel Meloy is the Public Safety Director of Colerain, Ohio, a place hit just as hard as anywhere by opioid abuse. Meloy has been a law enforcement official for 28 years. Most of that time, he felt nothing for drug addicts who committed violent crimes due to intoxication.
Meloy says, “It’s hard to feel empathy for an intoxicated person who caused a crash when you are looking at innocent people he has killed because he got behind a wheel when he shouldn’t have.” Meloy was referencing Jonathan Hayes. However, as of more recently, he has changed his mind about drug addicts. All it took was a little education on drug addiction and the difficulties people face in overcoming addiction. Meloy is now is a founding member of Quick Response Teams (QRT), an Ohio-based group formed in 2015 that takes a rather active approach to combating opioid addiction.
Following every single drug overdose in Colerain, a group from QRT, consisting of first responders and addiction recovery workers, visit the person who overdosed. They offer both access to recovery and case management. Amazingly, QRT has had an 80% success rate so far, entering four out of five addicts visited into treatment. Regarding people with such life-threatening addictions, Meloy says, “We need to get them the resources they need.”
Believing that the first responders on the scene of Jonathan Hayes’ horrible accident should have let him die is playing God. Choosing who gets to live or die is essentially murder.
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Original title: “Limits on Narcan? A Recent Death Begs the Question”