Thomas Young survived dozens of drug overdoses before his “scary night” in the spring of 2020 at his Charleston home when too much fentanyl pushed him beyond the secret pleasure and relief he craved.
After a few days without drugs in his body, Young turned sweaty, restless, achy and nauseous. Impending doom and the sensation that he was crawling out of his skin were constant companions.
He rose from the sofa to answer fentanyl’s call. In his bathroom, he prepared a syringe of the diluted opioid. The injection to his vein seemed larger than before. But he convinced himself he’d be fine. He was wrong.
“The next thing I knew I was waking up with the EMS, police and firefighters standing over me,” Young said recently as he recounted that brush with death. “The only thing I noticed out of all of them was my fiancé holding our baby son.
“I heard them saying ‘give him another Narcan,’” he remembered. “I am wondering ‘How did I get here?’ … and then I [realized] ‘Oh my God, I overdosed.’”
Young is convinced Narcan saved him. Narcan is a medication that can potentially counter an overdose of opioids, which include heroin, fentanyl and prescription opioid medications.
Young uses that near-death experience with synthetic fentanyl as a peer-support specialist at Charleston County’s drug rehabilitation program at the Charleston Center. He is one of two counselors recovering from drug addiction who travels the county on most days handing out Narcan nasal spray to people who struggle against society’s challenges. Four other counselors provide other services to clients who seek help with substance abuse disorders.
A statistic to avoid
Young nearly became a data point on the list of 180 people who died in 2020 from fatal opioid overdoses. That year, the Charleston County Coroner’s Office didn’t isolate unintentional deaths due to fentanyl overdoses.
Beginning in 2021, however, the office began to list fentanyl deaths separately. Between 2021 and 2023, 462 people died after ingesting it, an average of 154 people annually.
But in 2023, opioids killed 236 people in Charleston County. So far this year, the opioid epidemic has claimed 46 lives with 33 cases pending to be properly classified, said Chief Deputy Charleston County Coroner Brittney Martin. At that rate, 2024 could end as the deadliest year yet for opioid fatalities, she predicted.
Pharmaceutical fentanyl, classified as an opioid, is prescribed to treat severe pain. A synthetic version is an additive to illegal street drugs, which has caused a spike in overdose deaths, officials said.
In the battle to prevent lethal drug overdoses, Martin said, the coroner’s office partners with the Charleston Center to conduct pop-up Narcan events. The coroner’s office also has a supply of Narcan at its office at 4000 Salt Pointe Parkway in North Charleston and leaves the medication with families where overdoses have occurred, she said.
In the city of Charleston, Shelby Joffrion is the opioid overdose project coordinator for the Charleston Police Department. In an email to the Charleston City Paper, she said the ever-changing illicit drug industry is “constantly bobbing and weaving making our efforts such that we are continually changing strategies to make our response as timely and efficient as possible.”
To do so, a county-wide Addiction Crisis Task (ACT) Force of law enforcement agencies, community groups, medical professionals, court personnel and others meet every other month to review overdose cases to determine how best to provide information to survivors and their families. A smaller ACT subcommittee meets weekly, she added.
The education process, Joffrion explained, is also aimed at removing the shame and guilt of substance use disorder. Drug use may have started as a choice, but it quickly becomes an illness as drug use changes the brain’s chemistry, she said.
“Just as we would not shame a cancer diagnosis, nor shame a recurrence,” she said, “the same should hold true for those affected by substance use disorder.”
A struggle to save lives
Young joined the Charleston Center in January as a peer counselor after completing a two-year certification process.
“I have been trying to do this for many years,” he said. “I was just trying to get enough clean time to get my life back on track.”
Remaining drug-free was not easy, said Young, a 38-year-old New Jersey native who had spent 8½ years in a Pennsylvania state prison for stealing to get money to buy drugs. He was in prison three years longer than his sentence, he said, because while incarcerated he continued using drugs that were readily available behind bars.
“When I was in [prison] I cleaned up and was doing alright for a while,” said Young, who moved to the Charleston area four years ago. When he was released he returned to a drug world that had changed radically.
“It was no longer heroin and the drugs I was used to,” he said. The drugs on the street included substances he had never heard of before, like fentanyl, and other homemade stimulants.
Eventually, he returned to a roller-coaster ride of kicking his drug habit and then succumbing to synthetic fentanyl. His family and friends “really didn’t know I was using drugs,” he said. “I was telling them that I have it together, but I was far from keeping it together.”
Young’s survival story motivates him to hand out Narcan to people who come to the Charleston Center on Rivers Avenue.
“Two months ago I went to a homeless encampment in West Ashley, and I asked ‘You guys need any Narcan?’” They all said no, but as Young left he hung four boxes of Narcan on a tree branch.
“Two days later, someone contacted me and said a guy he knew went back into those woods and overdosed on fentanyl,” Young said. “So they took the four Norcan that I [left] and brought him back to life and saved him.”
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