WATCH – LIVED TO TELL –

June 23 – PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WJAR) — Roxxanne Newman is in a good place today but she didn’t know a few years ago that she’d ever make it here. “I woke up had been homeless for a whole year straight and I was so tired, and I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much’,” said Newman. Addicted to opioids and other drugs, Newman said she overdosed 29 times. “The last time I ever used was an overdose,” she said. “When I overdosed, it happened really fast, and you don’t really know what’s going on. You just go out. And I woke up and I was in an ambulance and I had a paramedic standing over me who was just like, ‘You’re just a luckily little girl because it was very hard to revive you’,” said Newman. Newman never met the Providence paramedics who saved her that day, but she still wants to. It’s all part of her recovery journey now. “If they didn’t have Narcan would you be here today?” asked NBC 10’s Alison Bologna. “No,” said Newman.  “So, it saved your life?” asked Bologna. “Yes, 100 percent,” said Newman.  “So, we’re kind of in the fourth wave of the opioid crisis, and the fourth wave is that fentanyl is not just the main street opioid it is contaminating the rest of the drug supply, too,” said McKenzie.

So, now it’s about getting more Narcan out to more people, which is happening.

“One of the things Rhode Island does really well is have naloxone available in many different avenues,” said McKenzie.

In Rhode Island, you can get Narcan in the pharmacy, from outreach centers and in behavioral health centers, too.

McKenzie said the more the better because it’s about harm reduction, which buys people time to get into recovery.

It worked for Newman. Today, she has a full-time job at Brown University, and she’s the proud mom of two children.

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