The Wider Image: Boston-area paramedics face front lines of U.S. opioid crisis
The paramedics find them everywhere - slumped over car steering wheels, barely breathing in doughnut shop bathrooms or dead in derelict apartments and expensive mansions. For the Cataldo Ambulance Service crews outside Boston on the front lines of the U.S. opioid epidemic, the flood of overdose calls is a grim daily reality, despite expanded access to overdose reversal drugs. "When I started, this was a rare thing. You did one or two here and there. Now, we do quite a few," said Dave Franklin, a supervisor at the private service that contracts with cities who has worked in the field for more than 20 years. Amid wider use by bystanders and police of naloxone, a drug that reverses overdose symptoms, state figures showed a small drop in opioid deaths in the first nine months of 2017 compared with 2016. But Franklin does not yet see a turning point. "It's not going away anytime soon. People are still dying regularly," he said. REUTERS/Brian Snyder SEARCH "SNYDER OPIOIDS" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY. Matching text: USA-OPIOIDS/EMS