Shortly after she realized she might soon die, Kimber King reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. There was a phone number on it, and a few promises: “NO Preaching. NO Shaming. NO Judgement.”
She was skeptical, she later told me. “I was wary to call. I didn’t know what was going to happen with the police and stuff,” she said. But she did dial the number.
When she called, a warm voice answered: “Let me get my book, Kimber. I’ve never talked to you before. I’m glad you called. Have you called us before?”
“No. This is my first time.”
“You got your door unlocked?”
“Let me check. Hold on. Yes, it’s unlocked now.”
“OK, so make sure I’m on speakerphone.”
King told the operator she was going to use heroin. “Probably fentanyl,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “Probably fentanyl. OK,” the person answered.
On the other end of the line was Jessica Blanchard. Her voice is calm on the call. But she later told me she was worried right away. She was right to be.
I met Blanchard on the front patio of her home in Albany, Georgia. I was about 15 minutes early, and she was still in her pajamas, poking only her head out from the front door to greet us. “I’m on a call now,” she told us, waving us inside. That call, and others like it, was why we came to this backwoods area of Southwest Georgia, the “trailer hood,” as Blanchard called it, about a three-hour drive from Atlanta.
Blanchard, known by her friends as Jessie B., is an operator and education director for Never Use Alone, a safe-use hotline for drug users. It was conceived of four years ago by a “bunch a drug users sick of their friends dying,” as she put it.
The hotline serves people who worry using alone makes them vulnerable to dying by overdose. And there is reason for concern. Total overdose deaths have climbed to nearly 110,000 in 2022. Overdoses are often fatal, but the chances of survival go way up with urgent EMS care. Never Use Alone increases a caller’s chances of survival by promising to stay on the line while you use, and send you help if you become unresponsive.
After Blanchard was finished with the call, she got dressed and met my colleague and me in her office, a modest-sized room with its walls painted black and purple Christmas lights running along the ceiling, with a small desk and two futons. She has a bag with Narcan nailed into her wall by the door, alongside a little plaque that reads, “Very little is needed to make a happy life.” Never Use Alone’s coverage area spans North America, and Blanchard receives calls directly to her cellphone, rarely ever missing a call. That can be a matter of life or death.
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Before we could get started on an interview, she got another NUA call on her phone. Overhearing it, you’d be forgiven for thinking she was chitchatting with an old friend.
That’s on purpose. Blanchard wants to keep people talking so she can better monitor their state as callers use drugs. She has her own code for keeping track of how impaired they are. “When you call, my hope is that you’re speaking in print. Nice print, second-grade letters. You’re gonna use, you may move to cursive, you may move to calligraphy. I try to keep you out of the hieroglyphics. I can’t understand that,” she said. “That’s how I talk to them. ‘Oooo baby, you’re already talking in cursive! Let’s hurry up and get your address,’ ” she said, “It’s a nonjudgmental way to say, ‘You sound a lil’ fucked up.’ ”
They chat about anything the caller wants to talk about. It could sound like an impromptu therapy session. But underneath that, there is structure. The first thing Blanchard does when a call comes in is retrieve her small plastic container filled with index cards with the hand-written personal information of past callers, like a physical phone book. She calls it her “recipe box.” She keeps it so she can expedite the process for repeat callers.
But for new callers, Blanchard has a script that she personally developed over her years of taking NUA calls. That’s how her call with Kimber King begins. With her permission, Blanchard played a recording of that call for us to listen to.
“Never Use Alone, it’s Jessie,” the call began.
“Hi. My name is Kimber.”
“Oh hi! How are ya?”
You can immediately hear Blanchard shuffling for her recipe box.
“I just got out of rehab yesterday, and I don’t wanna use by myself.”
On the tape, Blanchard continues with her onboarding script. She asks for King’s call-back number, her address, any details about how to find her apartment, and she also asks her to make sure the door is unlocked, to set out Narcan on her coffee table if she has any, and to make sure any pets she might have are locked away someplace safe. This protocol is designed to ensure that if EMS is called, they can get to the caller as quickly as possible, since survival can be a matter of seconds.
At this point in the recording, you can hear the concern rising in Blanchard’s voice. “So you know your tolerance is in the dirt, right? We’re gonna go real slow. We’re gonna go real slow,” she says.
Blanchard paused the tape, and offered a worried look. “You hear my voice change?” she asked. “I knew she was going to overdose. She’d just gotten out of rehab, had this period of abstinence. She was speaking with some speed, with some urgency. I just—I knew she wasn’t going to be careful,” she said. “My mama spirit kicked in. It’s a sixth sense you develop when you do these calls. Within about five minutes, I know I’m going to have to call EMS.”
Before that day in 2020 when she called Blanchard, King had been in rehab. It wasn’t the first time. By then, she had been doing heroin for 11 years, and had been averaging about two rehab stays per year over the last six years. “I really didn’t want to stop back then,” she told me over the phone. “It was more that I wanted to get sober enough to be able to go to my job, to be able to look like I’m functioning from the outside.”
She started using as a teenager, after her older brother, 24, was brutally stabbed to death. “I thought at the time that I was bipolar, because a lot of people get that, you know? They tell you that because they really don’t know what’s going on underneath the drug addiction,” King said. “But really, I was just dealing with a lot of PTSD.”
King had become a regular face at the rehab center, but her stay that year would be abruptly cut short. After she was let out on a pass to attend an appointment with her therapist, she stopped in a convenience store on the way to buy a Red Bull. She felt it was harmless, but the rehab center took such violations very seriously after it had made its no-outside-contact rules stricter in response to COVID. And when someone who worked at the rehab saw her stop in the store, they notified the rehab center. “By the time I got to the therapy office,” King said, “my stuff would be waiting outside.”
King was embarrassed. She didn’t want to tell anyone that she had gotten kicked out because she was afraid what her family might think. So without speaking with anyone, she went home, where she was alone.
She relapsed almost immediately. She picked up some dope, and took a walk down the street from her apartment to a local needle exchange. They knew her there. She’d typically go once or twice a week to exchange her stuff when she was using, and they didn’t expect to see her since they knew she was supposed to be in rehab. Worried for her, they handed her the business card. It read “Never Use Alone.” She put it in her pocket and returned home, not giving it much more thought.
But as she prepared to use alone in her apartment, she thought back to the card. “I knew that I had like 40 days of abstinence. So, I knew how risky it was,” she told me, recalling the exact moment she dug into her pocket and took a second look.
When Blanchard references her “mama spirit,” she is being specific. There are only a few years’ difference between King and her daughter, Kaylen, who met a boy at 18 who told her he “had something for her that would feel better than any hug she got from her mama.”
“She’s 23 now,” Blanchard said. “She’s the most magnificent creature I’ve ever met in my life. She’s also the raggediest bitch I’ve ever met in my life. She’s magnificent … she’s magnificent.” Kaylen has now overdosed 11 times.
Back then, Blanchard was a nurse and was caught off guard when she learned of her daughter’s addiction. She regrets that now.
Not long after Kaylen started using, Blanchard found out by word of mouth that she had almost died of an overdose. Blanchard hadn’t seen Kaylen in weeks, and she blamed herself. “She was hiding from me because every time I saw her, I gave her the business,” she said. She recalls driving her car around for three and a half hours each day (an hour before work, an hour at lunch, and an hour and a half after work), hoping to catch just a glimpse of her daughter. One morning, she found her, in the parking lot of a Krispy Kreme.
“I drove across five lanes of traffic, me in that little Jeep, and I ran up on her,” she said. “I ran up on her and I was excited. I meant to touch her shoulder, but I grabbed her shoulder. And when I did, she turned around and hit me. Being from West Tennessee, I hit her back.”
They had a fistfight in the parking lot. “For a few seconds, she forgot I was her mama, and I forgot I was her mama. And when we got through fighting in the Krispy Kreme parking lot, we were both bleeding,” Blanchard said. “She threw her hands out to the side and said, ‘Mama, what the F do you want from me?’ And I threw my hands out and said, ‘If you would just not die, that would be great.’ ”
It was a turning point for Blanchard. “That’s when it hit me: ‘Just don’t die.’ That was literally the moment my brain shifted. Because even standing there, bleeding, I was looking at my baby, and she was OK. And that was all that mattered.”
In that instant, Blanchard unlearned everything she had been taught in nursing school about drug addiction. “We’re taught drugs are bad, ‘Just Say No,’ deputy dog, D.A.R.E. That’s the kind of stuff we were taught. That’s not realistic,” she said. “We were taught, ‘Well, you did it to yourself.’ That was the mantra. For some reason, that didn’t feel right to me. I was often deemed a soft, bleeding-heart pushover. I thought I was just being nice.”
After that, Blanchard became involved in harm reduction. “I didn’t want her to die. This whole thing—every fucking thing I do is about her not dying. Then about her and her homie not dying. Now it’s about the entire town,” she said.
Blanchard’s relationship with her daughter improved when she began supplying Kaylen with clean needles and invited her to use in her home, at her dining table: “I would rather my daughter sit at my dining room table and do what she’s got to do than hide behind a dumpster or Burger King and die. Absolutely.
“Did I ever see myself doing this? No. This is enabling,” she conceded. But she thinks of that term differently. “It enables health,” she said. “Folks gonna do what folks gonna do. If you’ve never watched someone sharpen a used hypodermic needle on a brick to inject a substance—watch that happen. Watch it be your child. You’ll change your mind real quick.” She is convincing, but her doubts have often been profound. “First box of syringes I bought her, I drove around the corner and I puked down the side of my Jeep,” she said.
Still, she saw results immediately. Her daughter’s arms and skin began looking better, and she started looking healthier. She wasn’t complaining of fatigue. “What I knew is we were battling infection, and we were getting on top of it quickly. That’s when I knew I was doing the right thing,” she said. “If what she wants to do is continue to use, she should be alive and healthy to do so. If what she wants to do is one day kick it, she should be healthy.
“ ‘Don’t die: That would be great,’ ” she repeated. “We can work with anything but death.”
The abiding belief that alive is better than clean was what led to Never Use Alone. After Blanchard’s daughter got caught up in addiction, she realized that her community badly needed a regular supply of Narcan. After she wrote to a Georgia overdose prevention center to volunteer as a Narcan distributor, the center placed “Never Use Alone” cards in her first shipment. She called the number and offered to volunteer for the hotline.
NUA was a scrappy organization in its early days. It started as a simple Google Voice line that was redirected to the cellphones of volunteers. Blanchard originally wasn’t given a script or anything to work from. They simply told her she’d do fine, and that was it. “I got a call within 20 minutes,” she remembered. “I was like, Where’s the training, dog?”
She improvised at first. “ ‘Hello, I’m trying to reach Never Use Alone.’ ‘I guess you did!’ ” she said, recalling her first call. By chance, the caller, a man named Steve, was a regular user of the line. He offered to give Blanchard some tips. “I knew I needed to get his address. Outside that, he was like, ‘Are you gonna get my information?’ I was like, ‘What info do I need?’ He was like, ‘You’re gonna let me die! You gotta tell me to have my door unlocked,’ ” she said.
She picked it up quickly, and got to answering multiple calls a day. They’d come in so frequently she’d only ever not answer if she was already on the line with another caller. She treats each caller as if she is speaking with her daughter, who also uses the line. (Kaylen gives Blanchard a warning so she isn’t the one who answers.)
Our interview with Blanchard in her office was interrupted several times by NUA callers. One man called in from Philadelphia. He told Blanchard he was going to snort something before heading out to work. He sounded hesitant at first, but Blanchard had him chitchatting, and by the end, she asked him to let her go, but not without first making him promise to call the line again if he was thinking about using again.
Other calls are not so sweet. Blanchard played audio from a caller who was already extremely high when they called. “So how’s your day going?” you can hear Blanchard ask in the audio, and the caller mumbles their way through an answer. “He called talking hieroglyphics,” Blanchard said. That call did result in an overdose, though he survived after Blanchard called EMS for help. “It’s just somebody else’s kid who didn’t have to die. That’s it,” she said.
On the call that day in 2020, King did become unresponsive. On the recording of the phone conversation, Blanchard calls out Kimber’s name over and over again to an eerie, hissing silence. After an excruciating 30-second period, Blanchard offers her one more chance to say anything before she dials for help.
“I’m not panicked,” Blanchard told me about her mind state in that moment. “I’ve been a nurse 22, 23 years. Worked in an ER. Worked in a correctional facility. I don’t get nervous. That doesn’t do this caller any good for me to panic.”
About seven minutes after King goes unresponsive on the call, you can hear an EMS worker enter her home, shuffle around, and begin to work to revive her. That’s when the call ends. Blanchard hangs up. “I knew he had her,” she said. “Once I get there, I hang up.”
Stephen Murray, a paramedic who Blanchard calls her “harm-reduction BF,” happened to be the one who entered King’s home and saved her life. An overdose survivor himself, Murray was the one who had left the “Never Use Alone” cards at the safe-use clinic that King had visited to exchange needles after she relapsed.
“You want to talk about full circle? The man that put the card in the syringe access is the man that pulled that baby out of the bathroom! Her heart rate was 34. She was 15 seconds away from being unreversible. From being dead. In-the-dirt dead. If she had not unlocked her door like I asked her to, she’d be dead. The rig was still in her arm. She hit her arm. The needle was still in her arm when they pulled her out of the bathroom. That’s how fast she overdosed,” Blanchard recalled.
King survived. She later called Blanchard to thank her. But Blanchard remembers telling King that she saved her own life. “You called the line. I couldn’t have done shit for you,” she remembered saying. “Kimber calls me Mama. And I found out that Kimber’s going to make me a grandmama in September to a baby girl. And Kimber wants me in the delivery room. That’s how much I speak to Kimber.”
King is far from the only person to survive an overdose because they called Never Use Alone. “We’ve detected 97 overdoses on the line,” Blanchard said. “97 calls. All 97 people are alive to tell their story today.”
Blanchard acknowledges that Never Use Alone is far from the most perfect solution. It is an entirely volunteer operation, with only about 20 people answering between 250 and 300 calls a week.
“People ask us all the time: Can you keep us safe? Can you guarantee I won’t die? No,” Blanchard said. “I guarantee if you get unresponsive, I’ll call help, because the drug supply is unregulated, because you’re having to hide, because you can’t tell people what you’re doing. There are 1,000 reasons why it’s dangerous. You’re asking me to walk you successfully through a land-mine field. I can stand on the other side and try to point out some obstacles. I can’t guarantee you make it out alive.”
Blanchard told me the biggest obstacle is the unpredictability of the supply of drugs. She says not even dealers always know what’s in the drugs they’re selling. “All you have here is fentanyl,” Blanchard said. She knows because she also collects samples from both drug users and dealers in her community to send to a lab in Chicago to get tested. “If you find this gray-purple-looking stuff, it’s gonna have xylazine in it. It’ll have xylo, it will have fentanyl, it will have benzos,” she said. “Xylazine is an animal tranquilizer. They are mixing it in the dope. It is causing sores and ulcers. That’s why it’s so dangerous. They have no idea.”
That gray-purple stuff recently caused two of Kaylen’s friends to overdose. They didn’t survive.
While we talked in her office, Blanchard took three more calls. Each of them ended with the callers using, surviving, and Blanchard smiling. She called her daughter, wanting to introduce us to her, but though we agreed we’d meet, it never happened. “Probably have to pay her $20,” Blanchard said.
Blanchard was circumspect about her relationship with her daughter. “Is she living the life I’d have her live? That’s an absolute no. Am I living the life my mama would have me live? F no,” she said. “I tell people all the time, ‘You feel like you’ve been buried. You’re under the dirt. I get that. But were you buried or planted? I was buried for a while here in this. I chose to see if I could grow. And I did.’ ”
This piece was written by Aymann Ismail and reported by Mary Harris and Aymann Ismail, based on her original episode of This American Life. Listen to the episode now.
