MoH fights the overdose crisis

40 people a week are dying from opioid overdose in the UK. 47% of the deaths we document in our community, through the Dying Homeless Project are classed as ‘Deaths of Despair’ through overdose or suicide. This is something we are not only documenting through our investigations but working hard to change on the ground.

MoH is a recovery centered organisation, with many staff and volunteers in recovery and many people who we work with are in active addiction.

We understand addiction to be the soothing of unresolved emotional pain. We meet addicted parts of ourselves and others without judgement and with deep compassion. We understand extreme use of drugs and alcohol to be a survival mechanism which at some points in life has kept the person safe, but does not always serve the person.

We have items in our collection related to addiction including a case of Naloxone, given to the museum in 2017 in Glasgow by a worker at the Simon Community.

We tell the story of the Naloxone so people can understand addiction better and we also keep Naloxone in our first aid kit. Naloxone inhibits the opioids effect for about 20 minutes and can save the person from dying from overdose, giving a window of time for the paramedics to arrive.

Anyone can legally administer it, but you need to be licensed to distribute it. We work with our friends Release who run England’s first Harm Reduction hub in Tower Hamlets and who are a licensed drug treatment service.

Yesterday our crew were training in administering Naloxone and each week we tell the story of Naloxone in the museum to open up discussions on the overdose crisis.

We document so many drug related deaths in our dying homeless project research and it breaks our hearts, so we do everything we can to practically save lives in our community.