This American Life: The Call
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2023
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the opioid overdose crisis continues, a group of volunteers started a hotline with one mission—not to encourage people to go to rehab, not even to discourage them from using—just to keep them alive for one more day.
A collaboration with This American Life.
Guests:
Stephen Murray, paramedic and overdose researcher at Boston Medical Center.
Jessie, a registered nurse who answers calls on the Never Use Alone hotline.
Kimber, a caller to the hotline.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there podcast listeners, this is Eric Glass. |
| 0:09.3 | You may know me, not from this podcast, but from the one that I actually host this American |
| 0:13.6 | Life. |
| 0:14.6 | I'm popping up here in the what next feed, because for the last few months, our two shows |
| 0:18.7 | have been collaborating on the story that you're about to hear. |
| 0:21.1 | We all loved working with Mary Harris, and we are so happy with how this came out. |
| 0:25.7 | Hope you like it. |
| 0:27.4 | From WBZ Chicago to American Life, I'm Eric Glass. |
| 0:31.4 | Okay, so you call a hotline, and then a complete stranger tries to figure out how to help you |
| 0:36.5 | on the spot. |
| 0:38.4 | That idea seems to have begun in the 1950s. |
| 0:41.0 | The first suicide hotline in the United States was created in the early 60s by a guy in San |
| 0:44.9 | Francisco who was a priest and also a journalist, and it was just him answering the phone |
| 0:50.2 | at first. |
| 0:51.2 | Ads on matchbooks and sides of buses said, thinking of ending it all, called Bruce, which by |
| 0:57.6 | the way it was not his real name, his real name was Bernard Mays, but of course the power |
| 1:02.1 | of anonymity is so important to any hotline. |
| 1:06.1 | People would call, and sometimes he could help them precisely because he had no connection |
| 1:10.0 | to their life at all, like they could say anything to him. |
| 1:14.7 | And there's pre-internet days that was completely new. |
| 1:18.2 | anonymity allows a very particular and intimate kind of interaction. |
| 1:23.9 | These days, of course, there are all kinds of hotlines for people in all sorts of situations. |
... |
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