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TOM CRANN: All this week, we've been reporting on Minnesota's overdose epidemic. The number of Minnesotans who've died of painkiller and heroin overdoses has increased dramatically over the last 15 years. Illegal drug users are some of the most at risk of overdose death and most difficult for public health workers to reach.
John Collins has this report now on an activist named Lee Hertel. He hands out clean needles and medicine that can reverse overdoses. He says he's trying to save the lives of people he believes society has forgotten.
JON COLLINS: I met Lee Hertel at a South Minneapolis coffee shop. It's on the bus line and midway through his daily rounds across the cities. Hertel is 50 years old, wiry, with a nervous energy. He sits on a curb in the shop's back parking lot pulling items from a black backpack.
LEE HERTEL: Syringes. It's cottons. It's tourniquets. It's little metal cookers.
JON COLLINS: And naloxone, the medicine that can bring someone back from an opioid overdose. It's also called Narcan. Hertel has been handing those items out for about five years under the name Lee's Rig Hub. "Rig" is slang for needles and other gear that's used to shoot up. Hertel has been around long enough and given out enough help that he's known by both drug users and drug sellers in the Twin Cities.
LEE HERTEL: I'll ride along with people and go along with them on their deliveries. I'll also hang out in some of the houses where people are buying, taking, using, stealing drugs. [LAUGHS] So, yeah, so I mean, I'm there, and people ask me questions. I can educate, and I can hand out the Narcan to them and tell them how to use it.
JON COLLINS: Naloxone is more widely available now in Minnesota than it was a few years ago. It's for sale at some pharmacies, and it's available at treatment centers and through a couple nonprofits. It doesn't get people high, and it's not addictive. All it does is reverse opioid overdoses. But health workers still struggle to get naloxone into the hands of street drug users.
LEE HERTEL: There are huge risks, huge risks. And, yeah, you just have to welcome them in and be welcoming and have a welcoming space and a way that they can trust you or a place where they can trust being, because there's always that fear that the cops are going to be watching. You know, the criminalization of people who use drugs, that's a major thing.
JON COLLINS: Hertel says he tried heroin once, but it's not his drug of choice. He says users trust him partly because he doesn't preach about sobriety.
LEE HERTEL: I can't stop anybody from doing what they want to do, but I can keep them alive until they want to stop, until something happens, that come-to-Jesus moment, whatever it might be or whenever it might be.
JON COLLINS: During the time he's been active, Hertel says he's handed out enough naloxone to reverse thousands of overdoses. A donor, who he declines to identify, pays for as much of the medicine as he can hand out.
LEE HERTEL: Two or three weeks ago, I met up with a young man and gave him a bunch of Narcan, and he said, he always asks me, Do you have any idea how many lives you've saved? And I said, no. And he says, dude, you saved mine eight times in one month, because there was one time where he was just going out, going out, going out. When Hertel still has minutes on his phone, it's not unusual for him to get a call from someone saying the medicine he gave out saved their life.
LEE HERTEL: I process it like a punch to the gut and then another one right to the heart. It's just like, it leaves me speechless. I can't say anything. Like, I can't even breathe. That's how it leaves me.
JON COLLINS: Hertel doesn't get paid for his work. He's guarded about his personal life. But he says this is the best job he's ever had. He says he does it because no one else stands up for the rights of drug users.
LEE HERTEL: We all have parents. We all have somebody who's going to care about us, who does care about us and wants to see us live. And so many people just treat it like, psh, it's just another just a drug user, let them die, who cares, let's just clean up the welfare rolls or whatever. But I just can't get that because everybody has a story.
JON COLLINS: Covering health, Jon Collins, Minnesota Public Radio News.