You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psycopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

Well, my name is Matthew Fortune.

I was dead for forty five minutes.

There were no white lights, no tunnels.

There wasn't even warm, floozy feeling.

I didn't meet anybody.

All it was was just nothing.

I don't know what, if any afterlife we're going to experience.

Probably, in my opinion, depends on what kind of a person and what your beliefs are.

Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were forever altered after having almost died, the first hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.

Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.

Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener and discretion as advised.

I grew up in a good home in sarah Soota, Florida.

My parents weren't about Christians.

My dad had a good job as a project manager for a construction company that did some of the landmark projects here in Atlanta, including the Bank of America building and the High Museum of Art, and of course.

They built all over.

So I had really really good parents, but my parents.

They were very strict.

I started being a difficult.

Child in my teens.

Basically at sixteen, I said, I had enough of this strict Now I don't want to be home at eight o'clock.

I don't feel like coming home for dinner.

I can drive.

I got a car, I'm you know.

Of course it was my parents car, but that wasn't concern to me.

I was mine as far as I was concerned.

So my parents, you know, I said, oh, we got this difficult child, so we want to we want to be good parents than they were.

And so they they were reading this book and it said, you know that when you got a difficult child, you've got to be tough.

You know.

Whatever psychiatrist wrote it obviously didn't know what they were talking about, but they sure did have an opinion.

My parents, after having read this book, they basically said, we're going to take the car and if you leave, you can't come back.

And so, being the good parents they were, they took a hard line with me.

And basically I am the same gene pool, as my parents imagine.

And so I decided, you know, I was going to take a heart approach with him, and so I was not going to come back.

I had a girlfriend and her mom was.

At a little bit more relax, let's just say.

And so I moved in with her.

I worked for my girlfriend's dad's tree service, and you know, I made enough to buy at nineteen eighty to two years older than I am, for Fairmont Futura.

Thing produced more smoke than it did drive time, the girl and her mother got into an argument, and you know, I got in between them.

So the next day I was the bad guy.

So I didn't have a place to go.

So I had a friend who had been renting a room at this house, and and you know, the landlord was a guy in his sixties, and there were several other younger guys in the house renting rooms and a.

Couple older guys.

It was a big, seven bedroom.

House, and so since my friend was moving out, I talked to the landlord and I ended up moving in.

Well, long, long story short, it turned out to be a house that was being run by pedophiles, and so that decision made my life a lot more difficult.

From that point on, I would be asleep in my room and all of a sudden I would wake up and they would have injected me with methamphetamine.

So there was a guy living at the house where I got my room.

It's a convicted pedophile.

He got me hooked on drugs and then started getting me new favors and exchanged for lent.

There were actually several and they got me hooked on drugs, started injecting me at night while I was asleep, and then they're very good knowing what to say and what's due to get people to cooperate with them.

Before long, you know, it became normalized to get high and be involved with these creeps.

On top of that, from the meth and from me being a teenager didn't like to drink water.

I like to drink a lot of soda.

I got kidney stones.

This was right at the time that oxy cotton came out, and so it was being pushed really hard with all these doctors.

The drug companies had been to hovading oxycotton as the newest, latest, greatest, non addictive painkiller.

It was a very small pill, whereas you know a purpose that's a large pill.

It has a lot of time I'm mixed in with it.

So when you do a oxycott in the original ones, you could lick it and get it wet, and you could wipe the time release offie outside on your shirt or napkin or something.

And then what you had inside that was a very small amount of white powder, and that was basically heroin medical grade, always the same dependable heroin.

Well, I took them and felt good, so I took more of them, and I pretty much had a free flowing supply.

And then you have your fentanyl, and you know, you hear today about how bad noise and pentanoil is certainly bad when you're using it as a street drug because it's so strong, it's so easy to overdose someone.

And different dealers cut it to different amounts.

So one day you're doing fentanyl and you do this amount and you're fine.

The next day you take two hits and you dial the oxycotton got prescribed too easily.

At the same time, if you have cancer and you're in the hospital and a doctor's given you medical grade fentanyl, it's not made by a cartel in Mexico in a bath hub, and they're in terrible pain, who cares if they get addicted.

I was still close with my parents, but they never had any idea of what was going on.

I knew that if they found out that it would be a problem coming from the background that I came from, you know.

If you're raised Christian.

Going from that to being basically a sex worker and my gender identity is straight, you know, I like women.

It was very confusing time for me, and I really questioned my faith at the time and basically stayed so high it just really didn't matter to me.

This was not normal the situation that I was in.

But as I started distancing myself from them and got really to be too old for their interests, I became homeless.

Life on the street is very hard from the perspective of they did away with all these sanitariums back in the day, and when they did that, they really created a gap in care for people that have mental health issues, drug issues, seriously, a combination.

Of the both.

I was diagnosed with mental health issues as a child, so really what's picked up the gap is if you've got mental health problem and you can't really function properly in society, you end up homeless, and then you end up in jail for petty crimes, you know, non violent things, and then once that happens, you've got a record.

And you know, nowadays with computers, it's really hard to get second chances.

Once you get a record, it's there for your whole life.

The computer doesn't forget, and most employers aren't looking at the fact that, oh, this person's been out of prison and off paper for eight ten years and doing the right thing and you know, hasn't been in trouble.

They don't really do your whole situation, and so it's really easy for a company looking at you to say, this person, we don't want anything to do with them because we don't want them to embarrass our company, and so it becomes hard to get jobs.

They can just do a truth Finder search and they can see that you've been arrested X amount of times for silly things, and you've been in trouble, and then you've been to prison for three years or whatever.

We've got this for profit prison system.

We're putting all these males of working age in prison instead of getting them the help they need.

So there, I am, I'm seventeen years old, you got kidney stones, I'm addicted to oxy cotton.

I'm homeless.

My options are just dwindling.

When you're addicted to oxy cotton, it's not something you just put down.

When you do put it down, you are intensely ill.

Once you start doing these drugs, you have to have them to feel normal, and you need more to feel good.

So you don't have them, you are actually sick.

And so that's a real thing to realize is some people, if they don't have the drug, they're physically violently ill.

When you're homeless.

You live in Atlanta here, some days are absolutely gorgeous.

The weather here is wonderful.

When it snows, it melts after a day or two, and it's not there for all winter.

So the weather is wonderful in Atlanta primarily.

But we go three and.

Four days where it's thirty degrees, wet and cloudy.

Then your feet have been wet for three days.

You're in wet clothes.

You probably don't smell great when it's freezing cold and you don't have.

A blanket and you're in a T shirt.

Somebody handing a pipe and you can hit it once and feel better.

You're gonna hit it once a mill better for an hour.

You know, you do a hit of math.

You're gonna feel good for twelve hours.

The problem is you're gonna want more.

When you do math.

You might get a bunch of work done.

I found out when I was living at the Marta stations and doing it all.

The time that a lot of these guys that work in these big tall buildings, that work on the fiftieth story of a building, they actually park their car at the Sandy Springs Marta station.

They ride the mart train in because then they don't have to deal with traffic.

They get off, they take two or three puffs off their math pipe, and they go work all day.

I lived behind this you know, this tree and bush at Art Center, and it was kind of out of sight, and it was one of the only places it was out of sight.

So I got a lot of free drugs because these guys would come right through and they would be on their way.

They've got money, they've got a real good job, and they're going to work and they just want to get their pep up for the day so they can get a lot accomplished.

And so they would go in there and they'd hit it a couple of times on it like there and I'm, you know, homeless and looking like I'm not having a good time, and so they'd be nice and help me out by the handed me the pipe.

Some people can do drugs on a recreational level and other people cannot, and it's hard for people that are doing it to realize where that line is.

The reason that math causes people to be so far out there is because people will stay up for three four days a week, and if you want to sleep in a week, you are certifiable.

I mean, once your brain does not rest for three days, you're.

Hearing things that aren't there.

You are not yourself, you are crazy.

So I was homeless for about twenty years on and off.

I'm forty years old, so most of my life and every day is a real challenge.

It's dangerous.

You've always got to watch your back.

The worst thing you can have is another homeless person around you, because they're gonna take anything they can get from you.

When you're not around your spot, the police, the guys that clean up and stuff like that around town, they're gonna throw your bags away.

It's just constantly you're afraid.

Like one time, you know, in.

Branson, Missouri, I was stabbed right and along, and I ended up having to be taken to the hospital in a helicopter wrapped in saran wrap.

When you have a hole in your lung, the air takes the path of least resistance.

You breathe in and it comes right out of your chest, so they wrap you in saran wraps so you can bleed, and then they have to let it drain, and it's just a bloody, nasty mess.

So you're always afraid of what can happen.

You always have to be.

Watching out for your surroundings, what's going on, look out behind you, that kind of thing.

But at the same.

Time, it can be really almost care free at times, because sometimes in Georgia, you wake up it's seventy degrees outside, it's blue skies, the sun shining.

Somebody hands you twenty bucks.

Another guy hand you a brown paper bag with a subway sandwich in it.

You know, there are great people in Atlanta.

There are great organizations, but there are great individual people that care.

And you know, and you don't have a care other than your safety and maybe whatever drug issues you have.

You don't have a care in the world because you don't have to go to work you don't have to worry about paying your electric bill, you don't have to worry about your rent.

Now you might get back to your spot and your stuff might be all thrown away, or another person might have stolen it, or somebody might stab you.

One of these places that's doing really a great thing is is First Fresh Cherian Church over Bio Art Center Station.

There's coffee to be drunk.

There's a place out of the rain to recover, rest a little bit, play chess, read a book.

They've got a library that is really it's not even a library.

It's take the books and you can get good books to read and certainly use this pillows as well.

When you go to First Babetarian, you're not going to feel like they're pushing an agenda on you.

You're going to feel like they're there because they want to help and provide.

Services to you.

It doesn't matter if you are an atheist, doesn't matter if you're Christian, it doesn't matter if you're Buddhist.

It really doesn't matter at all what your beliefs are, and they're not going to make you feel like it matters.

They're going to make you feel like they're there because they care about you.

So there's a woman there named Trish who every day she'd ask me when I came in to get something to eat, She'd say, are you ready to be clean?

Are you ready to get get yourself together?

And I'd say no, But she always would ask me, and I would always come in for the food and get a pair of socks.

And they'd ask me that every day, and then I would fail, and I would try, and then I would fail, And so they didn't really, they didn't give up on me.

They could have been several several different lines.

And I definitely presented a challenge, but you know, she would ask me every day and I would I would try for a couple of days or a week and then come in high again.

My fortieth birthday, I just wanted to be off the street for a couple of days, so I got a hotel room.

Most people celebrate their forties, it's a huge big deal.

My fortieth, I were just happy not to be out on the rain.

And so I had a little money, and I learned to get high.

And I'm gonna have me a good twelve hours and and I go and and this guy pulls a gun out on me, and I was instantly realized, I'm not.

Getting any drugs.

He was robbing me.

I wouldn't have it, and I just threw my arm up.

It popped the gun out of his hand and it blew out of the street.

So he took off after the.

Going I'm running one way, he's running another, you know.

And of course he did get my fifty bucks.

You know, it was fifty dollars.

It's spent like eight hours humiliating myself to make the money for it, and I I was so angry.

I was going to go get my fifty dollars back.

This is not gonna be an honorable thing.

This is gonna be of both of us trying to sneak up behind the other one that spend the rest of our lives in prison type thing.

We're gonna give me my money back.

I'm going to.

This holding and I just really need that fix.

I am sick, sick, sick.

So I came to the church angry and scared.

I really just didn't feel like that much worse, And it really couldn't get that much worse except you know, death.

They talking down from going and getting going and doing anything stupid at the church, and of course I knew better than to do that, but it did.

It did help that I had a support group to go and to say.

Supportive things, calming things to me, and so that I could feel like somebody gave a crap that I was having a really bad day.

So I walk out of the church.

But I'm just so miserable still.

So i go down and I'm just walking do the sidewalk with a friend.

He's got some ventanyl.

I'm miserable, smokes ventanyl with him.

First hit, one enough.

Second hit.

I just hit the sidewalk dead, instantaneous.

I have no memory of it.

The high of finnyl is like oxycodon or morphine or too much of a lesser extent percoseet.

Fennyl is just the top end strength.

It depresses your central nervous system, so it makes you quote unquote fade out.

You know, you close your eyes, you lean forward, You're feeling so good inside.

But it also slows down your breathing and slows down your heart, so it eventually you just go to sleep.

That's how you die.

You never wake up.

It's just like when you're going for surgery and you count down from ten and the doctor says count down from ten and it gives me the anesthesia, and so you're like ten.

Nine, eight, you might get to seven.

Then you wake up two and a half hours later and you're going, oh wait, it's two and a half hours later, and I've had surgery.

It's the exact same thing.

So that was my death experience, to go.

From ten nine eight seven and then death and then.

Wake up, you know, forty five minutes later with a sore chest from CPR, no memory all.

So my friend that did the venta with me, he gave me a shot of no lozon up my nose and then he called the ambulance.

They did not pronounce me dead.

They kept getting a heartbeat or a breath.

My heart started beating and then stopped and then started, and so they kept going, and so they did it for about forty five minutes.

It's a miracle I was brought back because if you know anything about CPR, they do not typically go that long, and it is extremely.

Physically draining.

I remember waking up in the ambulance and thinking this guy swept like crazy, and I had no idea he'd been doing CPR on me forty five minutes, except my chest belt.

Here got hit by a truck, and they're like, you have had CPR done on you for forty five minutes.

He just barely lived.

And the guy given the CPR was a he was doing a shift as an ambulance paramedic, but he was also a police officer, and so he was late for work as a police officer.

And so he's calling his boss and explaining to his you know, captain or whatever, why he's going to be late to his job as a police officer, sir.

And so I just grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and I wrote him a note and said, please excuse John or Paul or whatever his name was.

He was busy saving my life, that's why he's late for work.

And I signed a dumb ass.

I was dead for forty five minutes.

There were no white lights, no tunning rules.

There wasn't even warm, fuzzy feeling.

I didn't need anybody.

All it was was just nothing.

I hit it, and then I woke up in an ambulance and I could have just as easily not woken up.

So, based solely on that experience.

I think death is like going to sleep.

I don't know what, if any after life we were going to experience.

Probably, in my opinion, depends on what kind of a person in which your belief are, But.

It definitely isn't something you're going to have a big warning for.

A lot of people think I'm gonna die of cancer and I'll know about it for six months or whatever.

Well, you might, but to may very.

Well be driving home from work and not even see it coming and its lights out and it's just over.

They have to have their permission to take you to the hospital, and I absolutely refused.

I wanted out of that ambulance.

I was like, I, look, I'm not going to the hospital.

I'm fine.

I just want to get out of the ambulance and everything's okay.

Thank you so much for saving my life.

I wasn't sure.

If I wanted to live or die.

I just knew I didn't want to do what I'd been doing.

So the next morning I into First Westerian.

I saw Trish.

I told her that, you know, I wanted to get clean.

So that night I got I got ann ouber and went to North Georgia and went into that program.

So the program is fantastic.

It used to be a hunting FLDGE but when you go up there now, it's really amazing because the deer will eat out of your hands, and there's these black bears running around.

The black bear mom and the two cubs.

You got like seven guys that have been used to being out on the street doing drugs that are now living in these cabins that are just beautiful out in the North Georgia mountains, and there's a swimming pool and the classes.

The staff was great.

You know, I learned so much there that it's really not something that you just go, well, I'm a drug addict.

It's my fault because I party too much.

You know, I'm a drug addict.

There's ruins.

This happened.

Some of them are my fault.

But it's a predisposition.

It's a disease.

You can't ever get rid of your addiction.

You will always have the disease.

But these are the things that I can do to control it.

When you start dealing with this kind of stuff, you know, you can really take the.

Approach of it.

I didn't deserve to be abused.

I didn't deserve to get addicted.

The doctor should have known better.

You know, you can be mad, what is that going to accomplish.

Part of the treatment is going to counseling, mineral counsel and learning that you know, you're gonna have to accept the fact that even though it's not necessarily all your fault, it is your responsibility.

Are you gonna let that defind you?

I mean, am I always going to be known as Matt Fortune the drug addict?

Or am I going to be known as Matt Fortune?

And that guy that you know, maybe he had some problems when he was younger, but he rose above it and he did all these great things.

He helps a volunteer at the church, he builds habitat for humanity houses.

He's a loving father, he's a you know, a good son.

It's really about rising above instead of wanting others to feel sorry for you.

I've always been a Christian, and I would say I'm more of a Christian now because I have seen some.

Of the love that's been given to me.

And you know, God is a billy love in my opinion.

Sometimes when you're all on drugs and things so muddied too, you see God through that too.

What you really get, especially in the New Testament when you read it, is that God is really what God is about is love, And if we as a society could realize that God is really about love, like true love, just your fellow human being.

And if we could learn as a society to love each other more and be more forgiving of each other, and realize that everybody screws up, you know, and everybody needs some different level of redemption.

I think that's the lesson that the Bible is really trying to teach.

We all make mistakes.

So when I made the decision to lead my house at sixteen, that was a mistake on my part.

I think my parents now have realized that it was a mistake on their part to not force me to come back.

If they had to do it over again, I'm sure they would.

Both my younger brothers sister, and both of them had to go to military school because they definitely.

Were not going to have another one like me.

You know, it's really hard to drive down the street and have someone that's dirty come up to your car and ask you for money, and it's hard to look at it and see how they're suffering, and then you either have to give them money and then justify why you gave them money, knowing that they might spend it on drugs, or you have to tell them no and kind of justify to yourself while you did that.

Either way, it kind of gives you a bad feeling.

It's not a pleasant interaction on either side.

But you have to understand these people are for buying larger than the most part good people on hard times.

You know, they are redeemable people.

They are people that probably need some help mentally, probably need some help getting clean.

But these are the type of people that God would love does love.

You don't have to do anything more necessarily than smile.

You can, you know, you can do all the thumping of the book and reading verses to people.

And everything like that.

But the way that you're going to get my attention to show everybody else how good we can be.

And if everybody looks at that and sees how good you can be, that brings everybody up instead of bringing everybody down.

And so every day I wake up and I try to be a better person than I was at the day before.

Welcome back, this is Alive again, joining me for a conversation about today's story or am I other alive?

Against story Producers learned Vogelbaumb and Brent Die and I'm your host, Dan Bush in the studio day we have learned Vogel Bomb, Brent Die and myself, Dan Bush, your host.

And so, how Brent did you meet Matthew.

Matthew who was a member of our church, and he came and spoke before congregation one morning about his experience.

He was celebrating the fact that he was drug free for two hundred and eighty days, which is a huge accomplishment.

Well, yeah, and I was struck by just the arc what he accomplished, how it transformed his life.

And I've always been interested in the issue of homelessness.

I find it shocking that so many people experience homelessness in this country, so many veterans.

Yeah, it's shocking.

It's terrible.

Matthew talks about like, you know, when you pull up to the top of the turnpike or the exit or wherever you're at, and you meet a homeless person, or you have an encounter with a homeless person who is maybe needing money, and then you're conflicted because you either say, yes, I'll give you some money, and then you're afraid they'll go use it for drugs, which is not good for them, or for the society or whatever, and then or you say no, and then you're conflicted because you had a moment to be compassionate.

And he was like, at the end of the day, I just want to be seen, you know.

Of course I need the money, of course I need the food, but I also just need to have dignity.

Who knows what traumas they've experienced that have made them unable to function or participate in society and the way that we deem normal or whatever.

I was really moved by the story so much so that I played it for my ten year old kid, Roman.

I thought he could handle some of the mature stuff that was in there.

I wanted him to hear the fentanyl story.

Yeahe never never too really to start talking to your kids about the dangers of taking random pills.

He's only ten.

But I'm like, look, if ever any friends come to you and say here's an adderall or here's something that will help you with this test, just come to me.

I don't want you to die because of fentanyl, and we have to have a different approach to it these days.

So I actually played the story for Roman so that he could hear how quickly fentanyl will kill you.

People press it into what looks like totally normal prescribed pills.

You cannot tell the difference unless you use a test.

And they do make tests that will detect fentanyl in a small sample.

And just because one pill is fine, there might be a much higher concentration in another pill in that same batch.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and test strips in a lot of places.

You can find them for free from from local programs.

Here in Georgia, we have the Georgia Overdose Prevention Organization, which is terrific.

They'll come out and like teach you how to how to use the loock zone.

They'll provide you with test strips.

It's a really wonderful program.

Yeah.

He describes how much work it is, you know, to get fifty dollars like that would be eight hours of standing by the side street, just dehumanizing yourself, you know, to ask for this money.

And he said people will, people will hold a drive up and hold a bill up and they'll walk up and they'll spit at him, or they'll drive by and throw like a half empty can of coke at him, you know.

And he said, all I need is a smile, you know, if you can't give me a money, you just treat me like a human being.

But also in this specific case, you know, it's it's a react.

It's partially a reaction to how we view poorness in this country and how we consider it some kind of moral failing where it is not what is it the statistic like ninety percent of us in this country are only really a few paychecks or like one medical emergency away from being in the same.

Situation, right right, Brent, He didn't have any sort of the classic near death experiences that we have heard so much of on the show.

It was more probably because of the fitanyl.

He described it more as like you know, when your surgery lights out, you know nothing.

I don't remember.

Yeah, I don't remember.

When I've had surgery and they've used fitting all or whatever as anesthesia.

Same thing, like I don't remember any dreams.

You just wake up.

Yeah, what story was it?

That was it?

Angelain or Jessica?

That was.

And she did Angeline who had the brain aneurism.

I wondered if like she just doesn't have any for if it was just a blank in her in her a gap in time and space like that, like that happens when you go under anesthesia, or if she remembers the nothing, because if you remember the nothing, then it's something, you know, so it goes into the soul like like, so I wanted clarity on that, But she'd also describes like there's just it was just a nothingness.

When I was speaking with Matthew, he had that same kind of haunted reaction to really not feeling any memory or any feeling.

No tunnels, no meeting of angels.

Just lights out, is how he put it.

And it seemed to really frighten him.

And you know, he's coming at it from a Christian perspective, and he was saying based on his experience, and he was he was saying that there or other experiences people could have, and he wasn't ruling out the possibility of an afterlife.

But for him, what he took out of that was the need to do something now.

And that's why he's getting really active with Habitat for Humanity.

He's involved in the church program where they help other homeless people and drug addicts rebuild their lives.

And I think it's kind of the old idea that heaven could be here on earth.

You know, what is it that you can do with your faith while you're here.

Well, even if you are not religious, there probably the one of the best antidotes for depression or feelings of being traumatized is to go help somebody else unconditional.

Unconditionally helping somebody else can be a really powerful antidote to your own woes.

Yeah, for sure.

I think another lesson that comes on to his story in the teaching of the story of the prodigal Son, which I'm sure you know the story.

It's the father and two sons, and he had an inheritance, and one son took that inheritance and went out into the world and just squandered the money and ended up destitute and in the street, and in such a situation that he had to come back begging to his father.

And his other son stayed on the farm, was faithful with a diligent worker, and when met the prodigal son came home, the father was like, let's kill the fati cow.

Let's have a big feast, because my son has come home.

He loved him just as much as the son who had stayed behind and worked.

You'd accept him with grace.

You need to bring him back into your house.

Oh yeah, yeah, we'll mess up.

Everybody does stuff that they regret, and Matthew says, it like showing everyone else how good we can eat, realizing that there are people who care about you, and furthermore, you should care about yourself.

Yes, I think that's very difficult for some of us to absorb.

I'm speaking about myself.

There are days just like you don't deserve anything, you should just rot.

But of course it's not true.

I can say that my life.

I had teachers, I had parents, had people who came along and said, you can do this, you're capable, you're worthy, And it's impossible for me to imagine a life lived without those things, to endure that kind of situation where your human dignity is just stripped away and stripped away and stripped away and stripped away.

And I just feel like it's so easy to look at homeless people and see them on the street and say, oh, they're lazy or there's something wrong with them.

It's their fault.

Well I think, yeah, I think that.

Saying oh they're lazy, they made these choices that led them to live in the street, is our way of absolving ourself from the responsibility.

There have been several studies where it has been proven now that it is cheaper to house people than it is to have a houseless population.

Yeah, Like if you give people the leg up, just the barest little step stool, like one of those little little Fisher Price step stools, just to get into a place where they can help themselves, they probably will.

They probably want to, you know, like generally speaking, people would rather be comfortable and would rather be productive and want to be part of this society and turning your back on them for.

What And that makes me proud of what First Prebeteria is doing because they have a place where people can come in and take a shower, they can get fresh clothes, like you said, you can pick up a book there, you can get something to eat.

They help with job counseling, and a lot of people argue that that's the role of the church.

But I can tell you my church doesn't have the resources to handle the entire homeless population of Atlanta, and I think leaving it to the whims of a religious organization that may attach different requirements.

He said he like going to First Priz because he said, sometimes you feel taken advantage of as a homeless person.

I'll give you this aid.

But first you need to you know, hear my face, right, you know, And so I think it has to come.

It just should be something we have the resources to cover.

Lauren, you talk about how people will do whatever they can to find comfort, and Matthew talks about how that's such a driver to addiction.

Is if it's freezing cold and all you have with a T shirt and it's raining, and somebody offers you a hit of math, you're going to take the hit of math, you know, And you can't really fault.

It's not like they're taking these drugs recreationally.

They're taking it to deal with their pain.

Yeah, they're self medicating.

One of the shows that I never got to fully produce is this podcast we were doing about the iplioid epidemic, and so I learned a lot about in the lock Zone as I was doing that.

And the terrific thing about in the lock Zone is that you will never hurt someone by giving them the lock Zone.

You can give them as many doses of it as you choose to.

If you find someone in an overdose situation, you probably should give them more than one.

What happens during an opioid overdose is that Basically, the drug just kind of latches onto all of these receptors in your nervous system and it shuts your systems down.

You stop breathing, and all that the lockzone does is knock the drug off of those receptors.

So if you don't have opioids in your body, it does nothing to you.

It is not harmful.

The Surgeon General of the United States used to do this stick where he would be up on stage and he would just inject himself with the lockzone like a couple of times, just to prove how completely safe it was.

The reason that I said that you should probably give people multiple doses is that just because the drug has been knocked off of those receptors doesn't mean that it can't find its way back on.

It doesn't mean that there isn't enough of the drug on other receptors that is still going to put someone in a place where they're unable to Breathe always hole nine one one and get medical aid out there, because they're going to need more than just that.

So you came upon somebody who was unconscious and you were not sure whether they had ingested any drugs or not, and you noticed that they weren't breathing, or their breathing was slowed or whatever, and you couldn't wake them up.

Would it be okay to go ahead and give them the lock zone?

Yep, even if you had no certainty about what was wrong with them.

Absolutely, there's no situation which like, oh, giving the lock zone is actually going to complicate their condition, not that.

I'm personally aware of.

And furthermore, they did this amazing study on some packets of the lock zone that had I think they'd been like stuck in the back of an EMT vehicle for seventeen years or something.

They pulled them out they were still good.

So you can keep them.

You can keep them in your car.

You can just put them in your glove compartment and hang on to them.

And there's no reason not.

Tease you do do you?

Just like?

Is it like a EpiPen?

Like?

What do you?

There are a few different it.

Is it like pulp fiction?

It's kind of like pulp fiction.

Uh, they make an injectable version.

They make a couple different kinds of injectables.

There's one that's really super friendly.

There's one that's a little bit scarier because it is a needle and so you have to find like a like a large muscle tissue just you know, like a thigh or upper arms something like that.

And then the brand name nar Can refers to the nasal spray and that's just a little push cartridge, like you're using a nasal spray.

Okay, I'm going to go stock up.

Yeah, please do uh.

It is relatively inexpensive as of the last time I checked over the counter.

You don't need a prescription to receive it in some states.

And again there are organizations prevention organizations, harm harm reduction organizations in most urban air certainly that we'll probably be able to hook you up with something for.

Free if you can give me any like you got any quick information I could put in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, I can.

I can give you.

Yeah, I'll link you to Georgia Overdose Productive Prevention.

They're terrific.

Okay.

There's also an organization that somebody will stay on the line with you if you're doing heroin or any drugs in case you have an overdose, they can call yeah, the police.

And I understand how this sounds to somebody who is not fluent in drug culture, and one of those people I never have done drugs.

Really, people are addicted and they want to stop using drugs, but having them have an overdose and die from that overdose is not the solution, you know, So I think, you know, doing what first PRESI did for Matthew and giving them a way to find their way out of this situation when they're ready.

That was another key part of his story.

I mean they asked him several times.

He went twenty years of this and he had to be ready to make that move himself.

Yeah.

Like with anything, it's it's again.

It comes back to a sense of personal responsibility.

And make anybody do anything right you has to come from them.

Yeah.

Yeah, And he spoke offul In parts of the story avenues, he talked about how difficult he was during that period.

I mean, and yet.

He was redeemable.

Everybody has inherent worth.

I think that's what we take from Matthew's story.

Everybody is redeemable.

Next time and alive again, we meet Jessica Sanchez, whose battle with cancer and a life threatening miscarriage led her through a labyrinth of systemic medical oversight and emotional trauma, ultimately revealing for her a profound connection between mind and body.

When there is something that is a perceived danger.

It will flood your brain with enough fear to make you act.

This much pain means something's wrong.

I need to get to the hospital.

Now, having gotten through all of this, all of these near death experiences, I'm so proud of myself and I feel so much stronger, and I feel like I'll be able to navigate some of the harder things that I know that are coming around the corner.

Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren vogelbah music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.

Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.

Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.

Our studio engineers are Rima L.

K Ali and Noams Griffin.

Today's episode was edited by Mike w Anderson, mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.

I'm your host Dan Busch.

The special thanks to Matthew Fortune for sharing his powerful story with us.

His journey sheds light on the complexities of addiction, survival, and resilience, reminding us of the importance of compassion and support.

If you or someone you know is affected by substance abuse, The National Harm Reduction Co provides vital resources to promote health and safety.

Learn more at harm reduction dot org.

Alive Again is a production of i Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures.

If you have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.

Please email us at Alive Again project at gmail dot com.

That's a l i v e A g A I N p R O j E c T at gmail dot com.