The Heroines Who Take On The Harm
March 06, 2025 at 01:57AMFor The Delacorte Review, Adlai Coleman follows Danni Dineen and Donna Coleman, women who work for two different harm reduction programs in West Virginia, a state hit hard by the opioid crisis. Both in recovery, both formerly incarcerated, Danni and Donna meet people exactly where they are because they’ve been there, too. They offer whatever it is someone needs that day or that hour, be it a life-saving dose of Narcan, some water, a sandwich, a bus pass, a ride, or simply just to feel seen by someone who understands.
Danni’s work is all consuming, “draining” is the word she uses, mentally and physically. She tells me that when she feels run down by the job, she looks at a map on her wall where she tracks Charleston overdoses with push-pins. “Each one of those pins is a life, someone who needs my help,” she tells me. It’s a rehearsed line, one I would later find in a local news interview she gave a year before, and one that she would repeat to me in later conversations. However, as she said it to me that morning, she had tears in her eyes.
It doesn’t matter that they are high. It doesn’t matter that they are lying to the cops about why they had Narcaned their friend, or that they are lying to us about what they had been doing upstairs.
Danni simply tells them that they have done the right thing. She gives them her card, another box of Narcan, and even calls the tall husband an Uber on the CARE account because he says he’s late to work.
More picks about harm reduction
The War Over Safe Drug Supply in Vancouver
Are they “martyrs in the war on drugs or reckless agitators”?
The Land Beyond the Drug War
“It’s more than fifty years on from our declaration of a war on narcotics, and people are getting higher on more destructive shit than ever.”
The Only Narcan Vending Machine in Alabama
“How Walker County is confronting the next phase of the opioid crisis.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/05/the-heroines-who-take-on-the-harm/
via IFTTT
Watch