Student Profile

Student Uses Harm Reduction to Tackle Overdose Crisis

Stephen Murray, an Executive MPH student and Lieutenant for Northern Berkshire EMS, is working to break down stigma and change public views of substance use disorder.

Stephen Murray is tired.

He is tired of seeing parents bury their children.

He is tired of the stigma surrounding people who use substances.

He is tired of pulling people out of the “stream,” dead or alive.

And he is demanding change.

A full-time Executive Master of Public Health student at the School of Public Health, Murray works as a Lieutenant for Northern Berkshire EMS, which serves the City of North Adams, Mass. and the surrounding communities of Northern Berkshire County and Southern Vermont. He has responded to over 100 overdoses in his career.

“When you work in frontline medicine, you hear a lot of stigmatizing language, especially towards people who use drugs,” says Murray. “Calling people addicts or junkies, or complaining about having to respond to another overdose. It is exhausting.”

For Murray, this language is personal. He has been in recovery for more than 10 years.

“I am an overdose survivor,” he says, “and I often found myself in rooms full of people who were talking badly about people like me, about people that I have cared about. It’s not right, and it needed to change.”

In 2019, Murray spoke at a Voices for Recovery event in North Adams, sharing publicly his story of recovery for the first time. He was in uniform. 

“I wanted to share my story with people in a way that was inspiring, but also in a way that breaks down stigma among first responders and other health care providers,” he says. “It was important to me that people see someone in uniform unashamedly speaking about their own struggles with substance use.”

Since then, Murray has propelled himself into the national conversation on substance use, working specifically in harm reduction.

He works closely with the organization Never Use Alone, a virtual supervised consumption site, offering an anonymous space to use substances safely.

“Being alone while using is the number one risk factor for fatal overdose,” says Murray. “For me, there has always been this pressing need to convince people that using alone is really dangerous, and they can reduce their risk of dying by just being with somebody. Never Use Alone really functions to bridge this gap without shame, judgement, or pushing treatment on anyone.”

When someone is planning to use alone, they can call the Never Use Alone hotline, where an operator will take their exact location and stay on the phone with them. If the caller becomes unresponsive, the operator will activate emergency medical services.

Since it was founded in 2019, the Never Use Alone hotline has received over 4,400 calls, with 28 EMS calls and 28 lives saved.

Murray helped to launch Never Use Alone hotlines in Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, and currently works on the backend to train phone operators and ensure everything runs smoothly.

“Fatal overdoses are one hundred percent preventable,” he says. “Every fatal overdose is a policy failure in the sense that it could have been prevented with some sort of intervention, so I am really proud of the work that Never Use Alone is doing. It is consistent with my work as a paramedic, and I am so glad that I have taken a leadership role with them because what they are doing is really beautiful.”

In addition to his work with Never Use Alone, Murray has joined a local addiction task force and is designing a new EMS-based post-overdose program to connect people who recently experienced a non-fatal overdose, and are thus at higher risk of a fatal overdose, with support services. Many of these programs, Murray says, are currently police-based, which can pose a number of issues. His agency will be the pilot launch site for the program in Berkshire County.

As Murray transitions his work from frontline medicine to public health, he says he is growing more and more frustrated with the system’s resistance to change, especially around drug use, highlighting that the criminality of drugs is the driving factor in the overdose crisis.

“If we want to have 100,000 people die a year, we can keep doing the same stuff over and over and expecting the same results,” he says. “We are not able to have supervised consumption sites, we are not able to offer a safe drug supply, and we are really obsessed with abstinence-based recovery. I’ve been responding to overdoses for eight years, and we still respond to the same, if not more, overdoses a year. What we are doing is not working.”

Murray hopes to use his MPH to position himself more “upstream,” and step into a more official public health role, eventually hoping to influence drug policy at the national level.

Aside from his physical distance from SPH, Murray says that the online, asynchronous Executive MPH made sense for his busy schedule, as well as for him and his growing family (he and his wife welcomed their fifth child a few weeks ago).

He says that with the smaller class sizes of the EMPH, he has been able to connect with his professors and peers in ways that he hasn’t experienced in the past. Outside of class, he has even started collaborating with one of his peers, who is also in recovery, on launching a Never Use Alone hotline in Maine.

With his work, family, and school, Murray’s schedule is booked, but it’s just the way that he likes it.

“I’m more organized than I have ever been,” he says. “My days are scheduled down to the half hour, but the busier I get, the more relaxed I am. Even though I am busy, I still manage to take a nap every day, I spend a lot of time with my kids, and I am doing work that I believe in.”