Alum Directs First State-Funded Hotline to Prevent Fatal Overdoses.

Alum Directs First State-Funded Hotline to Help Prevent Overdoses
A trailblazing advocate for drug policy reform, Stephen Murray (SPH’22) blends his personal and professional experiences as an overdose survivor, paramedic, and now, director of the Massachusetts Overdose Prevention Helpline to challenge stigma and promote empathy for people who use drugs.
Work as a first responder once provided Stephen Murray, a former firefighter and paramedic—and multiple overdose survivor—with a sense of purpose and an identity he took pride in. But his years on the frontlines of healthcare, responding to more than 100 overdoses over the course of his career serving Western Massachusetts and Southern Vermont, took a toll.
“People [want] me to be this beacon of hope because I recovered,” says Murray (SPH’22), who has frequently shared his personal experience in an effort to combat the stigma he has encountered— even among colleagues in healthcare—towards people who use drugs. “I always tell people I didn’t come out about my drug use to inspire people. I came out because I’m angry. A lot of my friends have died. A lot of people that I went to rehab with died within a few years. I watched people die in my job, people I cared about.”
Today, he no longer fields 911 calls. Instead, Murray serves as the recently appointed director of the Massachusetts Overdose Prevention Helpline, a toll-free number (1-800-972-0590) and anonymous service that functions as a virtual supervised consumption site to provide those who would otherwise use drugs alone with a lower-risk alternative. It is the first of hotline of its kind in the country to secure state funding.
Phone operators stand by 24/7 to ask callers for their location and stay on the line with them as they use drugs, ensuring help can be dispatched immediately if the callers become unresponsive.
Launched with seed funding from the nonprofit RIZE Massachusetts and run out of Boston Medical Center (BMC), the program has 23 active phone operators and an additional 12 currently in training. According to Murray, the team has remotely supervised more than 1,300 uses of drugs, resulting in the detection and reversal of nine overdoses. This year, they aim to launch a Spanish helpline and become the first overdose hotline ever accredited with the International Council for Helplines.
Originally a 100-percent volunteer-led effort, the Massachusetts helpline evolved from a grassroots initiative called Never Use Alone. As a former state administrator for Never Use Alone, Murray trained operators and helped expand the service throughout Massachusetts and into New York and Vermont. A 2023 episode of the podcast This American Life titled “The Call” detailed a particularly heartwarming Never Use Alone success story in which Murray responded to an overdose and revived the patient, a woman named Kimber, to later learn that she survived because she used the hotline.
Kimber is now a program assistant and the frontline operator at the Massachusetts Overdose Prevention Helpline. When a call is placed, the first words the caller hears come from a prerecorded message by Kimber. Then, on average, callers are connected within 15 seconds to a live operator.
Murray is proud to share that both he and Kimber have come full circle, but he does not forget how many people will never get another chance. According to state data, there were 2,359 confirmed and estimated opioid-related overdose deaths in Massachusetts in 2022, and, according to federal data, nearly 110,000 nationwide.
The promise of harm reduction programs to reduce these numbers is what inspired Murray to pursue an MPH in the first place, he says. While working as a paramedic, he delved into researching the subject, eventually coming across the HEALing Communities Study—a multi-year research project on the prevention and treatment of opioid use disorder conducted at BMC and SPH in collaboration with heavily affected towns and cities across the state.
“The beginning of the HEALing Communities Study coincided with early spread of COVID, so all these community meetings they were hosting aimed at reducing the stigma of opioid use were happening online,” says Murray, “So now, me, this guy who lived in a small town in Western Massachusetts was able to visit several hard-hit communities around the state. I was able to make a lot of connections, and I realized, ‘Oh, Boston Medical Center is at the center of this, maybe that is where I need to be. That is part of why I chose BU, and it worked out because now I am at BMC.”
While a student in the Executive MPH Program at SPH, Murray intensified his efforts to combat stigma towards people who use drugs. A precursor to the current Online MPH Program, the Executive MPH program enabled mid-career professionals to remotely complete the requirements for a master’s degree in a single intensive year. For his practicum during the program, Murray collaborated with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to develop and publish a training for first responders that orients them to the principles of harm reduction and instructs them on how to care specifically for people who use drugs.
The course is available online for credit in the state of Massachusetts and Murray travels to deliver an in-person version of training in other states. To date, he estimates he has trained approximately 2,000 EMTs and paramedics in at least six states.
As a practicum deliverable, Murray also conducted a survey of training participants to assess its effectiveness. He recently attended a conference to present the findings—which revealed a positive impact on the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of EMS providers toward people who use drugs—and plans to feature the data in another publication.
“We need smart caring, capable people coming out of MPH programs to come into research and implementation and program management,” says Murray. He suggests students passionate about harm reduction advocacy reach out to him.
Murray maintains that the overdose crisis is in part, if not entirely, the result of ineffective drug policies. Law enforcement has tried for going on 50 years to reduce the flow of drugs into communities, he says, yet the drug supply has only become more potent and more dangerous. He points out that the overdose crisis is not only a matter of addiction—an overdose can happen to anyone, regardless of the volume or frequency that they use drugs—therefore, a treatment-only approach is also futile.
“I am a firm believer in quality control and consumer protection. If we had a shampoo crisis where shampoo was making people’s hair burn and fall out. We would not solve that by giving people shower caps, right? We would solve it by fixing the problem with the shampoo,” says Murray.
The country’s shifting attitude towards prohibition gives him hope, though he says. “I could have gotten a felony in the State of Florida from smoking weed [in college], and now, there is a dispensary. That is a shift in only 10 years, right? So, I hope we can get there someday.”
In the meantime, he continues to take the occasional call from the Massachusetts Overdose Prevention Helpline.

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