By Rachel Becker 

June 16, 2020

Breanna Dixon doesn’t remember struggling to breathe when she overdosed, but her younger brother Joshua hasn’t forgotten the sound. 

At first, it sounded like heavy snoring coming from the TV room in the Dixon family home in Fontana, where the siblings were sheltering in place with their parents.

It had been a month since the novel coronavirus forced California to a standstill, and Dixon, 28, was struggling. She had already overdosed twice before in the two years she had used opioids. Stuck at home with her family and a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, she found herself using more than ever. 

While other people were hoarding water and toilet paper, Dixon stocked up on oxycodone pills that turned out to be tainted with fentanyl, a dangerous, potent opioid. 

“The stress of not knowing what’s going to happen in the world, and then on top of that having to deal with the little things inside my home,” she said. “I needed to cope with a lot of things, because I felt like I couldn’t fix it … and I felt like I already hurt my family so much.” 

That night in April, Joshua Dixon, 23, could tell something was off with his sister, who pivoted from jittery to groggy. So at 4 a.m., when he heard what he thought was loud snoring, he checked on her. 

He found her sitting up, her head drooping forward onto her chest. 

“I looked closer, and I was like, okay that’s not snoring — so I kind of snapped into panic mode … started shaking her on the shoulder, like, ‘Wake up!’” Joshua Dixon said. “She wasn’t waking up.” 

He called an ambulance, and Breanna’s ex-boyfriend stayed on the phone with the 911 operator until the paramedics arrived with naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses.

But the night wasn’t over: About an hour later, Joshua Dixon found his sister’s ex-boyfriend crumpled in the backyard. He had overdosed, too. 

A “collision of epidemics”

It’s a crisis that mental health experts worry they’ll see more often as people turn to illicit drugs to cope with the stressors of the pandemic. This “collision of epidemics” could magnify the dangers of both, according to warnings reverberating from scientific journals. 

While the number of Californians killed by the coronavirus is tallied daily on public dashboards, its effect on illicit methamphetamine and opioid use is harder to track. Whether more people statewide are relapsing or overdosing is unclear.

But several local health departments in California as well as emergency rooms participating in a statewide treatment effort are seeing signs that fewer people addicted to drugs are receiving treatment since the pandemic reached California. The Public Health Institute’s CA Bridge Program reported 35% fewer people with opioid addictions in emergency rooms, dosed nearly 48% fewer people with medication to treat withdrawal and recorded 24% fewer people attending follow-up appointments, comparing April to January.

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