This white box can save a life. L.A. County pushed to hand out 50,000 of them

LOS ANGELES — His friend was barely breathing when Manny Placeres saw him being dragged out of a tent near a freeway onramp. At first he thought someone nearby was shouting "Freeze."

"What I was really hearing was 'breathe,'" Placeres recounted.

Placeres jumped off his bicycle and tried everything he could think of to revive the man. Nothing worked. As others panicked and shouted, Placeres pulled the man onto his lap and held him as his lips went blue.

It was a fentanyl overdose, Placeres learned. His friend died in his arms.

Placeres, 58, was wrestling with that memory when a nurse approached him one day at his RV in a Studio City encampment, offering him a white box of a medicine that could undo an opioid overdose.

Now, Placeres said, he has rescued people again and again with that medicine in hand. "What a change of mentality that is," Placeres said, "to be able to do that."

Deaths from drug overdoses have surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, to roughly across the country over a year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Roughly three-quarters of those