Charleston County Had 39 Overdoses This Month. Bystanders Carried the Antidote to Fewer Than Half.

Lt. Stephen Kurdron runs the Community Wellness Unit for the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, and this month his phone hasn’t stopped. Thirty-nine overdoses, seven deaths, in July alone — in a county that had actually seen a 19% drop in drug deaths in 2025. “Definitely been an uptick,” he told Live 5 News. “This is an epidemic that has touched virtually everybody.”

The overdoses aren’t the only number that matters here — it’s that of the 23 doses of naloxone administered across all of 2025’s 153 drug deaths countywide, only 10 came from a bystander.

Two days earlier and 500 miles northwest, Nashville’s Neighborhood Safety Unit was living the same math. Six fatal overdoses in 24 hours sent Sgt. Anthony Cucci’s team out with more than 300 naloxone kits. His warning was blunt: “Never assume you know what is in street drugs… it only takes a small amount of fentanyl to become deadly.” Davidson County has stocked 428 public ONEbox naloxone stations across the city — free, no ID, no questions.

Naloxone works. That part of this story isn’t in dispute anywhere. It reverses an opioid overdose in minutes, it’s legal to carry in every state, and in Tennessee and South Carolina alike it’s stocked in vending-machine-style boxes specifically so a stranger can grab it without a prescription or a conversation. What isn’t working is the last three feet: getting the box into someone’s hand before they’re standing next to a person who has stopped breathing. Charleston’s own numbers show the gap isn’t supply — it’s the moment nobody thought to grab it on the way out the door, because carrying naloxone still reads to a lot of people as an admission that someone they love, or someone in their neighborhood, might need it.

Cody Hendrick of Wake Up Carolina, who works Charleston’s overdose response alongside Kurdron’s unit, put the stakes the only way that actually lands: “Even if we can just save one life, one life is enough.” If you live in a county with a naloxone box on a public corner — and by now, most of the country does — the ask this week isn’t complicated. Take one. Put it in the glove compartment, the junk drawer, the bag you carry every day. The sirens in Charleston and Nashville this month weren’t responding to a shortage of medicine. They were responding to the space between where the medicine was sitting and where it needed to be.