Mike Reid: A Merokean fighting the heroin epidemic

The heroin epidemic has ravaged Long Island’s South Shore for years now, and this most insidious of street drugs shows little sign of loosening its vise-like grip.

Teens too often start down the long and serpentine road to perdition by experimenting with their parents’ opiate-based pain-relief medications at so-called “pill parties.” When the pills run out, they turn to heroin. It’s a simple question of economics: Pain pills go for $30 each on the street. Heroin sells for as little as $5 for a single glassine packet — enough, in most cases, for a nightlong high.

Once heroin seizes control over a user’s brain, it becomes very much the master. All self-control is lost. Addicts need increasing amounts of heroin until they crash and burn in an overdose. Some survive. Many die.

Front and center in the epic battle against heroin addiction is Merokean Mike Reid, 54, a paramedic instructor for the North Shore-LIJ Health System, which will become Northwell Health in 2016, and a volunteer paramedic for the Merrick Fire Department.

In his role as a paramedic, Reid said, he has seen far too many heroin overdoses, and he has pledged to do all in his power to halt the heroin scourge. He is a founding and active member of the Bell-more-Merrick Heroin Task Force, which formed in 2014. In addition, through the nonprofit Long Island Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependency, Reid became a certified Narcan trainer. Narcan (naxolone hydrochloride) is an opioid antidote that, if properly administered, can stop a heroin overdose. Reid is among New York’s first non-physician Narcan trainers. On top of it all, through the Kiwanis Club, he has taken his Narcan training program statewide.

For all Reid has done to educate the public about the extreme threat that the heroin epidemic poses to Merrick and communities far beyond, and for all he has done to curtail this rapidly moving disaster, we proudly name him the Merrick Herald Life’s 2015 Person of the Year.