A father of a drug addict nearly died from an overdose Wednesday in New York City after shooting up his son’s stash of heroin in an attempt to teach him a lesson.
Sergey Gnatovskiy, a 45-year-old living in Brooklyn, has been struggling for years to get his son clean of the substance. His son, 23-year-old Maykl Gnatovskiy, repeatedly pledged to go to rehab but continued to abuse heroin and hide the addiction from his father. After Sergey found a hidden stash of his son’s heroin Wednesday he took drastic actions in an effort to scare his son into seeking help, reports the New York Post.
He injected his son’s heroin and began overdosing shortly after. His son found him passed out on the living room floor of their home.
“I told him if you’re not going to stop, I will do the same as you do,” Sergey told the Post. “I [tried] to send him to rehab. He promised me he was going to go, and I found it again. My son was screaming at me, ‘Pop, pop, are you crazy, you almost died.'”
Sergey said he vaguely remembers shutting off a television before waking up with paramedics around him. Maykl recognized that his father was suffering an overdose and began performing CPR before injecting him with the overdose reversal drug Narcan, which successfully revived him.
Sergey has revived his son from heroin overdoses four different times.
“After seeing this I definitely want to go,” Maykl told the New York Post regarding rehab. “I’ve been doing this since I was 15. I’m 23 now, I can’t keep doing this.”
Painkiller and heroin abuse is rampant in New York City and across the state, claiming 2,431 lives in 2015. The state experienced a 135.7 percent increase in synthetic opioid and heroin deaths between 2014 and 2015, one of the largest increases for a state.
A record 33,000 Americans died from opioid related overdoses in 2015, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.
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