India, Aug. 29 -- image credit- shutterstock

Ahead of International Overdose Awareness Day on August 31, most conversations turn to numbers: how many deaths, how many adm issions, how the figures have climbed year on year. Those numbers matter. But inside an emergency room, the number that actually decides whether a patient walks out or doesn't is not any statistic; but the minutes.

In overdose medicine, there is a narrow window between when breathing starts to fail and when it stops altogether. What happens in that window, who notices, how fast they act, and how quickly the patient reaches a hospital equipped to manage it, matters more than the substance that was involved.

This is the part of the overdose crisis that almost never make...