- Heroin is strangling Baltimore.
- It's called Carfentanil.
People are dying and overdosing from the toxic opioid.
- Everyone has to be in the game
about combating opioid addiction.
- When people think of Baltimore,
drugs and crime are never far from their mind.
The media calls it the heroin capital of the US.
That it's ground zero for America's opioid crisis.
But some residents are hard at work finding ways
to lessen heroin's grip on their city.
- The hope is we can warn them and let them
use whatever powers they can to save their own lives.
- Drugs just happen to be a false hand
in a dark place in your life.
- Meet the Bad Batch Boys, a group of teenagers
using technology to help prevent overdoses.
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- I've worked in the last 15 years
as a game programmer in Baltimore.
I've always had a love for art and code, and video games
is like a great place to mash those two together.
We started Code in Schools about five years ago
because we like working with young people
and seeing the way in which coding really
opens their minds, change the way they think.
Baltimore City, it's majority black.
- You should only get a notification when--
- For students, not what we could consider underrepresented,
just a lot of people you don't generally see in tech.
- It's just like something that's not really marketed to you
coming from the places I come from.
My name is David, and right now
I'm teaching coding to public school students.
Can you show me your conclusion real quick?
I wanna see--
I'm thinking code is this insane complex, you have to be
white for someone ever to take you seriously.
Mike is the biggest nerd in the world.
(laughs)
The biggest nerd in the world, but having a person defy
almost every one of my misconceptions
lead me to become a better coder, which is pretty awesome.
- I kind of fell into the harm reduction world
accidentally I would say.
I had a friend who overdosed from a batch
of heroin that was cut with Carfentanil.
It affected me a lot.
She'd always had struggles with addiction,
but she'd managed to make it work.
And then Fentanyl and these other drugs
hit the street and no matter how careful you are,
when those are out there, that you're just ...
These street dealers that are mixing it
are not, obviously, chemists.
You know, some of them are taking a spoonful of this
and a spoonful of that, shaking it up
in a bag and they get it wrong.
And when they get it wrong it can kill
large groups of people.
You know, Baltimore City recognizes this problem,
maybe, more so than any other city
because it's been a problem here for a long time.
- Baltimore has been dealing with the effects
of heroin abuse since the 1940s.
To help curb overdoses, the city developed an email alert
that notify healthcare providers of increased overdoses
in different areas of the city.
But users, the people affected most by potentially
dangerous batches of heroin, were left out of the loop.
- There was no processing place to alert people
that this was out there killing people.
You know, it was like, why?
What I know how to do is code and what I know
how to do is make these kinds of things.
- Baltimore is a DIY city.
When people see a need, they will band
together to create a solution.
Mike came up with this idea for Bad Batch.
It was designed to let users know
when there's a bad batch of heroin in their area.
- It's a text messaging system sort of like
an Amber alert or flood warning.
The data starts with an overdose.
That data is analyzed on a daily basis
and if they detect a spike in overdoses
in a particular neighborhood that implies that it's likely
something different than the usual is going on there,
like maybe somebody has mixed a bad batch of drugs
that's killing a particularly large number of people.
When we get that information, we can send
an alert out to everybody that's registered
in that neighborhood and let them know
that something's not right.
It really makes me excited when the right people
are introduced to the topic at the right time.
During the weekends is when the
Bad Batch Team and I would meet and be coding.
When I was in high school, that would've taken a lot
for me to give up my Saturdays week after week
for no pay to work on a coding project.
They just kept coming in and chipping away at it.
- It's brainstorming, we can just put it down.
Click on what spot they want.
- I feel like you should get a alert regardless.
- We absolutely have students that would code
the pants off of ivy league graduates, often,
finding problems with my code and helping me fix them
or showing me more efficient ways to do things.
- Before Bad Batch I had no personal
involvement with the opioid crisis.
I didn't realize the type of things that
these people were going through until Mike telling us
his story and then, personally meeting some of these people.
It's crazy.
- Their dedication and the scrappiness
of them coming together and toughing it out,
they put their all into it.
- I didn't think that anything that I'd be doing
with my life would impact anybody personally.
- What's this?
- My own experience with Bad Batch, it changes
my perception of what I can do for the world.
- And that's like one of the best things about code.
You don't really have to go to college to make
a life changing app to like save people, which is amazing.
Everybody has something in them and all it just takes is
someone just pointing you in that direction.
- A lot of these people that are addicted
are trying to stay alive, they're trying to like
fight their addiction and they're just trying
to live their lives, you know.
I think it's important that people just remember that
all of these people are people that are loved.
A message like that would be the world to me
and would hopefully honor her memory.
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