ESPAÑOLA, N.M.  Eric Lucero has been addicted to heroin for three decades and says he has known at least 100 people in this pastoral county who died from overdoses, some in his presence. 

But Mr. Lucero has recently become a popular  and, he would argue, safer  injection buddy.  Seven times, he says, he has revived companions by using an anti-overdose drug, Narcan, which the state now hands out to addicts and their relatives as part of its effort to reduce the toll of one of the country’s most pervasive epidemics of narcotics use. 

Mr. Lucero, 48, said, “People know I’m good at saving them.” 

Rio Arriba County, just north of Santa Fe, is a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape of juniper-dotted desert and mountain valleys populated mostly by Hispanics who proudly trace their lineage to settlers of the 1600s  and who, a decade ago, discovered that their county had the nation’s highest per capita rate of deaths from overdoses.  Hundreds of families are struggling to live with a multigenerational plague of narcotics; Mr. Lucero’s own son is addicted. 

Federal data released in March showed that the county ranked first in drug fatalities for 2001 to 2005, with a death rate of 42.5 per 100,000, compared with a national average of 7.3.