HAYLEY Symes saved the life of two people in one week and has been commended by the Wiltshire Ambulance Service for her quick thinking actions.

The 31-year-old good Samaritan from Trowbridge administered first aid to the two victims, saving both their lives in the critical time between the crisis and the arrival of the emergency services.

The two people she saved were drug users in danger of dying from drug overdoses. What saved them was a new drug, administered via a special injection pen, called Naloxone.

The first man was dying in the tent he calls his home in Trowbridge. His associates rang Ms Symes because they did not know what to do with someone who was about to die of a heroin overdose.

She said: "When I arrived he had already gone over. He was blue, not breathing, and close to death. I tried to resuscitate him and then called the ambulance.

"As it arrived I administered the Naloxone, which I have been trained to do in these situations and it saved his life. The ambulance crew told me he would have died if I had not been there.

"Three days later a friend turned up at my house and collapsed in the kitchen. He had split up with his girlfriend and then gone on a drug and alcohol bender, taking heroin just before he collapsed.

"I gave him Naloxone and he pulled out of the overdose. It was amazing, very scary but worth it. This drug has to be distributed more widely or more users will die needlessly."

Naloxone is special drug that reverses the effects of a heroin overdose. The Wiltshire Harm Reduction Task Group paid for a project to train people to administer the drug and raise awareness of it in order to try to halt the rising number of drug users who die of a drug overdose each year. The latest figures for this country show that 1,506 users died in 2005.

Despite immense apathy from the public, lack of funding, and misinformed sceptics, the group of drug workers and their clients, the drug users themselves, executed a six-month pilot scheme to get Naloxone into the drug using community.

It resulted in three lives being saved. The total cost of the project, including the drugs, was £120, which translates as £40 for each life - the price of the life of a drug addict.

Steve Blackmore, of Great Western Ambulance, officially commended Ms Symes for her bravery, cool headedness and quick thinking.

He said: "Without her these two guys would be dead, like the countless other victims of our drug culture."

Ms Symes is a former drug user and was helped by Mick Webb, a harm reduction worker supporting drug users in Wiltshire.