Finding his son’s heroin stash was evidently the last straw for a concerned father in Brooklyn, who injected himself with the drugs and almost fatally overdosed—just to teach his son a lesson.

“I told him if you’re not going to stop, I will do the same as you do,” Sergey Gnatovskiy told the New York Post. “I [tried] to send him to rehab. He promised me he was going to go, and I found it again.”

While Sergey’s impassioned act of desperation was risky, his son Maykl seems to have gotten the message. Discovering his father unconscious on the floor, Maykl immediately recognized the symptoms of a heroin overdose and revived his father using a combination of CPR and Narcan spray. His father has had to revive his son four times before.

This role reversal was apparently the wake-up call Maykl needed. “After seeing this, I definitely want to go. I’ve been doing this since I was 15. I’m 23 now, I can’t keep doing this,” Maykl said. 

Sergey does not remember much from the incident, only able to recall making his way towards the TV before suddenly waking up surrounded by paramedics. “My son was screaming at me, ‘Pop, Pop, are you crazy, you almost died,’” Sergey said.

Sergey took in his son after Makyl’s mother kicked him out of her house for using drugs as a teen. Sergey has been trying to get his son clean ever since, and with the threat of eviction looming over the two men, Sergey was desperate to get his son into a proper facility.

“I’m trying to kick him out of my apartment and into rehab. We’ve been notified of eviction and I need to prove he’s gone by May 31, which was yesterday, or I’m out as well,” Sergey said. “If I lose you—I don’t know. Look what you made me do yesterday? I’ll give you my home, my car, my heart. I don’t want to lose you.”

Desperate parents will try almost anything to rescue their children from the grips of addiction. One father in China even hired cyber hitmen to continuously kill his son in an online game to curb his son’s gaming addiction.