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When Kaily, a senior at Sacramento State, saw the campus was offering a free Narcan training, she signed up immediately. She’s going to Coachella this weekend and knows her friends are planning to bring drugs.
“It's like the week before — it was perfect,” she said. “I thought I might as well take this training just to reduce any harm that might be done.”
She also signed up for the training with her brother in mind. She said she gets worried when she hears about the parties he goes to.
“I know his friends actually do fentanyl,” she said. “So if I can have this resource to share with my brother to then share with his friends, it can help save a life somehow.”
The twice-monthly training is in place due to the Campus Opioid Safety Act, a law that went into effect in California last January. The act requires all community colleges and state universities to teach students about opioid overdoses during orientation, and distribute an approved overdose reversal medication, such as naloxone. UC campuses are encouraged to do the same.
At the training Kaily attended in the Sac State wellness office, peer health educators Tori Duong and Stephanie Rosas guided the group through discussions about what opioids are, how the medication naloxone works, and how to administer it in its most common form, Narcan. They showed an example of body cam footage where police revive someone experiencing an overdose, and sent everyone home with a box of Narcan and a tip sheet on when to use it.
Students at Sacramento State take a free training on how to administer naloxone in its most common form, Narcan, on April 4, 2024.Kate Wolffe/CapRadio
Lori Miller works in substance use prevention and treatment for Sacramento County, and says these trainings will do more than just help students at Sac State and the community colleges in the area.
“Prevention education is the key in this epidemic,” she told me. “We all need to work together as a community and to normalize Narcan, so people are not afraid to administer it.”
According to the county’s tracker for fentanyl-related deaths, which relies on coroner data, 385 people died in Sacramento County last year. That’s more than one death a day. It’s risen quickly — in 2019 there were 33 deaths in the entire year.
Miller says deaths began rising significantly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that’s when the county shifted more to a harm reduction approach, where they accept that people are using drugs and try to make the experience safer.
However, despite experts touting it as best practice, harm reduction can be controversial. Last fall, Placer County issued an emergency ordinance banning needle exchange programs after the Sheriff called such programs “an acceptance of illicit drugs.” Needle exchanges are meant to prevent the spread of disease like HIV. And in February, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said harm reduction was “making things worse” on the city’s streets. Some addiction experts rebuked the mayor’s claim, with one attributing the situation to “the worst overdose crisis the United States has ever seen” and fentanyl’s status as “a historic foe.”
I asked Miller if she thinks providing Narcan to people is enabling them to do drugs without consequences. She said she doesn’t think that’s the mindset when it comes to Narcan, but concedes that there might be a trade-off.
“I think the bigger message is that you can save more lives than the lives that you're going to be enabling through having this life-saving medication,” she said.
Miller says her dream is for Narcan to be in every classroom in every middle school, high school and college campus — she sees it as a matter of life and death.
Meanwhile, Sac State’s trainings are just for students and staff. But the California Department of Public Health website has a lot of information about Narcan administration, including an online training video.
Here’s the basics:
- Keep Narcan on you (and out of extreme heat and cold — i.e. keep it in your bag, not your car, during the summer) especially if you know someone who uses opioids.
- If you see someone who could be experiencing an overdose (pinpoint pupils, trouble breathing), check for responsiveness.
- If they’re not responsive, call 911, and administer the Narcan nasal spray. The spray will not hurt someone who is not overdosing, and will only help someone who is. People may need more than one dose, so check again after two to three minutes.
If you or someone close to you uses drugs, you may be able to access naloxone through the mail. You can also try to access it through harm reduction groups in the community. If those resources fail, you should be able to buy a box of Narcan for less than $50 over the counter at your local pharmacy.
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