By Keith Eddings
The Eagle-Tribune
LAWRENCE, Mass. — City police next month will begin carrying a drug that reverses overdoses of heroin, fentanyl and other opioids under a state Department of Public Health program that is distributing $700,000 in all to communities that are suffering the worst from the surging use of opioids.
Through October last year, 24 people in Lawrence died from overdoses of heroin or fentanyl, just one shy of the 25 who fatally overdosed in 2015, which was a record, police Chief James Fitzpatrick said Wednesday. The numbers are up substantially since the opioid epidemic began four or five years ago. In 2012, there were just six fatal overdoses in Lawrence.
Lawrence will receive $35,000 of the state grant, enough to equip all 139 sworn officers and several civilians with inhalants of the drug Narcan, Fitzpatrick said. He said the drug will be distributed to officers after a training program is completed.
Thirty other municipalities, including Haverhill, will share the state grant to purchase the Narcan canisters and train employees to administer it. Haverhill, where 20 people died from heroin overdoses in 2015, will receive $20,000. The grants were distributed based on a formula that included overdose deaths per capita.
In all, opioid-related overdoses killed 1,005 people in Massachusetts during the first nine months of 2016, according to the Department of Public Health. Of those, 188 were in Essex County, up from 171 in 2015.
Andover firefighters and Methuen police were among the first in the Merrimack Valley to equip rescuers with Narcan. Methuen police started carrying it in November 2014.
Narcan is available over the counter, including at CVS pharmacies, and ambulance crews in Lawrence already carry it. But Fitzpatrick said it’s important to equip police because they often arrive at the scene of an overdose first and can’t do much more than radio for ambulances “to speed it up because the person is in respiratory arrest.”
“Our focus is law enforcement, but this is a multi-pronged epidemic,” Fitzpatrick said.
Other prongs have included Operation Blue Crush, a summerlong sweep through the city last year by local, state and federal law enforcement officials that targeted sellers and buyers of heroin. The operation resulted in 344 arrests, although not all were drug related.
Lawrence’s opiate problem – and the Narcan antidote – received national attention in October, when a 36-year-old Salem, New Hampshire, woman collapsed from an overdose in a local dollar store and lay unconscious as her two-year-old daughter tugged at her until paramedics arrived and administered Narcan. The Eagle-Tribune posted a video of the incident on its website, where it was picked up by news organizations around the country.
“There is no faster and more effective way to reverse an opioid overdose than to administer naloxone,” Marylou Sudders, the state secretary of Health and Human Services, said when the grant program was announced last year. “It is imperative we do everything we can to counteract the epidemic of opioid addiction by providing as many first-responders as possible the opportunity to use life-saving medication.”
Narcan is the brand name for naloxone.
Using Narcan to reverse overdoses is controversial, including in Maine, where Gov. Paul LePage last year vetoed a bill that would have made the drug available without a prescription. LePage said making Narcan so widely available would normalize heroin use and provide a safety net that will encourage its use.
State legislators overrode his veto in April.
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