A library is a place of community, where lots of people come together. And some of them suffer from opioid addiction. That’s why the first-step in a program to hand out the overdose reversal medication naloxone began at San Diego’s Linda Vista Branch Library.
The city of San Diego has forged a partnership with a local nonprofit to provide naloxone in more places throughout the city.
City Councilman Raul Campillo was at the Linda Vista library to promote it, and he said he had a good reason.
“Eleven years ago my brother overdosed and died from an opioid addiction. And it’s people like him that we’re trying to serve, so that families like theirs, families like mine don’t have to go through that again,” Campillo said.
The nonprofit Harm Reduction Coalition is partnering with the city, and they focus on providing people with training and supplies of naloxone that can prevent overdose deaths. The coalition wants naloxone everywhere and they freely gave out boxes of it to library patrons who happened upon their Friday press conference.
“We have the goal of saturating the community with naloxone. Everybody should be carrying naloxone,” said Tara Stamos, founder and CEO of the Harm Reduction Coalition. “If there’s a barrier, I want to hear about it. If you can’t get naloxone somewhere, tell me. We’ll work on getting it there.”
Naloxone, sometimes called by the brand name Narcan, comes in a nasal spray bottle. Each box contains two. When an overdose is underway, naloxone can knock a drug like fentanyl off the opioid receptor sites in the brain.
“Do one dose of this up the nose,” Stamos said as she gestured with the spray bottle. “Then you do two minutes of CPR or rescue breathing. You want to keep that blood flow going and you want that blood flow going but you want to keep that oxygen going to the brain; is the most important thing.”
And call 911. Also very important.
The Harm Reduction Coalition gets naloxone from San Diego County, which gets it from the state of California. Supplies are plentiful but not always accessible.
The coalition and the city of San Diego are bringing naloxone to many public properties where people gather, with a focus on libraries.
“Today we’re at the Linda Vista Library. We are going to have many more of these pop-ups throughout San Diego to make sure wherever you are you can get them for free,” Campillo said.
Opioid overdose deaths in San Diego County spiked early in this decade and they have been on the decline for the last couple of years. The Harm Reduction Coalition wants to get large supplies of naloxone to 100 city locations, and by the end of the summer they think they’ll be halfway there.
