Jesse Blanchard started about five years ago trying to get enough of the opioid overdose rescue drug naloxone to prevent her daughter from dying of an overdose.
She pleaded with a colleague at the University of Albany, Georgia, where she works as an adjunct lecturer, to take advantage of her prescription benefits and take two doses every six months.
Now, every week she loads up her jeep and along with a few other volunteers, delivers the antidote (commonly known under the trade name Narkan) to hundreds of people in this city of 70,000 people. am.
She also offers clean needles and fentanyl tests in parking lots and intersections and is an unbiased confidant. Blanchard says that at least nine times in December alone, the relief supplies she provided were used to stem overdoses.
“People keep coming to me,” says Blanchard, a nurse who founded an organization called 229 Safer Living Access, named after the Albany area code. . She said, “Jessie, she was put on Narcan the other day and without you she would have died.”
Naloxone, available as a nasal spray and an injection, is an important tool in combating the overdose crisis that kills more than 100,000 people a year in the United States.
Changes in state and federal policies have removed some of the major obstacles in the hands of police, firefighters, drug users and their families. However, the moment an overdose occurs is often frustrating and overwhelming.
Leave a Reply