Summit County Public Health aims to ‘saturate the community’ with a life-saving antidote for opioid overdose

Visitors to the Frisco Transfer Center in recent weeks may – or may not – have noticed an inconspicuous box similar to the newsstands where locals pick up the Summit Daily News.

But this box, and the nearly a dozen others that have shown up at various locations in Summit County since September, contain no newspapers. Instead, these boxes contain a life-saving antidote: naloxone.

“Naloxone has saved countless lives over the years,” said Summit County Public Health harm reduction specialist Justin Harrow. “It’s impossible to put a number on it.”

Naloxone, sometimes better known by the brand name Narcan, is the antidote for opioid overdose, Harrow explained. He said he knows from experience the lifesaving power of naloxone, which is easy to use without medical training and can restore a person’s breathing in two to three minutes.

“I was saved by Narcan myself,” Harrow said. “I was addicted for over ten years and it saved my life several times. Long enough to get clean and build a life for myself. That is the end goal: to keep people alive long enough to make the choice to get better.”

The Summit County Sheriff’s Office and the Summit County Public Health Department have offered free naloxone to the community for years in an effort to prevent deaths from opioid overdose.

But Amy Wineland, director of Summit County Public Health, said these new naloxone distribution centers aim to make the antidote even more accessible by offering it at locations people often visit.

“We’re really trying to saturate the community with naloxone,” Wineland said. “A lot of people don’t feel comfortable… coming into public health or the Sheriff’s Office. We wanted to make sure it was accessible to everyone.”

In addition to the naloxone distribution cabinets popping up at transportation centers in Silverthorne, Breckenridge and Frisco, Wineland said the health department has also set them up at local Colorado Mountain College campuses and popular entertainment venues such as Tenmile Music Hall and Brooklyn’s Tavern. There are now a total of 12 naloxone distribution boxes, either kiosk or wall-mounted, across the province, she said.

Summit County has not been spared by the deadly opioid epidemic that has raged across the United States for more than two decades and is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. In Colorado alone, 1,926 overdose deaths were reported in 2023.

In recent years, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, has fueled a deadly new wave in the opioid epidemic. Law enforcement officials say cartels and drug dealers are taking advantage of fentanyl’s cheap and addictive properties, mixing it with other illegal drugs and counterfeiting counterfeit pills that resemble Oxycodone, Percocet or other prescription pills that can contain a fatal dose of fentanyl. .

“Because of the way fentanyl interacts with our communities in this country, someone can die in a matter of minutes, literally faster than the ambulance can get to them,” Harrow said. “So if we really want to do something about the problem, we’re fortunate to have a tool like this.”

Even if someone is not suffering from an opioid overdose, naloxone is safe to administer, including to pregnant women and children, Harrow said. So if a bystander encounters someone who is unconscious, there is no risk that administering naloxone could hurt him or her, he said. Colorado also has a Good Samaritan law that protects people who provide emergency assistance without compensation from civil damages and criminal prosecution.

“The idea is to just have this in your medicine kit in your car and at home, especially if you live around people who use drugs or if you use drugs yourself,” Harrow said. “Just so it’s available.”

Wineland noted that the new naloxone stations are just one part of a multi-pronged approach that Summit County government has taken to tackle the opioid epidemic locally. Among other measures, the public health department has also pushed to expand treatment services, such as medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, and to educate the public about the dangers of fentanyl and other opioids.

“(Opioid addiction) is a disease that can be treated,” Harrow said. “It really causes a chemical change in the brain. It’s something that’s very difficult to overcome, but we do have a treatment in Summit County.”