School to offer fentanyl antidote training
Students to learn to detect overdoses and reverse them using naloxone kits
The University of B.C.’s Alma Mater Society is organizing mass training events to teach students to recognize and reverse drug overdoses amid a devastating provincial health emergency that shows no sign of slowing down.
Organizers say 120 students are registered for a two-hour training session Thursday in the student union building at UBC’s Vancouver campus, where they’ll learn the signs of an overdose, how to use a naloxone kit and the role stigmafree language plays in improving the lives of people who use drugs.
The training was orchestrated by AMS VICE, a group that provides support to students who use substances. With registration at capacity and the event still drawing interest from thousands more students, the student society is already planning to hold more sessions to train as many people as possible, said AMS president Alan Ehrenholz.
“This is something that is an issue of our time and we want them to be prepared for the worst,” Ehrenholz said. “We want to prepare our students to respond in an emergency situation so that they can support their peers and have a safe and fun party experience.”
He said the university has been supportive of the AMS’s efforts and he hopes students will take their training with them off campus so that they can provide support in emergencies wherever they are.
The AMS asked Karmik, a group of harm-reduction experts, to provide the training. Co-founder Munroe Craig said up to a dozen peer trainers from her group will teach students about factors that increase risk of overdose, harm reduction, indicators of respiratory depression and ways to use compassion when working with people struggling with substance use.
Craig said that in the past she’s found it politically challenging to provide training to large groups in institutional settings, but said Karmik was keen to answer the AMS’s call for help.
She said working with students is particularly important because they may not be aware that even “party drugs,” such as cocaine and MDMA, are increasingly being tainted with the toxic opioid fentanyl, which has been detected in more than 80 per cent of drug deaths this year.
Recent testing at the Insite supervised-injection facility found that 40 per cent of cocaine samples contained fentanyl. A Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction study found that 2.4 per cent of respondents aged 15-24 reported in 2013 that they had used cocaine in the past year.
“With a lot of youth or young adults that are maybe not intending to use an opiate, there is a lot of polysubstance use going on by virtue of the fact that no substance is pure or clean anymore,” Craig said.
Naloxone kits will be provided for free by the B.C. Centre of Disease Control, which has already distributed more than 50,000 kits this year.
The program launches a week after the B.C. Coroners Service released a disturbing report showing that illicit-drug overdoses had killed 1,013 people across the province in the first eight months of 2017, up from 982 for all of 2016. One in four deaths were in Vancouver and 18 per cent of those who died were 19 to 29 years old.
VICE co-ordinator Alex Dauncey, who is working with AMS studentservices manager Marium Hamid to run the naloxone training, said the high demand for it proves students are “hungry” to fight back against the overdose crisis.
“Often, I feel like people don’t really want to talk about the fact that people use drugs or that people may be in harm using drugs,” Dauncey said. “I’m really heartened by the fact that people in my community and my generation are taking concrete steps to reduce these problems.”