Police officers take on a bigger role in the fight against opioid deaths
SACRAMENTO — Last week, a Sacramento police officer used a new tool to help save a woman’s life.
She was lying in a house in Oak Park on a Monday afternoon. She was not breathing or responding, but she still had a pulse. The officer became the first in the department to use Narcan, the nasal spray that blocks the effect of opioid overdoses.
A Sacramento Fire Department crew then took over and took her to the hospital, along with a man who was still conscious but not coherent, said Police Department spokesman Sgt. Vance Chandler.
Sacramento County officials hope police will play a bigger role in combating opioid overdoses like this one after receiving a grant from the California Department of Public Health last year. The grant supplies the county with 2,900 doses of naloxone, the drug found in Narcan. Those doses will be dispersed among eight law enforcement agencies in the county and two community groups that focus on drug use.
Sacramento Harm Reduction Services and the Safer Alternatives thru Networking & Education, groups that run syringe exchange programs, will receive the largest number of doses, or 320 and 317 two-dose kits, respectively.
The Sacramento County Sheriff ’s Department will get 300 of the two-dose kits, while county officials have allocated 260 kits for the Sacramento Police Department, the documents show. Other agencies participating in the program include the Citrus Heights, Folsom, Elk Grove and Galt police departments.
A 2013 change in state law allowed police officers and family members of opioid users to administer the drug without facing civil or criminal liability as long as they are trained to do so. The state’s Naloxone Grant Program, approved in 2016, set aside $3 million to distribute opioid overdose kits to various counties.
The Sacramento County Public Health Advisory Board urged the county’s Board of Supervisors to approve an application for the state grant in a May 2017 letter, pointing to an incident in which more than 50 people overdosed and 12 died in the county after taking counterfeit drugs laced with fentanyl, an opioid the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.
Narcan, the brand name for naloxone, works by both removing and blocking opioids from the parts of the brain that can cause people to stop breathing when they overdose, said Dr. Kevin Mackey, medical director for Sacramento Regional Fire Services. Mackey trained representatives from local law enforcement agencies to teach other officers how to use the naloxone medication, including the Sacramento Police Department.
There are currently few other drugs that both remove and block the effects of opioid overdoses, according to Mackey. Naloxone can work in a matter of minutes, and is already also carried in ambulances and engines of the Folsom, Cosumnes, Sacramento city, and Sacramento Metropolitan fire departments. Paramedics with each department administer the drug, Mackey said.
“Time is very important, so that’s why we put it in the hands of the officers,” Mackey said. “Often times they can beat fire personnel to a patient by a minute or two, which can be the difference of saving a life or not.”