Lessons in saving a life
City offers naloxone training in fight vs. opioids
Some people have a drink on Friday to relax and unwind. Emily Winkelstein shot heroin.
When the 43-year-old publichealth worker overdosed in a hotel room a decade ago, an injection of a powerful medicine, naloxone, brought her back.
Now, Winkelstein will play a key role in opening the city’s latest front in its war against the opioid crisis — equipping and training 25,000 New Yorkers each year to use the lifesaving drug.
“I bring that experience with me to every single training that I do,” she told The Post.
As the head of the Health Department’s overdose prevention unit, Winkelstein will play an important role in training New Yorkers on how to use naloxone as part of the city’s new End Overdose Training Institute.
The program, which will cost $673,000 the first year and then $1.7 million in the years to come, will be first targeted at city employees, community health-care and social workers as well as addicts and their friends and family, officials said.
“The main goal is to get naloxone into the hands of people who are likely to experience or witness an overdose,” said Dr. Hillary Kunins, the Health Department’s top alcohol- and drug-addiction official.
Each kit distributed by the city contains two doses of Narcan, a nasal-spray version of the naloxone injection that saved Winkelstein.
It’s a small component of the $60 million that Mayor de Blasio plans to spend fighting opioid overdoses in his next budget, according to a recently released City Council report.
The naloxone push comes as overdoses killed a record-setting 1,441 people in New York City in 2017, preliminary figures show. More people died of overdoses than died from homicide, suicide and car crashes combined.
Health officials say that opioids were linked to 80 percent of the fatal overdoses last year, with fentanyl accounting for half of the fatalities alone.
In January, the city filed a $500 million lawsuit against the manufacturers and distributors of opioid-based drugs, alleging they helped fuel the crisis through de- ceptive marketing.
It was the second straight year overdose deaths pushed past the macabre milestone of 1,400. As in years past, The Bronx and Staten Island were particularly hard hit, city stats show.
But officials say there is hope in those grim figures, thanks in large part to naloxone.
When overdose deaths soared from 942 in 2015 to 1,425 in 2016, a 51 percent increase, the city responded by quadrupling the number of naloxone kits it distributes, Kunins said.
The next year, 2017, the number of overdose deaths climbed by only 1 percent, hitting 1,441.
“We know the work is nowhere near done, we’re still at epidemic levels,” she said. “But we’re heartened that we’re seeing a flattening.”
Still, some on the City Council want to see the de Blasio administration push further and harder to tackle the opioid crisis.
“Why is the city so slow to react to this?” said Councilman Robert Holden of Queens.
“They’re trying to save a life, but they’re on the back end of it. How do we not get people addicted first of all?”