Inmates receive overdose-halting drug at release
CHICAGO — Chicago now gives at-risk inmates the overdose-reversing drug naloxone upon their release from jail, and Los Angeles is poised to follow suit, putting the antidote in as many hands as possible as part of a multifaceted approach to combatting the nation’s opioid epidemic.
The Cook County Jail in Chicago, which is the largest single-site jail in the country, has trained about 900 inmates how to use naloxone nasal spray devices since last summer and has distributed 400 of them to at-risk men and women as they got out. The devices can undo the effects of an opiate overdose almost immediately and are identical to those used by officers in many of the country’s law enforcement agencies.
Sheriff Tom Dart, whose office runs the jail, said addicts are most at-risk of fatally overdosing in the two weeks after getting out because of their time away from drugs while locked up.
“We’ve got to keep them alive (and) if we can get them through that two-week window, they might get treatment, get off drugs,” he said.
Dr. Connie Mennella, the chair of Correctional Health for the county’s hospital system, which administers the program, said only inmates are being trained to use naloxone, but that she eventually hopes their relatives and friends can also be trained.
“We are trying to saturate this community with this drug, and we are educating them to tell their buddy, mother, father how to use it, where they keep it and, ‘If you come home and see me not responding, to go get it and use it,’ ” she said.
Proponents say such jail programs can be the difference between a former inmate living and dying.
And Dr. Arastou Aminzadeh, the correctional healthmedical director for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said the kits are particularly important for just-released inmates because the same amount of drugs they once used to get high before they were locked up could now kill them.
“Their threshold has dropped but they may use the amount of drugs they used to use,” said Aminzadeh, who is helping Los Angeles jails prepare to begin its naloxone program early next year.
It is too soon to gauge the effectiveness of Cook County’s program, but Dart said anecdotal evidence suggests that the kits have saved lives.
In New York City, more than 4,000 kits have been distributed to friends and relatives of inmates at the city’s jail at Rikers Island since the program there was launched in 2014.