Advocates working to prevent overdoses

Community urged to attend Narcan training in Hartford

A group of community activists, who believe that all people should participate in the fight against opioid overdoses, is holding an event to distribute Narcan and show people how to use it.

The event will be Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. at The Wholeness House, 12 Charter Oak Place in Hartford. People can register at kamora@kamorasculturalcorner.com, but anyone who shows up will be welcome even if they haven’t registered.

Narcan (generic name naloxone) is an opioid antagonist that binds to opioid receptors and can reverse and block their effects. When administered to a person suffering an opioid overdose, Narcan can stop the opiate damage until the person can get medical help.

The overdose-response training is the idea of Hartford therapist Erin Doolittle and community activist Kamora Herrington. The women got together out of concern for the still-raging opioid epidemic and its effect on the communities in the city.

“This training is the brainchild of people who are tired of watching people die and are tired of the insane amount of red tape that stands between the community and harm reduction,” Herrington said.

Doolittle said overdoses “happen all the time in places you’d never expect.

“It’s not just happening in allies and on the street. It happens in movie theaters, in malls. It happens everywhere. At any time, you could walk into a situation. We want to give you what you need if you do,” she said.

Herrington added, “There are a lot of families who don’t know they had a drug issue at all until something happens and a child is dead.”

According to statistics from the state Office of Chief Medical Examiner, as of the

first week of December, there have been 1,284 confirmed fatal drug overdoses in Connecticut in 2022.

Arthur Mongillo, spokesman for the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, said the Statewide Opioid Reporting Directive newsletter reports that emergency providers respond to 300 to 400 suspected overdoses per month.

“In almost all of these suspected overdoses, naloxone is administered,” Mongillo said.

Doolittle said she and Herrington got 50 Narcan kits for their event.

The training itself should take about 15 minutes, Doolittle said, and will include how to use the nasal spray, and what to do after administering it.

“You can’t hug the person. For the person it’s happening to, they don’t know they are overdosing. All of a sudden they are shocked back into the present moment. It’s very scary for them. You have to give them space to let them readjust and then tell them what happened,” Doolittle said.

After the training, Herrington said, there will be a 90-minute conversation about how people feel about addiction, people struggling with addiction and Narcan itself.

“There are still a few people out there who believe that if you do drugs and you overdose, you are supposed to die. You are not supposed to be coming back. So there is that shame, that stigma,” she said.

A few people struggling with addiction will be at the training, Herrington said. “The stigma about discussing drug usage is killing people as much as usage itself,” she said.

Herrington and Doolittle said there is no governmental participation in their training event. But they hope other community organizations might team with them in the coming months to have more trainings.

“We hope to contact anyone interested in this. We want to continue doing this in other people’s spaces,” Herrington said.