Naloxone not in all Franklin County schools
Medicine, also known as Narcan, used to reverse opioid overdose
It’s a life-saving medication, but only some Franklin County school districts stock it.
Naloxone is a medicine that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose, and it can help restore breathing if it has stopped because of an opioid overdose.
“It’s an incredibly effective medication that can reverse the effects of opioids in a matter of seconds and minutes, so if someone has unintentionally overdosed on opioids, you can use naloxone,” said Berkeley Franz, a professor at Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Columbus City Schools, the state’s largest school district with about 47,000 students, is among a handful of Franklin County school districts that don’t stock naloxone, also known under its brand name Narcan. Others include: Groveport Madison, Southwestern and Westerville school districts.
“At this point, naloxone is not state law,” Columbus City Schools spokesperson Jacqueline Bryant said when asked why the district doesn’t stock the drug.
Bexley, Grandview Heights, Hilliard, New Albanyplain Local, Reynoldsburg and Worthington school districts report they all stock naloxone. The Upper Arlington Board of Education also approved a policy in December to begin stocking naloxone.
“The goal is really to let’s equip our nurses proactively for safety situations that could arise,” said Chris Potts, Upper Arlington Schools chief operating officer. “It’s really just best practice to have just in case, but you hope you never have to use them.”
Potts emphasized that the district hasn’t experienced any uptick in opioid use.
“It wasn’t a reaction of adding a board policy because we felt like we had way too many cases of where we could have used it. That is not the case,” he said. “It’s just another tool in the toolbox to help our nurses and also our safety forces be prepared should something happen.”
Reynoldsburg City Schools approved the policy to stock naloxone in August, and it was distributed to every building on Dec. 1. The district put the policy in place to be prepared to respond to emergency situations, said Angela Abram, president of the Reynoldsburg City Schools Board of Education.
“It’s a life-saving drug,” Abram said. “We are just trying to provide a tool for the management of opioid-related overuses, and it’s part of our emergency preparedness.”
A 10 milliliters supply of naloxone is $61, according to drugs.com. Naloxone was patented in 1961 and approved for opioid overdose in the United States in 1971.
In 2020, fentanyl and fentanyl analogs were involved in 4,041 unintentional drug overdose deaths, representing 81% of such deaths, according to the Ohio Department of Health.
Teen deaths from fentanyl have more than tripled nationwide in two years from 374 in May 2019 to 1,365 in May 2021, according to a 2022 report by the nonprofit Families Against Fentanyl.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, said teenagers are unintentionally ingesting opioids by taking illicitly manufactured prescription pills that are basically disguised fentanyl.
“They go and buy a pill thinking it’s Vicodin, but it’s fentanyl,” she said.
That’s what happened to three Ohio State University students who took in early May 2022 what they thought was a generic form of Adderall, a drug used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that has for years been popular among college and university students to help them stay up and cram for exams. Two of the three women died as a result.
More schools nationwide are stocking naloxone, Volkow said.
“It’s a very safe medication, and if you have it accessible you can save someone, so in many ways it’s almost like a no-brainer,” she said.
When it comes to whether Ohio schools stock naloxone, Franz said it just depends.
“I don’t think it’s uniform on who has it and who doesn’t, but I think there’s this growing community-based push to make sure that naloxone is available in any public-facing institution,” she said.
Franz said the idea behind schools stocking naloxone is similar to schools having automated external defibrillators.
“It’s the exact same kind of thing in terms of if there was an emergency, how bad would you feel if you didn’t have this really simple thing on hand to save somebody’s life,” Franz said. mhenry@dispatch.com @megankhenry