By CAT MURPHY
Everyone has heard of a designated driver, but Hyattsville officials are trying to destigmatize a new type of designation: a designated naloxone administrator.
In Hyattsville and surrounding communities, as in most of the U.S., opioid use is an ever-present concern.
There have already been more than 70 reported opioid-related overdose deaths in Prince George’s County, according to data from the Maryland Department of Health — the third-most of any county in the state, behind only Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Seven of those deaths occurred in and around Hyattsville.
The data also show that emergency medical personnel in Prince George’s County have administered the opioid-reversing drug naloxone 350 times since January, including 39 times in Hyattsville.
Naloxone — also known by the brand name NARCAN — has been shown to reverse more than 90% of opioid overdoses, according to a Stanford Medicine-led study. But as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services notes on its website, the highly effective drug can only prevent overdose deaths “if it is in the right hands, at the right time.“
That’s why City of Hyattsville officials — all of whom receive mandatory naloxone training — are looking to get naloxone into the hands of community members.
“We hope you never encounter a situation where you have to use it, but just in case you do, you want to be prepared,” said Reggie Bagley, the city’s emergency operations manager who oversees the naloxone training program.
Through a partnership with the county health department, the city offers free training sessions on opioid overdoses and naloxone administration.
“We started the class training about a year and a half ago because we recognized the importance of people being able to respond in the event of an opioid-related emergency,” Bagley said. “And we’ve had overwhelming success with folks always being interested in taking the class.”
As part of the training, which is free and open to both residents and nonresidents, participants leave with two emergency doses of naloxone nasal spray.
By contrast, the over-the-counter naloxone available on pharmacy shelves costs $45 for two doses.
“I saw NARCAN, I think the other day, in CVS. I was curious. It was like $40,” said Nora Doyle, 28, of Hyattsville. “That’s probably just a little bit too much for people to do … just purely to be cautious.”
For people who use opioids, naloxone’s price tag can be a barrier to access. The free training, Bagley explained, aims to eliminate that barrier both by making naloxone widely available and by reducing the stigma associated with addiction.
“Don’t confuse any of that to mean that I’m supporting using drugs — I’m not,” Bagley said. “But it’s kind of like, at some point, we have to understand or deal with the reality of what we’re dealing with.”
Hyattsville Mayor Robert Croslin emphasized the importance of training people who use drugs on how to administer naloxone.
“We need to stop folks from dying,” Croslin said. “We need to train them to be able to save their friends.”
Bagley encouraged people to think of having naloxone training as having a designated driver.
“If you’re going to go out drinking, you have a designated driver. When that first became a real thing 20-25 years ago, it was socially unacceptable. Well, now it’s a social norm,” Bagley said. “Is it right or wrong? That’s not the question. The question is that it happens. And it’s the same thing here.”
The naloxone training also presents concerned community members with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the topic of opioids and overdoses. The 90-minute training covers what an opioid is, how to recognize the signs of an overdose and how to respond appropriately.
Doyle, an executive recruiter, said she was drawn to the training by a sense of obligation to her community and is hoping to contribute to community preparedness.
“Part of being a good community member, I feel like, is being able to look out for people around you,” said Doyle, who attended a training session in mid-September. “It can happen at any time in a lot of different scenarios, so the best case scenario is that as many people as possible have [naloxone].”
Brian Allen, 54, of Bowie, shared Doyle’s sentiment.
“There’s a lot of fentanyl, and a lot of people dying from it,” said Allen, a bus driver for the City of Greenbelt and a pastor at Empowerment Places Fellowship in District Heights. “So, I just want to be prepared if it happens around me. … I just would like to see no one die.”
Although the training is free, Bagley tells attendees he has a different kind of reimbursement in mind.
“We want you to pay with people,” Bagley explained. “We want you to go out and tell your friends, tell your family, tell your community to come on out and receive the training. And that’s how you pay.”
Allen, who attended a training session in September, committed to sharing the training with his congregation.
“They give [naloxone] to the church because people are just dying,” Allen said. “The training I get, I’m going to share with my church, as well. So we’ll all be prepared.”
Doyle, too, said she planned to tell her friends about the training.
“If I do this, and I can kind of talk to them about it, they might sign up,” she said. “People I know will be like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it was a free service, but Nora did it, so I want to do it.’”
Bagley noted that the city is in the process of expanding its naloxone training offerings to include a train-the-trainer program.
“We want to have people to come here and actually receive the train-the-trainer program, and then they can go out and be ambassadors for the training and be able to offer it,” Bagley said.
The city holds naloxone training sessions twice-monthly — once on a Thursday evening, once on a Friday morning — at the Hyattsville Municipal Building on Gallatin Street. The registration form is available on the city’s website.
Cat Murphy is a graduate journalism student at the University of Maryland.