photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Chrissy Mayer, DCCCA’s chief community based services officer, speaks to the Douglas County Commission during its Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023 meeting.

There’s enough of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone to go around in Douglas County for now, a local social safety net nonprofit says, but the real challenge will be giving the community easy ways to access it and training more emergency responders on how to use it.

At Wednesday’s Douglas County Commission meeting, commissioners got a briefing about DCCCA’s distribution program, which sends naloxone — also commonly referred to by the brand name Narcan — to individuals and agencies throughout the county and across Kansas. More and more commonly, it’s being used in instances where overdoses are caused by fentanyl-laced drugs.

“All you have to do is read the newspaper as of this morning to realize how incredibly challenging this issue is and how prevalent it is, not only in the state of Kansas but in Douglas County,” DCCCA CEO Lori Alvarado told the commission.

Since the program began operating in August 2020, it has distributed more than 24,000 naloxone kits throughout all 105 counties in Kansas, and DCCCA has also trained more than 4,400 folks on opioid overdose prevention and administering Narcan.

In a letter to the County Commission ahead of the meeting, DCCCA said that it had previously been forced to use wait list periods for the program because of supply issues. But on Wednesday, Chrissy Mayer, DCCCA’s chief community-based services officer, asserted that the supply of naloxone in Douglas County is stable as of right now and should remain so for the foreseeable future. The discussion on Wednesday was more about how to get the life-saving drug to more people who need it.

Commissioners expressed some interest in training more EMS responders to administer naloxone, and Kevin Joles, the EMS division chief for Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical, said he would coordinate training for first responders within the next month or so. Education like this is important, commissioners said, if Douglas County wants to effectively respond to overdoses of fentanyl and other opioids. As the Journal-World has reported, public safety agencies in the community have warned that even very small amounts of fentanyl — as small as a few grains of table salt — have the potential to be deadly.

“It sounds pretty incredible that such a small amount can be so dangerous, and the more we say it in the community, the more people hear it, I think it’s pretty important,” Commissioner Karen Willey said.

Commissioners were also interested in the prospect of installing boxes designed to improve public access to the overdose reversal drug in a number of community buildings. In the presentation on Wednesday and in the letter earlier this week, DCCCA shared two examples of such boxes, including one called a “Naloxbox.” Those containers typically are placed at various locations throughout a community and stocked with naloxone to ensure easy access.

Another type of box, called a “ONEbox,” would serve as a similar public receptacle for naloxone, but with a built-in video screen that can play an instructional video that shows how to administer the nasal spray to someone experiencing an overdose.

Mayer said DCCCA is interested in getting supplies of naloxone into a number of places throughout Douglas County that don’t already have it on hand in case of emergencies, including libraries and schools, potentially in the same spaces where a defibrillator might be kept. She said that hubs where large numbers of people gather, such as Rock Chalk Park, would also be effective locations, and that getting naloxone into at least one storefront per block along Massachusetts Street would be a game changer.

“You just never know when you’re going to need it, that’s the thing,” Mayer said. “… I think if we can normalize having naloxone out, I think that’s a big piece of reducing stigma around drug use as well.”

In other business, Douglas County Administrator Sarah Plinsky told commissioners that she, county legal counsel and Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center have already met following last week’s update about progress on the county’s yet-to-open behavioral health crisis center.

Last week, Plinsky said the county was aiming to finish negotiations with Bert Nash by early April about the operation of the Treatment and Recovery Center of Douglas County, and they’ve already begun a rapid meeting process. Plinsky said the first priority is setting the terms of an operating agreement, and the goal is to accomplish that in the next week or two. She said a meeting was planned for Friday afternoon, and the talks would continue early next week.

Plinsky also said she plans to share shorter updates about those meetings with county commissioners each week from here on out, near the end of their meetings when she gives her weekly report.