Author Spotlight
Emmerson Winfrey
The emergency department nurse questioned me with a judgemental side eye, taking her eyes off the IV she was attempting to insert into my friend.
“Why do you have that?”
I’d just told her I had administered my friend two doses of Narcan before bringing him in. He’d been roofied at a party and showed consistent signs of an opioid overdose — slowed breathing, pinpoint pupils and unconsciousness. I did what my parents taught me.
The fact I had Narcan on hand seemed to concern her more than her own patient’s care.
Narcan, a medicine that rapidly reverses opioid overdoses, is crucial to have on hand and know how to use — even if you don’t think you’ll ever need it. But you just might.
You don’t have to be actively using drugs or know someone who takes drugs to run into a situation where you need Narcan — something many clearly don’t realize.
They don’t realize there were over 16,000 accidental overdose deaths involving opioids in 2022. They don’t realize 480 college students out of a sample pool of 6,000 reported being roofied, according to NBC News. They don’t realize 60 students from the pool admitted to have slipped unknown pills into drinks.
No one in my family has used illegal drugs. We don’t even know people who do drugs. However, we all know exactly what corner of the cabinet our Narcan is kept.
Both of my parents work as nurses at Children’s Mercy, I regularly hear stories of teens who had overdosed on opioids. Some didn’t even knowingly take drugs. Narcan had always just seemed like another item to put in our first aid kit — no different than an EpiPen.
I quickly realized this wasn’t the case when side-eyes and questions started flying my way whenever people find out my house always has Narcan. Peers have given everything from passive-aggressive judgement to assumptions that my friends and I take opioids.
Narcan is no different than administering CPR or the Heimlich; they are all life-saving tools. The only real difference is people’s reaction to them.
These are also required curriculum for most high school health classes. This ensures students have at least some experience with these procedures and an idea of how to give them — but this isn’t the case for Narcan.
According to a study by the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 75% of people don’t know how to help someone having an overdose. In a poll of 213 East students, 37% said that they don’t know how to administer Narcan and 81% percent don’t own any.
Adding a 30-minute presentation on Narcan in these classes would both help to end the stigma and ensure more people know how to administer it.
You don’t have to be a user to have a dreadful encounter with opioids. You shouldn’t have to know a user to know how to deliver Narcan.
As a senior going into college, it’s flat-out delusional to assume I’ll know the bad habits of everyone in my dorm, on campus and at parties.
I would much rather be able to help someone overdosing on opioids than have to stand around and hope someone else knows what to do.
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