Early Thursday morning, DuPage County sheriff’s deputies administered a dose of Narcan to an unresponsive man believed to be overdosing on heroin.
He was the 100th person to be saved by the emergency medical treatment in DuPage County since its use was approved in 2013, and the seventh saved already this year, according to the DuPage County Health Department.
Had the medication not been available, it’s not certain the 24-year-old Willowbrook man now being treated at Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield would have survived, DuPage County Coroner Richard Jorgensen said. The fact that 100 people are alive today because of it is “amazing,” he said.
Narcan responds to and reverses the effects of an opioid antagonist, and when administered during an overdose situation, it can prevent death, experts say. It’s credited with saving 32 lives in 2014 and 61 in 2015, according to county data. Most law enforcement agencies in DuPage County have been trained to administer it.
Hitting a milestone of 100 lives saved is a dubious honor given that it’s also a stark reminder that the heroin problem plaguing the Chicago area is not going away, Jorgensen said. The majority of people saved with Narcan have been under the age of 30, he said.
“We’re seeing high school kids using heroin. It’s not a good story,” Jorgensen said. “The bad thing about this is it shows there’s heroin in this county, it’s being used and people are dying from it.”
But saving lives with Narcan also allows those addicted to heroin and other opiates to receive treatment and turn their lives around, he said.
“That’s one of the most important things that this program allows us to do,” he said.
Narcan is administered as a nasal inhalant to individuals who have overdosed on an opioid, typically heroin. The treatment works by blocking opiates from the opioid receptors in the brain, which can stop or reverse the effects of an overdose.
Until November 2015, Narcan was not approved as an inhalant by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and it had to be administered as an injectable. Law enforcement officer discovered a way to administer it through an atomizer so that it could be inhaled, giving them an alternative to using a syringe or similar device inject it, Jorgensen said.
It was “not fair or safe” to ask deputies to try to administer an injection in a high-stress situation, he said.
Law enforcement’s success using the atomizer helped persuade the FDA to fast-track approval of Narcan as an inhalant, Jorgensen said.
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The DuPage Narcan Program, a partnership between multiple county agencies including the health department, coroner and sheriff’s department, was established in 2013 in response to a high number of county deaths attributed to opiate overdoses, Jorgensen said. Among them were seven Naperville high school students in 2011, followed by the arrest of a 17-year-old student who was dealing heroin in 2012, a situation that put a national spotlight on the city.
The Narcan program is supported through a combination of public and private funds and has allowed 2,560 people to be trained to administer the treatment, Jorgensen said.
Alex Keown is a freelance writer for the Naperville Sun.