GAITHERSBURG, Md. — People are dying from heroin overdoses in leafy, suburban neighborhoods, in the countryside and in the city. Heroin-related deaths have increased sharply throughout the region and across the country. In just two years, from 2011 to 2013, heroin deaths jumped by 88 percent in Maryland.
Now, Montgomery County Police are being trained to administer Narcan, a rescue medication carried by most ambulance crews.
“This gives us an additional edge so that if the officers are out there on patrol and we get a call for an overdose that occurs relatively close by we can respond immediately,” says Officer Scott Davis, coordinator of the Montgomery County Police Crisis Intervention Team.
Narcan, the trade name for the drug naloxone, is a spray administered in the nostrils. It can bring a person who has overdosed back from the brink of death.
“It gets absorbed in the blood stream very rapidly and the effects are within a couple of seconds to a minute. It’s very quick,” Davis says.
While grateful for the medication and its ability to save lives, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said, in an interview last week, that the rescue drug is doing something else.
“Narcan has emboldened some narcotics users to take riskier levels of narcotics to try for that better or higher high, thinking they can be saved at the back end,” McCarthy says.
Twenty-seven Montgomery County police officers have been trained and issued Narcan kits.
By March, some 80 police officers are expected to be carrying Narcan.
“We’re trying to get the medication to the individuals that need it, when they need it,” Davis says.
