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MAHHC eyes education to promote drug overdose awareness

By Patrick Adrian
EAGLE TIMES STAFF
WINDSOR, Vt. — Windsor County organizations hope through education about drug overdoses and training with Naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, to encourage residents to be more active in the effort to stem drug-related deaths.

Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health Center (MAHHC) co-hosted a freeNarcan training and drug overdose awareness presentation last Friday as part of the hospital’s ongoing overdose-prevention efforts.

Over the last four years Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health Center has gradually chipped away at substance abuse challenges in Windsor County, which at one time had the highest rate of drug overdoses in Vermont, said Jill Lord, director of Community Health at Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health Center.

In addition to an array of preventive and educational strategies, including counseling treatment services and outreach programs, the Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health Center distributes free Naloxone, a medication used to intervene in opioid overdoses.

Ryan Fowler, a harm reduction coordinator with the HIV HVC Resource Center in Lebanon, is a former opioid user who credits Narcan for saving his own life on multiple occasions during his active substance use.

“Harm reduction” is a term to describe strategies or practices that reduce the risk of negative consequences that might derive from a human activity, Fowler explained. In general applications, this might be wearing a helmet when riding a bicycle or applying sunscreen when at the beach.

In regard to drug use, such harm reduction can include needle exchange programs or the distribution of Narcan.

Desired or not, drug use is a human behavior that “goes back as far as recorded history [and] will always be part of our society,” Fowler said. “But there are ways to reduce the risks and harms.”

Harm reduction aims to take a more practical and arguably more compassionate approach to substance users, shifting from the historical emphasis on criminalization strategies to showing understanding and compassion toward people struggling with substance misuse, according to Fowler.

“It’s about supporting them, not punishing them,” Fowler said.

Arguably the central controversy surrounding Narcan is a cultural view that sees Narcan as enabling opioid use by reducing the risk of fatality as a behavioral deterrent.

“People who use drugs don’t deserve to die,” Fowler said. “I hear this narrative in our culture that ‘they shouldn’t have taken that first one.’ To me that is justifying a preventative death.”

Substance use, like all human behaviors, serves some purpose to the individual, Fowler pointed out.

For Fowler, opioids became a way of self-medicating to cope with trauma, Fowler shared. Fowler found an immediate connection to the drugs, which at least initially made life tolerable enough to endure.

“Opioids actually kept me alive for a period of time, until they started to kill me,” Fowler said. “I feel like drugs in general did for me what society wasn’t. And I had no [thought] about dependence or long-term use. I just knew that when I took them I was less anxious.”

In a one-hour presentation Fowler walked Windsor residents through an overview of responding to a drug overdose, which he summarized at one point as “recognition, response and recovery,” or how to recognize a drug overdose, respond and provide a recovery-oriented aftercare.

An “overdose” occurs when the ingested drug slows the user’s brain activity to the point that normally automatic brain-directed activities like breathing cease.

“An opioid overdose is essentially the brain not telling the lungs to breathe,” Fowler stated.

Signs of an overdose might include difficulty breathing, loss of consciousness or non-responsiveness, vomiting or a pale or blue complexion.

“Remember that if they can respond to you, they are not overdosing,” Fowler said. “They are just really high.”

To learn about how to respond to a drug overdose, including how to administer Narcan and assist the recovery, watch a video of the full presentation on Windsor on Air’s Facebook page.

The presentation was co-hosted by Turning Point, a recovery organization based in Vermont and the Intersectional Solidarity Movement, a Windsor group dedicated to equity and inclusion in the community.

“I carry Narcan and I thank those who do,” said Amanda Smith, a representative of the group. “And I encourage those who don’t to consider carrying it in the future.”

reporter @eagletimes.com

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