The Kanawha County Sheriff's Office has launched its own naloxone program, in partnership with the Kanawha County Emergency Ambulance Authority, and has begun training some of its senior officers to use the potentially life-saving drug.
Patrol supervisors for the sheriff's department participated in a training led by the ambulance authority Thursday morning on how to store and administer the drug.
Earlier this year, the West Virginia Legislature passed a bill to allow police, firefighters and friends and family members to administer naloxone to people overdosing on heroin or prescription pain pills. Previously, only paramedics, doctors and other medical professionals could legally administer the medication.
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin signed the bill into law in March, but many local and state law enforcement agencies, including the West Virginia State Police, declared that they had no plans to carry the drug, citing factors such as cost and training.
Kanawha County had the third-most heroin-related overdose deaths in 2014, with 17, according to the state Department of Health and Human Resources. West Virginia has the highest drug overdose death rate in the United States; nearly 500 people died of drug overdoses in 2014, according to the DHHR.
The Kanawha sheriff's office is the first law enforcement agency in the state to supply its officers with Narcan, a trade name for naloxone, since the bill became law. Rich Meadows, the education department manager for the Kanawha County Ambulance Authority, said both departments are paying out-of-pocket for the drug, which trained officers must store in their own homes.
"Narcan is basically a 'narcotic antagonist,' which means it will stop any narcotic in the body that creates the effect that causes people to stop breathing," Meadows said. "Narcan will only work in situations where a person has overdosed on an opioid drug - it doesn't matter if it's OxyContin, Oxycodone, Roxanol [morphine], heroin - whatever the drug is, it will only work on narcotics. It will not work with any other commonly abused drug, such as benzodiazepines, which are things like Xanax and Atavan, or crack cocaine or methamphetamine.
"If we come in and they're not breathing, there's typically one of two things going on. They've either overdosed on a drug, either a benzodiazepine or an opiate, what people most commonly refer to as 'downers,' which will typically suppress their ability to breathe . . . or they may simply have a medical condition that led them to stop breathing. There are a lot of causes for that, but the easiest one to fix, if we suspect it, is an opiate overdose."
Kanawha County Chief Deputy Michael Rutherford said the department's choice to carry Narcan was spurred by the county's stark increase in drug overdose rates, especially among heroin users - the department and the ambulance authority responded to zero heroin overdoses in July 2014 but, one year later, saw 43 heroin overdoses in the county in the span of a month.
"The unfortunate part of our job is that, when things like this happen, we're there," Rutherford said. "People call us, and our job is to protect and serve, and to save people's lives. This is one of the best ways to do it, because this particular medication only affects opioid-type drugs, like heroin. If we can protect and save one life, it's more than what we can ask for."
Naloxone is administered by injecting it into the muscle, vein or under the skin, as emergency medical personnel with the ambulance authority are trained to do, or by spraying it into the nose with an atomizer, the method that will be adopted by sheriff's deputies.
Narcan has little to no effect on those who have not ingested opioids, and its effects last between 30 and 60 minutes, said Sgt. Brian Humphreys, spokesman for the Kanawha sheriff's office. Because Narcan is a controlled substance, the ambulance authority must obtain the drug for the sheriff's office, and the agency developed new policies for officers tasked with carrying the drug.
"We're asking our guys to carry a controlled substance, so we had to figure out how to manage that. Not that it's easily abused or anything, but we have a legal requirement, if we're going to carry a drug, to keep it stored safely," he said. "They have to keep it on their person when they're out and store it in their house like they would their firearm, so we're going to see how this is handled by the supervisors before we distribute it more widely."
Reach Lydia Nuzum at lydia.nuzum@wvgazette.com, 304-348-5189 or follow @lydianuzum on Twitter.