'Every second counts.' Why Cal Poly educators are pushing to get life-saving drug on campus

Jun. 8—Everyone hopes that they'll never have to use the fire extinguisher in their home, said Candace Winstead, a biological sciences professor at Cal Poly.

The same goes for the defibrillator in your gym, or even the seat belt in your car, she said.

"We have these things just in case you need it, just in case the worst is to happen," Winstead said. "So why not the same for Narcan?"

Winstead and others in the Cal Poly community are working to increase access to naloxone — commonly referred to by the brand name Narcan — to help reverse opioid overdoses.

They want naloxone in the hands of all on-campus resident advisors and the houses of each sorority and fraternity.

New data show the life-saving drug may be needed now more than ever because of a surge in opioid overdose deaths in San Luis Obispo County.

In 2020, 55 people in the county died from opioid overdoses. That's more than double the number of opioid overdose deaths recorded in 2019, according to the data.

Nationally, deaths from opioid overdoses rose about 36% from October 2019 to October 2020, preliminary data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.

Those under the age of 30 accounted for nearly 30% of the opioid deaths in San Luis Obispo County, local data show.

"What we're seeing on the rise is fentanyl and fentanyl being mixed with non-opioids," said Jenn Rhoads, the San Luis Obispo County Opioid Safety Coalition coordinator.

Rhoads said fentanyl is being mixed into popular party drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy, or benzodiazepines such as Xanax.

"The person using those substances is probably not an opioid user," she said. "So when they have even a little bit of fentanyl, they have no tolerance to it."

This is what has likely caused several young people to die of overdoses, she said.

People like Cal Poly student Jake Worden.

Worden died of a drug overdose in San Luis Obispo on Christmas Day. He had used a combination of cocaine and Xanax that was laced with fentanyl, according to the San Luis Obispo Sheriff-Coroner's Office and his dad, Leon Worden of Santa Clarita.

Cal Poly Police Department officers carry Narcan while on duty, and the Campus Health Center can provide Narcan to students for free without a prescription.

No on-campus opioid overdoses were reported to the university since at least 2016, according to Matt Lazier, the university's media relations director.

Therefore, "at this time there has been no consideration" of increasing access to Narcan on campus, Lazier wrote to The Tribune in an emailed statement.

Because an overdose occurs when the opioid overwhelms the same receptors in the brain that affect the drive to breathe, Winstead argues that students' current access to Narcan on campus requires them to take extra steps — either call campus security or go to the Health Center to ask for naloxone from a campus pharmacist — that could cost a student's life.

"If you're not breathing, every second counts," Winstead said.

How a Texas university got Narcan in dorms

At the University of Texas, Austin, faculty members found themselves in a very similar situation to those at Cal Poly.

In 2016, Lucas Hill, a faculty member at UT Austin in January "started hearing from people that there had been opioid overdose deaths of students off campus over the holiday break," said Claire Zagorski, the program coordinator at Pharmacy Addictions Research & Medicine at the Texas university.

That spurred him and a group of faculty to go to the university's administration and ask for better access to naloxone on campus for students.

Without much hesitation, the administration at UT Austin "went for it," Zagorski said.

Now, the Texas university has two doses of Narcan stocked behind the front desks of every dorm on campus.

"This has been a nice step in the right direction," Zagorski said.

A key to that step, however, was the faculty figuring out how many students had overdosed on opioids, she noted.

The Texas university had not always been aware of when a student would die from an overdose because of privacy laws and parents' discretion on sharing the cause of their children's deaths with the school. That's probably the case with Cal Poly, Zagorski said.

"Cal Poly is almost certainly unaware of a lot of overdoses that are happening among their students," she said. "They really have to rely on things being reported to them."

But the increase in the number of opioid overdoses in the broader community and more drugs being laced with potent opioids such as fentanyl should be sending a clear message to the university, Zagorski said.

"It's all making it harder and harder to ignore the need for this ... so we're (at UT Austin) progressively rolling out Narcan, we're putting Narcan in the Greek houses, and we're working on better and more education around this subject," she said.

Access to naloxone on college campuses carries stigma

One of the barriers associated with increasing access to naloxone on college campuses is the stigma associated with the drug.

"I think that there's an idea that this is a moral failing and people who find themselves addicted to different substances, if they happen to overdose and die, well, that was their choice, or they had it coming," Rhoads said. "And then I think beyond that there is some stigma around the naloxone or Narcan, specifically, in that there's some thought that it enables you.

"And the data really doesn't back that up in any sense of the imagination."

Rhoads also noted that there could be concern from an institution about what embracing access to Narcan means.

"Is there some kind of fear they have that by promoting this, they're either condoning substance use or putting it out there that, 'Oh, our organization, our school or our business has a problem with this?' " Rhoads said.

Rhoads has a very simple response to those concerns.

"Look at the community in general, our nation in general, you see this data that substance use, of overdoses, are rising," she said. "And how wonderful it is that we have this free, safe medication that really can be available to anybody."

Kirsten Vinther, a health educator and prevention specialist at Cal Poly, told The Tribune in an email that she and others at the university have greatly expanded educational outreach to students about Narcan over the last several years by giving presentations to all the fraternity and sorority executive council leadership and resident advisors.

But knowing about Narcan and having easy access to it are different things. Vinther noted that though Cal Poly may not have concrete data that prove students are overdosing on opioids, the data from the county show opioid overdoses have increased — a trend that is likely reflected in the campus community.

"Our students on campus are also part of the San Luis Obispo community. The more members of our community who have Narcan and understand how to use it, the better equipped we all are to respond in an overdose emergency," she wrote in an email.

There's also fear that because Narcan is a drug, people could become addicted to it or overdose on it, Rhoads said.

That's simply untrue, she said.

Additionally, anyone who takes Narcan who is not experiencing an opioid overdose will likely not feel anything because its sole job is to block the effects of opioids on the brain and restore breathing.

In other words, if there are no opioids in the person's system, nothing will change.

Winstead noted the fear that Narcan enables people to continue to abuse substances is fundamentally focused in the wrong direction when faced with the issue of addressing the opioid epidemic and drug abuse in the community.

"Dead people can't recover," Winstead said of substance addiction or abuse problems. "So if someone is in the throes of addiction and that's why they're using drugs ... or our students or anyone else is experiencing mental health crises and they're self-medicating around that — in order for them to make progress as a human, they need to be alive."

It's vital, Winstead said, to remember that Narcan is just like that fire extinguisher in your home — you hope to never use it, but it's there in case of an emergency.

"Your kid might not be experiencing long-term addiction. They may just take a drug at a party one time," she said. "Should they die from that because they didn't know better? No. Nobody should have to pay with their lives because their drugs are contaminated with fentanyl."

How to get help

If you or anyone you know are concerned about drug use or potential drug misuse or abuse, Mustangs for Recovery is an on-campus resource to help students. For those off campus or in the broader San Luis Obispo County community, there are resources available via Friday Night Live, or through San Luis Obispo County Behavioral Health's Drug & Alcohol services.

Additionally, SLO Bangers, a local syringe exchange and overdose prevention program led in part by Winstead, has overdose prevention training and overdose response kits — which include Narcan and fentanyl test strips — available for free. They can be contacted by calling or texting 805-458-0123 or messaging them via Facebook or Instagram.

If you are in crisis, please call the Central Coast Hotline at 800-783-0607. You may also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text HELLO to 741-741.

CORRECTION: This article was updated to indicate the correct faculty member at UT Austin who had heard about the off-campus student overdoses in 2016, Lucas Hill.

Corrected Jun 8, 2021

___

(c)2021 The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.)

Visit The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.) at www.sanluisobispo.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.