As fentanyl overdose deaths rise unabated, California is at the forefront of the fight to reverse the grim trend. But organizations that distribute overdose reversal drugs worry that their increasingly bold efforts to save lives could land them in legal trouble.
Some, such as an outdoor center in San Francisco that opened in January, have generated wide attention. The facility — which in addition to distributing naloxone to opioid users helped connect them with social services — drew criticism from residents who claimed it encouraged drug abuse by allowing people to use on site. It closed earlier this month.
Other pioneering approaches have stayed mostly out of the spotlight. In a handful of major cities from Oakland to Los Angeles, plans are underway to expand how the reversal drug is distributed: outfitting residential buildings that house large populations of opioid users with boxes of Narcan, the brand name of the widely used nasal spray version, in addition to making it available in schools, libraries and jails.
Elsewhere, service providers want legal cover to distribute naloxone to people who may in turn share it with others who have not been trained to administer it.
Homeless fentanyl user Brandice Josey, left, uses a straw to blow a puff of fentanyl smoke into the mouth of Ryan Smith, also homeless, in Los Angeles.
(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
The initiatives are a sign of this desperate moment in America’s long-running overdose epidemic. The death toll has spiked in recent years, largely as a result of the growing ubiquity of the powerful opioid fentanyl.
The legally prescribed painkiller has become a popular illicit street drug over the last decade. It has also killed thousands of people who unknowingly consumed other drugs such as cocaine or heroin that were surreptitiously laced with fentanyl.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described fentanyl as up to 50 times as potent as heroin and 100 times as…