Narcan to be distributed throughout R.I.
URI approved a $250,000 grant for 3,000 doses of narcan to help communities with high opioid use and overdose. GRAPHIC CREDIT: Elizabeth Wong
The University of Rhode Island recently approved a $250,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation to purchase 3,000 doses of Narcan for urban communities with high opioid use and overdose rates.
Narcan, known by the generic name naloxone, is a drug that can treat narcotic overdoses in emergency situations.
The Community First Responder Program (CFRP) has educated students on opioid use and taught them to use Narcan since 2019 and has worked to teach student organizations how to administer Narcan, such as Greek Life.
In 2019, the CFRP was given a grant of just over $1 million from URI to serve students. Soon after, another $250,000 donation funded the expansion of the program to the larger community.
“This grant for Narcan is specifically going to harm reduction organizations that are primarily in Providence, Central Falls, Pawtucket,” Anita Jacobson, a clinical professor of pharmacy and the program director of the CFRP, said. “It is really for mostly high-risk individuals who use unregulated substances actively.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, opioid addictions and overdose have grown, which Jacobson attributes to the struggles that people are having with mental health.
“We had the largest amount of overdoses on record in the state in 2020,” Jacobson said, with 384 fatal overdoses happening last year.
The grant comes after the Faculty Office Hour hosted by Jacobson, where she discussed the opioid epidemic and the use of Narcan to combat opioid overdoses.
“We just think it was really good timing,” Bryan Smith, the communications and program specialist for the URI Foundation and Alumni Engagement, said. “It just sort of really lined up with Narcan being in the news and Anita talking about it [at the Faculty Office Hour] as well.”
Smith said that they started the Faculty Office Hours as a way to showcase the research that faculty on campus are doing and show it to a wider audience.
The CFRP started in Washington County, according to Smith, but has expanded throughout the state, leading to the current grant.
The money will mostly be going towards nonprofits in urban areas of the state as opposed to the more rural areas of Washington County that the University usually works with. They will still work with one of the non-profits running in Washington County.
The group has already distributed over 5,000 Narcan kits to the rural areas since February of 2020. The CFRP will be working with these communities on the proper use and safety of Narcan.
“We will be making sure that all of the harm reduction workers have been trained,” Jacobson said. “Most of the people who work for those agencies are people who themselves are in recovery.”
As a result, these groups tend to be peer-recovery groups, where the responders teach the people using substances how to recognize and respond to an overdose as well as how to use Narcan properly, according to her.
The group is working with the Rhode Island Department of Health so that Narcan can be an annual expense and there can be more consistent funding to obtain Narcan.
In the future, Jacobson hopes that the CFRP will become a centralized hub for Narcan distribution throughout the state with more consistent funding from the state.