On his way back from Indianapolis recently, Keith Current picked up something Evansville desperately needed.
Officials in Ellettsville told him they had a few doses to spare of Narcan, the nasal spray that can reverse opioid overdoses. So Current swung past the small town just north of Bloomington on his way down I-69. He’s also occasionally gotten Narcan from Spencer County, and pretty much any locale that has offered extras.
“I’ve been beating bushes. Anybody who’s been getting new stuff in, I’ve been asking for (it),” said Current, the EMS manager for the Evansville Fire Department. “We’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
All that scrounging was necessary because Vanderburgh County saw a huge leap in overdoses in 2020.
According to a report recently compiled by the Vanderburgh County Health Department, 66 people fatally OD’d in 2020 – up from 54 in 2019. Fentanyl – a powerful opioid that has saturated the drug market for the last several years – claimed at least 27 of those lives. Most of the victims were young, in their 20s or 30s.
The increase in nonfatal overdoses was even starker.
According to Current, EFD administered 324 doses of Narcan within the city limits last year – more than double the 156 they handed out in 2019. And the 2020 figure doesn’t include Narcan doses given by other responders on EFD runs, including 101 from AMR, 50 from Evansville police and 29 from bystanders.
Current said there’s at least one woman in the city who keeps a stock of Narcan at home in case first responders can’t get to her family member in time.
Each year, VCHD receives federal grant money it can use toward Narcan. Current asked for 150 doses at the beginning of 2020, but for 2021, he’s hoping to receive the same amount EFD used last year: 324.
“The (jump) was just not something we were figuring on,” he said.
Who’s dying – and from what
VCHD’s fatal overdose report paints a grim picture. Of the 66 people who died last year, 40 were between the ages of 20 and 39. Eleven victims were in their 40s, while the rest ranged from 50 to 69.
Men made up 63 percent of the overdoses, and the majority of the victims were white – about 86 percent.
Sixty deaths were ruled accidental, two were undetermined, and four were suicides.
Traces of multiple drugs can sometimes be found in overdose victims, but autopsies often assign a death drug – the substance that tips an incident from an OD into a casualty. In 2020, fentanyl dominated everything else. If you include when it was combined with heroin, the opioid was responsible for 30 of the 66 deaths.
And the number could be even higher. Mixtures of either heroin and meth or fentanyl and meth killed eight people. Alcohol, methadone, mixtures and the nebulous category “other” were responsible for the rest.
Fentanyl has become a huge problem all across the world.
It can show up anywhere – mixed in cocaine and heroin, sold in prescription patches or broken into powder. And it courses through the Midwest. Late last year, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported on a drug trafficker who covered the region in fentanyl and meth, flushing it into several communities – including via a pipeline that shot right through Evansville. The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Joint Task Force played a role in the two-year federal, state and local investigation that ultimately recovered about 123 pounds of meth, 500 pills of oxycodone, 345 grams of heroin and 769 grams of fentanyl powder.
But overdose problems from all kinds of opiates have plagued the Evansville area for a long time. As horrible as this year’s statistics were, 2020 fell well short of the deadliest year in recent memory. That occurred in 2017, when 76 people died in Vanderburgh County.=
Who’s overdosing – and where
Like most of the deaths, the people saved by Narcan last year were young. According to Current, the average age of people who received doses on EFD runs was 36.
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Overdoses stretched all across Evansville, but many landed in two sections of the city. At the beginning of the year, Current said a lot of the calls came from the 47711 zip code. The action eventually shifted south to 47714 – one of the poorer and most populated parts of the city. Calls mostly came from the area between Washington Avenue and Riverside Drive, extending from U.S. 41 in the west to Green River Road in the east.
Current should know in March whether EFD will get the amount of Narcan he asked for. Grant money comes from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which doles out cash for states to distribute to local communities.
Firefighters often wondered whether COVID-19 played a role in the overdose spike. Maybe 2020 was an anomaly, but if it wasn’t, Evansville will need every dose it can get.
Responders often see the same people over and over, Current said. Companions will deny a victim took certain drugs, but that argument falls apart once a person is revived. Narcan only works on someone who has OD’d on an opiate.
“They’re lying to us, and we know that. That’s just the way it is,” he said. “I guess they think we’re the police, too. … They think we’re going to take them to jail, and we’re not.
“We’re there to help them. And they just don’t understand that a lot of times.”