Antonia Sawyer shows how the kit is packaged on Friday for ShipHappens, her grassroots organization that helps distribute naloxone kits to thousands of Indiana residents in need of the life-saving intervention. Staff photo by Kelly Lafferty Gerber | Kokomo Tribune
Nobody is immune from substance abuse disorder.
Nobody.
That is one of the messages behind ShipHappens, Kokomo resident Antonia Sawyer’s grassroots organization that helps distributes naloxone kits to thousands of Indiana residents in need of the life-saving intervention.
According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid deaths accounted for nearly 68% of all drug deaths recorded in Indiana in 2017, with the sharpest increase involving fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics.
In Howard County this year alone, the county experienced 19 drug-overdose deaths through June, four more than in the same time frame in 2018 and six fewer than in 2017, which was the deadliest year for overdose deaths in the county to date.
Naloxone – also known as Narcan – is an opiote antidote that travels to the brain and counteracts with the opiotes that have rested on the brain’s receptors, Sawyer said. That effect lasts roughly 30 to 90 minutes, depending on a person’s metabolism, which allows enough time for that person who has overdosed to get immediate medical attention.
Having worked in the Miami County Health Department dealing with naloxone as a community outreach coordinator, Sawyer was able to train numerous first responders in the proper application of Narcan, which comes in intranasal and intramuscular forms.
“But when I switched roles over to my new position in Indianapolis, the program discontinued,” Sawyer said. “So I went to the Indiana Recovery Alliance and told them that the program discontinued and that the health department no longer needed the program. I was of course extremely worried about the people who use drugs in my community, that people could potentially die because they didn’t have access to naloxone.”
So the alliance personally gifted 1,500 doses of the antidote to Sawyer, something that she referred to as fabulous.
“I had never seen so much Narcan in all my life,” she joked. “So I drove it home, and I knew there were other distributors like myself in rural places that didn’t have access to naloxone because their health departments stopped distributing naloxone too, so I immediately called some of my harm reduction friends and asked if they needed any.”
Since some of those friends were stationed hours away from Kokomo, Sawyer decided to ship the naloxone to them. To help pay for the shipping costs, Sawyer said she asked for crowdfunding support and donations, and everything sort of just snowballed from there.
While Sawyer said she still ships to those particular friends, she also sends naloxone through the mail to anyone who visits her Facebook page and requests a kit after watching a short video and filling out a naloxone training questionaire.
And since its inception earlier this year, ShipHappens has already distributed roughly 3,000 naloxone kits across Indiana, along with registering 44 saves.
Those saves represent somebody’s parents, spouses, children, siblings and friends. They may be nameless faces to the masses, Sawyer said, but they’re also valuable and loved and often reaching out for help.
Sawyer noted that she has over 600 kits currently waiting to ship out, with a mixture of both intranasal and intramuscular.
There’s only one type of naloxone treatment per kit, but Sawyer said people can and often do request multiple kits.
Along with the actual naloxone, each kit also comes with a set of instructions and a copy of Aaron’s Law – a piece of legislation passed in 2015 that allows any Indiana resident to carry and administer naloxone without prosecution.
That Good Samaritan law helps relieves some of the worry, Sawyer noted.
But she also said she knows there are critics of naloxone, those who perhaps say that the life-saving drug is really just an excuse for those who are addicted to continue feeding those addictions.
And to those people, Sawyer said she has a message.
“Narcan enables breath, enables life,” she said, “whether that’s a second chance, 10th chance or 20th chance. People are going to use drugs whether they have naloxone or not. We’ve been in an epidemic for a 100 years. There’s never been a drug-free community that any of us have ever seen, so I think that they’re going to do it anyway.
“But we have harm reduction everywhere,” Sawyer continued. “We wear seat belts. We know we shouldn’t speed, but we do. So we put our seat belts on. We know the sun is dangerous. We still go out in it anyway, but we put our sunblock on. We know using drugs is dangerous, but we have our naloxone just in case something happens. What’s wrong with safer use? Is that an enabler? I enable life. So I guess call me an enabler all day.”
So how does one help in the cause to slow down the opioid crisis?
By simply lending a hand, Sawyer said.
“We need all hands on deck, and we need mutual aid,” she said. “We need help. Everybody is entitled to an opinion, but don’t let it get in the way of doing what’s right.”
To those who are in the throngs of opioid addiction, Sawyer has a message for them as well.
“I want them to know that they’re not alone,” she said. “There’s a whole community of harm reductionists that are waiting here to embrace them. We embrace any positive change. Any change you want to make, that’s what we’re here for. It’s judgement free and confidential. They’re not tokens. We love them. They’re just like us.”
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