Wider availability of drug to reverse overdoses saving Hoosier lives

By the time Giles found the woman, who she recognized had recently overdosed, anyone who had been shooting up with her had cleared out of the house. The woman’s lips were blue, and when Giles ran her knuckles across the woman’s chest to try to wake her up, her eyes remained closed.

“She wasn’t responsive at all when I walked in,” Giles said. “All the other people, they left because they were afraid.”

Giles went to her car to get a naloxone kit she had received from the Indiana Recovery Alliance. Then, Giles said, she did something that until this spring, only emergency medical technicians, hospital doctors and other emergency responders could do — she brought the woman back from the brink of death.

Naloxone, the generic name for the prescription drug Narcan, is an injectable medication that has long been used by medical professionals to stop the overdose effects of opioids, such as prescription painkillers and heroin, before a drug user dies.

“It has one purpose, and that is to reverse opiate overdose,” said Christopher Abert, a social worker and project coordinator for the Indiana Recovery Alliance. “You can’t abuse it. You can’t get high off it. It doesn’t interact with any other drugs that they know of.”

IU Health Bloomington Hospital has seen a 50 percent increase in heroin overdose cases in the past year, and of the 16 drug-overdose deaths this year in Monroe County, seven have been attributed to heroin.