MAINE — A state-mandated naloxone training will be offered at public schools in the area soon.
Naloxone is a medication that can revive people who overdose on opioids. Once administered, it quickly blocks the drug’s effects on the brain and lungs to prevent death in the aftermath of an overdose. According to the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, naloxone is effective on drugs such as morphine, heroin, methadone, codeine and fentanyl, among others.
It has no potential for abuse as it isn’t a habit-forming substance. It will not affect a person if they do not have any opioids in their system. In addition, naloxone comes in two FDA-approved forms — injectable and nasal spray. Schools are set to stock the nasal spray form.
The law that was signed into effect by Gov. Mills last summer does not mandate students take part. However, the schools must offer the training.
“I think a really important caveat to this piece of legislation is that it is not a required education for young people, but more so for young people and their parents who want them to have access to this education,” Courtney Gary-Allen, organizing director at Maine Recovery Advocacy Project, said Tuesday. Gary-Allen, who is also an At-Large City Councilor in Augusta, has been involved with the work that went into introducing the bill.
According to Gary-Allen, the bill came into being through the efforts of youth who had been impacted by substance use.
“They came together and said that they had all, individually or collectively, had experiences where they wished they had had education around naloxone,” Gary-Allen recalled. Sen. Matthew Pouliot, R-Kennebec, sponsored the bill after hearing the stories behind the push for the legislation.
Gary-Allen thinks the bill’s unanimous passing “really speaks to the desire for all Mainers to have access to naloxone and have education around how to protect our loved ones, whether or not you’re a Democrat, Republican, young or old.”
“It really clearly reminds us that substance use disorder is not a political issue. It’s an issue that impacts all Mainers,” Gary-Allen added.
“In 2023, there were 739 overdose deaths in the state of Maine. Equipping all young people with the knowledge about how to administer naloxone provides an opportunity for both awareness of overdose in the state, and conversations about why doing drugs isn’t great and what the consequences of that are,” Pouliot said Tuesday.
“I do not think (naloxone training or availability) is going to normalize drug use. Certainly, naloxone is no (cure-all) to the overdoses that are happening. But one thing is for sure, if more people are not familiar with how to administer this potentially life-saving antidote, more deaths will occur,” Pouliot said. “We have no evidence to show that more education will result in more use or more deaths. There’s no evidence to support that nationally, and I don’t believe that that will be the case in Maine.”
“We encourage parents to take a good look at it the same way they would look at an EpiPen or an external defibrillator,” Gordon Smith, director of opioid response at the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, said Tuesday. “This is about saving lives.”
“While we would hope that as many students as possible would be trained to administer naloxone, we also recognize the right of parents to not authorize their children’s participation,” Smith said. “That’s a choice that parents have, and that’s part of what we worked out with the Legislature.”
“We just hope that parents would recognize that every citizen, every family, every student, everybody’s in a position to help here. We don’t want any overdose deaths,” Smith said.
“When I started in February of 2019, I only knew of one school, one alternative school that had naloxone on site,” Smith recalled. “Now, we have trainings and naloxone in well over 100 high schools.
“Unfortunately, we’ve got kids 9, 10, 11, 12 years old using drugs,” Smith said. “It’s shocking, but our job is to make sure they don’t die, and to help them get into treatment. That’s what we do every single day.”
In other parts of the state, districts are similarly figuring out plans for naloxone training. Biddeford Assistant Superintendent Christopher Indorf said the middle and high schools are still working on scheduling the training sessions for students.
“The Legislature has passed myriad laws — including this one — with required trainings, or requirements to offer training, so we use the lion’s share of our fall staff professional development time on these state-mandated trainings,” he said.
At the middle school, the training will be offered during Tiger Time, a flexible learning and schoolwide activity time each morning.
Brunswick school officials are not at the point of making plans for training students because the district is still working on training all administrators and office staff, said Assistant Superintendent Shawn Lambert. Nurses in the district have stocked naloxone in all school buildings for the past two years.
“We’re still trying to focus on getting our staff trained before we get our students trained,” Lambert said. “We’re not against training students, but that’s not our first priority.”
In addition to naloxone, the schools are also working to finalize training sessions for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and automated external defibrillator to comply with LD 1315, the same law that has mandated naloxone training.
This story will be updated as training dates become finalized.
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Publish date : 2024-09-17 13:46:00
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