By Sarah Holtz : sfstandard – excerpt (published 1/4/2023)
I’ve always been a firm believer in harm reduction. The way I see it, legalizing safe consumption sites and giving people access to fentanyl test strips and Narcan (a brand name for the overdose-reversal drug naloxone) will only serve to make our community safer.
On New Year’s Eve, as I prepared to head to a house party where I figured some might use recreational drugs—and thus put themselves at risk of accidentally overdosing on fentanyl—I went out in search of test strips and naloxone. With test strips, I could help people identify if drugs were laced with fentanyl. With Narcan, I might be able to help reverse an inadvertent overdose.
I figured it’d be an easy errand. I was wrong…
I knew that local nonprofit FentCheck has an online map of sites that distribute free test strips…
The irony of striking out at the pharmacy and the hospital, only to find the potentially life-saving resource I was looking for at a neighborhood bar, left me with more questions than answers…
So I called up Alison Heller, co-founder of FentCheck. Driven by a desire to confront the FentCheck crisis, Heller attended EMT school before starting FentCheck. She told me that when she started her organization, fentanyl test strips were considered drug paraphernalia. She and her co-founder Dean Shold worked hard with lawmakers to help declassify them. …(more)
Good to know that there is a simple test and where it is available. More information on the tests may be avoid the need for so much Narcan. Detailed information on what to look for should be distributed more widely.