Windermere police to carry opioid-blocking medication Narcan

Windermere Police Department’s officers are better equipped to handle calls involving potential opioid overdoses, thanks to training and accessibility to Narcan.

Narcan, also known as nalaxone hydrochloride, is designed to counteract the life-threatening effects of opioid overdose. It essentially blocks the effects of opiates in a person’s system, either through partial or complete opioid competitive binding of mu-receptors to treat opioid overdose symptoms. In short terms, opiates are knocked out of the brain’s opiate receptors.

“We understand that we are often the first to a scene,” Windermere Police Chief David Ogden wrote in a Facebook post in June. “Law enforcement has seen an increase of exposure and danger to first responders. We’ve been preparing our policies, procedures and guidelines for this implementation for several months.”

In the form that WPD uses, Narcan comes as a single-dose nasal spray and can be used in an emergency in which an opioid overdose is known or suspected. Called an opioid antagonist, it essentially reverses the opiate’s effects temporarily. The FDA-approved product cannot be reused and has no effect on people who do not have opioids in their systems. 

“This is something that we may not see very often, but in the chance we do, at least we’ll be prepared to do what we know to assist in saving a life.” - Windermere Police Officer Ryan Miller

“It can be used for heroin and opioid-based prescription drugs like Fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine, vicodin, demerol, basically all of the opioid drugs or medicines,” said Windermere Police Officer Ryan Miller, the department’s Narcan coordinator. “It’s something we went through over quite a few months’ span to come up with proper procedures, policies and use.”

The nasal spray is inserted into the victim’s nasal passage in one shot. The reverse of opiates’ effects should be seen within the first five minutes of administration.

Miller said the first step before deciding whether to administer Narcan to a potential opioid overdose victim is recognizing the symptoms, which include unconsciousness, shallow or irregular breathing, unresponsiveness, “pinpointed” pupils and a blue hue to the lips.

If a victim exhibits these signs and an overdose is suspected, the officers can administer Narcan and work on getting emergency medical treatment.

“You go from there to putting them in the recovery position — laying them on their side so they’re not on their back — and at that time we can initiate CPR or use an AED if we should need to,” Miller said. “With the effects of Narcan it’s not something that will last, so there may be situations where we may have to use another one. Most of our officers will arrive in pairs so they’ll have two on them, which is great.”

Narcan will wear off anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes after administration, depending on how much of an opiate is in the victim’s system, so it is only a temporary reversal, and the victim should still receive immediate medical treatment.

The Windermere Police Department began training and issuing Narcan to its officers in mid-June in response to a national trend in the increase of availability of dangerous synthetic drugs.

“According to the DEA, a large majority of these synthetic opioids are structural derivatives of the synthetic drug Fentanyl,” Ogden said in his post. “Fentanyl mimics the effects of morphine in the body, but with a potency of 50 to 100 times that of morphine, and 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin. Recently, Carfentanil (structurally related to Fentanyl) is reported to be up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine.”

The training only takes a couple of hours because the product is simple to use, and Miller said WPD is all for any tools it can get to help the public.

“This is something that we may not see very often, but in the chance we do, at least we’ll be prepared to do what we know to assist in saving a life,” Miller said.

Each box of Narcan comes with two single-use doses and costs $75. Miller said the department has not had to use Narcan yet.

For more information about Narcan, visit narcan.com.

Contact Danielle Hendrix at [email protected].