News Photo by Julie Riddle A police trooper holds a double dose of Narcan, a nasal spray version of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone carried by law enforcement officers.

ALPENA — Laurie Ames had to stop her son from dying.

The mother of a heroin-addicted young man was alone with her son when he overdosed.

After pulling him back to life with the breath of her own lungs, Ames sat on the floor the rest of the night with him leaning up against her back, prodding him with an elbow every time his lungs stopped moving.

“The main thing is to get them breathing,” she said later. “If you can get them breathing and keep them breathing, they’ll survive.”

Ames, certified prevention specialist with Catholic Human Services’ Up North Prevention program, knows firsthand the importance of having life-saving treatment immediately on hand in the event of a drug overdose.

Several years ago, as northern Michigan joined the nation in combating a skyrocketing opioid abuse problem, Ames was instrumental in bringing a life-saving medication to the jails, schools, and police cars of the region as part of the Up North Prevention Naloxone Project.

Naloxone, a medication used to counter the effects of opioid overdose, has been used locally by police — often the first to respond to the scene of an overdose — since January 2015, saving the lives of over 100 people.

An opioid overdose causes its victim to stop breathing. Naloxone works by knocking opioids off their receptors in the brain and blocking them long enough for the affected individual to start breathing again. It only has an effect if a person has opioids in their system and won’t react to anything else, making it safe to use when an opioid overdose is suspected but not confirmed.

The Naloxone Project delivered the lifesaving drug to law enforcement agencies in 21 counties north of M-55 to the Mackinac Bridge. Of the 110 reported overdoses reversed by police administration of naloxone since the project began, four have been in Alpena County, and one each in Montmorency and Presque Isle counties. Twenty-two of the 110 have been administered this year, after 29 in all of 2018. The most recent overdose reversal was on Tuesday by Oscoda Township Police.

The total number reflects only those saves that have been reported to Up North Prevention by police, and doesn’t include administrations that take place at the hospital or by other users.

A ‘DARN NICE TOWN’

Emergency medical responders have been required to carry naloxone since 2014. In 2018, the medication was administered 26 times in the city by the Alpena Fire Department, according to Chief Bill Forbush, with 11 more occasions so far in 2019. Countywide, naloxone has been administered 25 times this year.

Those numbers may or may not reflect opioid overdose saves, as department records only reflect doses administered, not whether those suspected overdoses turned out to be caused by opioid abuse.

The nationally recognized opioid crisis is, Forbush said, not as much of a crisis in Alpena. As an emergency medical services provider, his perception is that the Alpena area is not particularly hard-hit.

Fire department records show 1% or fewer of medical calls responded to by the city’s emergency response units are for drug overdoses.

“Yes, there are drugs here. Yes, there is drug crime here. But not a lot of it,” Forbush said. Law enforcement officers, he said, are doing a good job of keeping drug abuse in check, and Alpena is “still a pretty darn nice town.”

On July 17, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics released a report indicating that, based on provisional counts, overdose deaths in the U.S. declined 5.1% between 2017 and 2018, the first such decline in decades. A 3.7% drop in Michigan reflects concerted state and local efforts to stop drug-related deaths.

A THREE-PRONGED APPROACH

A three-pronged approach to combating the opioid crisis, implemented at national, state, and local levels across the country, calls for providing avenues for proper disposal of prescribed medications, offering community education about what was previously a misunderstood category of drugs, and getting overdose-reversing medications into as many hands as possible.

Up North Prevention addressed the first two prongs, placing red barrel disposal sites at key locations and offering training and promoting the message to lock up dangerous medications.

To attack the third prong and make sure overdose cases can be treated as quickly as possible, Ames secured grants and donations that placed naloxone in every police vehicle in 21 counties in northern Michigan, providing needed training to officers and replenishing the supply of the drug as it was used up or expired.

A company called Kaleo Pharma provides donations of an auto injector-style naloxone called Evzio to nonprofit overdose treatment efforts. Hundreds of kits have been distributed locally to police agencies at no cost, something Ames said could never have been paid for otherwise.The Evzio injector, similar in style to an EpiPen, provides spoken instructions, making it very simple to use.

A grant through the Northern Michigan Regional Entity in 2016 provided local police with a supply of Narcan, a brand name of naloxone administered as a nasal spray. The product also is available at all local high schools, where Up North Prevention helped obtain the kits and train multiple staff members at each school in the drug’s proper use.

Jails, which are almost becoming detox centers, Ames said, face overdose situations regularly, sometimes reaching for an adjoining sheriff’s department supply of naloxone to save an inmate’s life.

Up North Prevention’s Red Project, begun in 2017, made sure jails in every northern Michigan county received a supply of naloxone and the associated training.

‘IT’S STILL A HUMAN LIFE’

While numbers of overdoses are going down, the need to address the problem still exists, officials said.

The goal of Up North Prevention is not to prevent use but to prevent deaths, “so those folks could maybe take a look at things and get help,” Ames said.

Not everyone agrees with that philosophy, according to 1st Lt. John Grimshaw, commander of the Michigan State Police-Alpena Post.

Some people, Grimshaw said, oppose saving someone who has made a conscious choice to use something they know could potentially kill them.

“There’s a segment of society that believes that you get what you get, if you’re going to choose to be living in risky behavior and doing illegal or illicit drugs,” Grimshaw explained.

But, Grimshaw said, police can’t not administer the drug if there is the potential a life could be saved.

“It’s still a human life. It’s still somebody’s son or somebody’s daughter,” Grimshaw said. “The bottom line is, every life is important.”

Ames lost her son last October. He died, not of a drug overdose, but of pneumonia, after battling against the addiction that almost killed him.

“It was a very real situation for me for a long time,” she said.

Memories of that battle fuel her passion to make sure every chance is made available to stop an unnecessary death.

The goal of the Naloxone Project, Ames said, is “just trying to keep them alive. And helping the community so that this might not happen to their children.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.