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By Rowena Boulton
At an International Overdose Awareness Day event in Oakland last year, community members gathered to share stories of loved ones lost to overdoses. Among the participants was the HIV Education and Prevention Project of Alameda County (HEPPAC), which set up booths to connect with community members and help prevent future overdoses through programs that distribute aid and educate people about overdoses.
Founded in 1992, HEPPAC works to address the impacts of harm related to drugs in communities in the Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. One of its services, Opioid Prevention and Education Naloxone Distribution (OPEND), is dedicated to addressing these impacts through educational programs, community outreach, and the distribution of life-saving kits that reverse an overdose.
The program distributes naloxone, better known by its brand name Narcan, which is a medicine that counters an opioid overdose by blocking its effects on the brain. The OPEND team has implemented tools like harm-reduction vending machines, which distribute naloxone rescue kits to local communities and save lives in the case of an overdose.
Anisha Chauhan-Sharma is the coordinator of HEPPAC and has worked with the program for three years. She currently works with the OPEND program to distribute naloxone and coordinate educational training that teaches people how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses.
According to her, the OPEND program’s goal is more than just handing out naloxone.
“The goal isn’t to give someone naloxone just because but to have them actually understand what an opioid overdose looks like,” she stated.
Educational programs like the ones OPEND lead open an often stigmatized dialogue about opioid use and equip people with the tools to to recognize an opioid overdose when it occurs. This awareness of how to combat an overdose is critical, said Chauhan-Sharma, because many people assume the opioid crisis does not affect them.
“People don’t think it’s going to happen to them. People don’t think it’s going to happen to someone they love,” she emphasized. “There’s this stigma on what people who do drugs look like, and that’s very unfortunate, but anyone can do drugs.”
Some have argued that openness with opioid education and naloxone distribution may enable further drug use. However, Chauhan-Sharma believes that this only perpetuates further stigma around people who use drugs.
“There’s so much talk on the idea that we’re enabling and all of that,” she stated, “but we want to make sure that we have this dialogue of keeping people human and maintaining humanity as much as possible.”
Outreach in local communities, like HEPPAC’s presence at the event for International Overdose Awareness Day last year, reinforces this mission. Chauhan-Sharma attended the event last year and was impacted by the amount of people that overdoses have affected.
“I heard stories about people’s loved ones passing away through an opioid overdose, or not getting Narcan in time, or EMS not being there in time,” she stated. “It really shaped the focus on how much we need to make sure that people are educated, or people who are even strangers understand the importance of what an opioid overdose looks like.”
This article was written as part of a program to educate youth and others about Alameda County’s opioid crisis, prevention and treatment options. The program is funded by the Alameda County Behavioral Health and the grant is administered by Three Valleys Community Foundation.