Cumberland police now carry naloxone
Cumberland Township Police Chief James Vogel stands with intern Ashley Stewart, of Uniontown, holding items that make up the department’s new naloxone kits, which help to reverse opiate overdoses.
The Cumberland Township Police Department has recently adopted a new naloxone program with kits that help reverse opiate overdoses.
CUMBERLAND – Cumberland Township police have saved three people from drug overdoses in the last month, since starting a new program with naloxone, a medication that reverses an opiate overdose.
The department now has four nasal spray naloxone kits, with two doses each, to carry in their patrol cars in case they are dispatched to the scene of an overdose and arrive before emergency medical workers.
“It’s good for the community to have a full-time police department that’s capable of giving attention to the problems in the community,” Chief James Vogel said. “It’s always being able to handle people when we find them at their worst.”
The program was one of the first things Vogel, who was sworn in as chief in January, wanted to accomplish for the department. He served for 23 years with Pittsburgh police before retiring and moving to Cumberland and becoming the new police chief.
“In a crisis, a medical emergency, to where that person goes from a drug user to a victim, it is our job as a police department to render appropriate aid as soon as possible,” he said. “And in this age, the appropriate aid is administered in naloxone.”
The entire department was trained in administering naloxone March 15 and a policy was adopted by the department to outline the responsibilities involved with administering naloxone.
Vogel said his department has already seen three saves. Two were a husband and wife who overdosed on suspected heroin just two weeks after the department rolled out the new program. The other was a woman who, in early April, swallowed a fentanyl patch, and the police used naloxone to save her.
Those saved lives would not have been possible without the department’s partnership with Nemacolin Volunteer Fire Department, Vogel said. He said, because naloxone is a controlled substance, it has to be supplied to the police through a medical agency.
He said since the Nemacolin fire department is “a fire rescue service with a certified ambulance crew,” it was able to supply the police with naloxone through its medical command, UPMC. Anytime the police department uses one or more doses of naloxone it will file a report with the fire department, which will then issue new vials of the medication for the police department.
Drew Cubic, an emergency medical technician with Nemacolin’s fire department, said the fire department has been supplied with naloxone since the fall. He called naloxone a matter of “life or death.”
“This is not only for addicts but also for the old people who take too much of their medication or the mother who mis-doses her baby,” he said.
Before they were supplied with naloxone, when the fire department would respond to an overdose call, EMTs would “artificially ventilate” the victim and give them oxygen until an advanced life support team would arrive with naloxone.
He said that’s not efficient when the human brain can only go 4 to 7 minutes without oxygen before becoming “brain dead.” He said with police now carrying naloxone, it will cut down on the time that the patient is not breathing.
“The big thing is how closely we’re working with the police department,” Cubic said. “We’ve taken them under our wing, providing them with the class and the equipment, because a lot of times they’re the first on the scene. We’ll take any help we can get and this is saving lives.”
Vogel said before Nemacolin stepped in to partner with his department, he was having a difficult time finding interest in the program from other entities across the county.
“I don’t know why, but there’s no interest at the county level to put Narcan into service,” he said. “It is strange to me that there feels to be a lot of pushback to just put Narcan into the cars.”
He said since ambulances and fire trucks don’t patrol, “it makes sense” police patrol cars should be equipped with the life-saving medication and police are trained to use it.
“Narcan gives us the next edge in focusing our resources to fit the needs of the community,” he said.