In an attempt to reduce fentanyl-related incidents and overdoses, the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) club and the End Overdose organization are working with college student bodies and organizations at the Claremont Colleges to make fentanyl strips and NARCAN accessible to students across the 5Cs.
Fentanyl strips detect the presence of fentanyl in different types of drugs and are proven to be 96-100 percent effective by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. NARCAN is used to treat potential opioid overdoses in emergency situations.
The EMS club started this initiative because of how commonplace fentanyl overdoses are, especially since the drug is often laced in other drugs. This is particularly a problem in California, where in 2021 there were 6,843 opioid-related deaths, 5,722 of which were fentanyl-related according to the California Department of Public Health.
“What we’ve seen on campus is that a lot of people or at least some of the people that we even know have overdosed on drugs and so we wanted to make sure that everyone’s getting the help that they need,” said Rohun Krishnan PO ’24, the co-vice-president of the club.
After they decided to make a conscious effort to reduce fentanyl overdoses, Krishnan and his co-vice-president, Reese Ger SC ’24, reached out to other clubs around campus to collaborate.
They received their biggest support from End Overdose, an organization that works to provide students with the resources to end drug-related overdoses through education, intervention and awareness. End Overdose has distributed 62,190 teststrips and 18,490 NARCAN Kits across the country since its founding. The EMS club received theirs free of charge.
Ember Yanez PO ’26, who is currently implementing a chapter of End Overdose at the Claremont Colleges, said that the program decided to work with the EMS club to reach their ultimate goal of preventing drug related deaths.
“By working with large clubs and programs at different colleges and high schools, End Overdose can make large steps towards this goal,” Yanez said. “Since the EMS club has such a strong presence on campus, collaborating with them allows End Overdose to maximize its outreach.
Currently, Yanez is working with the EMS club to help them become trainers in NARCAN and helping with events and fundraising for this initiative.
“What we’ve seen on campus is that a lot of people or at least some of the people that we even know have overdosed on drugs and so we wanted to make sure that everyone’s getting the help that they need.”
While the use of these products has been approved, both clubs are still working to make the products easily accessible to students throughout the 5Cs. Krishnan hopes that the fentanyl strips will be available in residence halls, although this has not been approved yet.
“We want to be able to put them inside of each residence hall so that people can go and just access them without having any pressure of being labeled,” Krishnan said.
The club also plans to have training sessions so that even more students are equipped to use NARCAN.
“NARCAN costs about $300 a dose, so they have very stringent protocols and training sessions, so we’re gonna get trained as teachers for this program and then we’ll host sessions where we can train anybody and everybody who’s interested and at the end of that session, they’ll get a dose of Narcan,” Ger said.
Yanez says that these training sessions will also educate people about why reducing drug-related deaths is so important. “These trainings will also involve general education about the drug overdose death epidemic in our country and why harm reduction is a necessary part of solving this problem,” Yanez said.