Regional News
Email
Print
New tool, new hope
Wilkes project tackles overdoses caused by prescription drugs
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: October 30, 2009
WILKESBORO - Project Lazarus is preparing to distribute anti-overdose kits to people who are at risk of prescription-drug overdoses.
The pilot project is part of a cooperative effort to fight what authorities say is the Wilkes County's biggest drug problem.
The project received a major boost through $376,000 in grant money that became available last week, said Fred Brason II, the chairman of Project Lazarus, a nonprofit organization that was formed in July.
A portion of the grant money will be used to distribute more than 2,000 anti-overdose kits. The kits include the drug nal-oxone (known as Narcan), which stops the effects of opiates in the brain.
It is a tool that paramedics have long used.
A pilot program in San Francisco in 2001 provided similar kits to people in the community to counteract heroin overdoses, and the program has spread to major urban areas across the country.
Project Lazarus will be the first program in the United States to use the kits for prescription-drug overdoses, Brason said.
In 2008, 28 people died of accidental prescription-drug overdoses in Wilkes County, one of the nation's highest per-capita rates, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control. Authorities suspect that 24 people have died of accidental prescription-drug overdoses so far this year, although they are awaiting final laboratory results on a handful of deaths.
Most often, the overdoses involve such opiate-derived painkillers as oxycodone -- which includes such forms as OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan -- and hydrocodone, sold under such trademarks as Vicodin.
The anti-overdose kits will include syringes with nasal adaptors. Someone who sees a person overdosing would spray the naloxone in each nostril of the victim. The goal is to save lives by preventing respiratory failure and buying time for medical professionals to arrive.
Brason said that the kits will be ordered and assembled, and should be ready for distribution by early 2010.
Project Lazarus will also use some of the grant money to hire a new employee to visit the county's high-school students, middle-schoolers and fifth-graders to talk to students about the dangers of prescription-drug abuse.
The money will also be used for other awareness and educational efforts, such as the 11,000 red ribbons distributed this week to Wilkes County schoolchildren as part of the national Red Ribbon program against drug abuse.
The grant money came from various sources, but the biggest part, about $332,000, came from Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin.
About 200 students at Wilkes Community College attended an educational program yesterday about the prescription-drug abuse problem in the county. They watched a video about Project Lazarus, which included stories of local people whose loved ones have died here of accidental prescription drug overdoses.
Vicki Pruitt appeared in the video telling the story of how her husband, Randy, died Oct. 23, 2005, of an overdose of the Percocet that he had been taking after breaking his sternum.
As the video played, she sat in the front row of the auditorium, wearing an image of her late husband on a necklace. Afterward, as students headed to class, Pruitt said that it was hard to sit there and watch. She said she hopes that talking about it will help prevent such a thing from happening to someone else.
"If me telling what happened to him and what I've been through helps one of them, then it's worth it," she said.
mmitchell@wsjournal.com
667-5691
For more information and to view the video, go to www.projectlazarus.org.
Email
Print
