A nonprofit in LA is sending out mobile teams with oxygen cylinders to Skid Row to prevent overdoses amid the opioid crisis.
Workers from Homeless Health Care Los Angeles also carry naloxone – a medicine commonly known as Narcan that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
For overdoses involving more than one drug, including non-opioids that do not respond to naloxone, oxygen can be used to help stabilize people faster, address a range of drug threats and stop the brain from being damaged more severely.
Mouth-to-mouth breathing is the most straightforward way of doing this, but the teams from the nonprofit use masks hooked up to oxygen cylinders, The L.A. Times reports.
Kailin See, senior director of programs at OnPoint NYC, said an opioid overdose is fundamentally ‘a slow cessation of breath,’ so ‘it makes sense that really your No. 1 tool should be oxygen’.
Deadly overdoses more than doubled in the Skid Row area over two years, with more than 110 deaths in 2021, according to the L.A. County Department of Health Service (File Photo)
L.A. County officials said were not aware of any other community group in Southern California using oxygen to tackle the issue in this manner.
The L.A. County Public Health Department argued that to tackle the issue, changes needed include: increasing the distribution of naloxone, improving access to medications such as methadone and buprenorphine for staving off addiction; expanding mobile clinics for homeless people; and pushing forward with supervised sites where people can take drugs so that trained staff can intervene and prevent overdoses.
Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a state bill to set up this type of supervised sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, but he said he remained open to the discussion if local officials came back to the California Legislature with ‘comprehensive plans’.
An explosive rise in drug overdoses ramped up deaths among homeless people in Los Angeles County in recent years, along with the increasing toll of traffic collisions and homicides, according to a public health department report released in May.
Deadly overdoses more than doubled in the Skid Row area over two years, with more than 110 deaths in 2021, according to the L.A. County Department of Health Service.
For people in the 90013 ZIP Code, which Skid Row is a part of, overdose deaths were at more than 77 times the countywide rate when adjusted for age.
For people in the 90013 ZIP Code, which Skid Row is a part of, overdose deaths were at more than 77 times the countywide rate when adjusted for age (File photo)
Set over four square miles, Skid Row has 4,400 homeless people, 2,695 of them unsheltered, according to the 2022 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, making up the densest concentration of people experiencing homelessness in the County.
The death rate rose 55 per cent among people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County between 2019 and 2021, a much higher increase than in the years before the Coronavirus pandemic, public health officials found.
More than 2,200 county-wide deaths among unhoused people in 2021, marking the first time the agency has reported an annual toll of above 2,000, said Will Nicholas, director of the Center for Health Impact Evaluation at the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
He said that ‘it’s becoming more deadly or dangerous to be homeless’.
Drug overdoses were the leading cause of death, accounting for more than a third of deaths among homeless people in L.A. County in 2020 and 2021 combined, according to the report.
Fatal overdoses often involved more than one drug, the dramatic rise of fentanyl appears to be linked to the soaring rate of overdose deaths, public health officials said.
The percentage of overdose deaths involving fentanyl among homeless people almost tripled from 20 per cent in 2019 to 58 per cent in 2021.
Fentanyl deaths almost always involved combinations of drugs.In 2021, 71 per cent of all fentanyl deaths among people experiencing homelessness also involved methamphetamine.
Methamphetamine was involved in nearly 77 per cent of the overdose deaths.
