Long Beach residents who use drugs can now apply to receive medication that reverses opioid overdoses and other resources under a new city program designed to help reduce the potentially deadly consequences from substance use.
The new “substance use harm reduction program,” which the Long Beach health department announced this week, will provide residents with naloxone, also known as Narcan, which can reverse opioid overdoses. Residents, as well as community organizations, can also request test strips that will tell users whether their drugs are laced with the animal tranquilizer xylazine or fentanyl — the highly potent synthetic opioid at the heart of the latest addiction and overdose crisis.
“This vital program will expand community access to lifesaving medication and drug testing materials,” Mayor Rex Richardson said in a recent statement. “We continue to take proactive steps to help those experiencing substance use issues and foster a safer, healthier community.”
Fentanyl has flooded streets both nationally and locally in recent years. It’s easy to buy and can be laced into almost any street drug. And it can be lethal in quantities as small as a few grains of sand — since it’s 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.
That has led to a significant public health crisis. Fentanyl outpaced methamphetamine as the leading cause of death in Los Angeles county last year. It has driven a spike in deaths among those who are homeless. And it has fueled overdose hotspots in Skid Row, LA’s MacArthur Park and even Long Beach’s Washington neighborhood.
Fentanyl killed 1,910 LA County residents in 2022, according to public health data. That’s a 13% increase from the previous year — and a staggering 1,652% increase from the 109 deaths first recorded in 2016.
In Long Beach, there were 294 opioid-related deaths reported from 2018 to 2022, according to city spokesperson Jennifer Rice Epstein. Of those, nearly 80% were caused by fentanyl.
Xylazine, meanwhile, is a transquilizer approved for use in animals. But it’s increasingly found its way into America’s illegal drug supply, according to Long Beach’s Tuesday, Feb. 20, press release announcing the new harm-reduction program.
While Narcan won’t reverse the effects of Xylazine, the city said, the test strips will help detect the tranquilizer.
“Xylazine can be life-threatening,” the city’s press release said, “and is especially dangerous when combined with opioids like fentanyl.”
Long Beach, which will buy Narcan through the California Department of Health Care Services’ Naloxone Distribution Project, will pay for the program with money the city received last year as part of opioid lawsuit settlements in 2022, the press release said.
State Attorney General Rob Bonta and other attorneys general nationwide have gone after opioid manufacturers, distributors, retail pharmacies and other companies involved in the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, arguing they helped cause the ongoing addiction crisis.
“The opioid crisis stems from an increase in prescription opioids and illegal practices by opioid manufacturers and sellers,” says the “Opioid Litigation” page on the attorney general’s website, “who misled health care providers and patients about the addictive nature of opioids and flooded the market with an over-supply of opioids, helping create the crisis the country faces today.”
In 2022, there were national settlements with Walmart, Walgreens and CVS for a combined $13.8 billion, and with opioid manufacturers Teva and Allergan for $6.6 billion, among others.
Perhaps the most significant was a settlement with Johnson & Johnson, which manufactured and marketed opioids; and the nation’s three major distributors, Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen. That settlement was finalized in spring 2022 for $26 billion, according to the attorney general’s office — making it the second largest multistate settlement in U.S. history.
Those settlements were set to provide Los Angeles County with $59.5 million, according to data from Brown Greer, a court-appointed funds administrator, and published by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Long Beach was set to get about $1.1 million, according to that data.
The health department, according to the city press release, is using that money to help fight the addiction and overdose crisis local, through educational initiatives, harm-reduction programs, substance-use treatment and efforts to address health inequities.
Long Beach folks who wish to receive Narcan must fill out a request form, available on the city’s health department webpage. To get fentanyl or xylazine test strips, community members and organizations must fill out a different city form; organizations that want Narcan must request it through the state’s Naloxone Distribution Project.
“This program is important in reducing the negative consequences of drug use,” City Health Officer Dr. Anissa Davis said in a statement, “including communicable diseases and overdose deaths, while providing education resources, and support.”