Graphic by Liam Bray
Narrated by Matt Davies Voiceover
Blue Mountain Heart to Heart (BMH2H) is a community-based health organization that offers case management, clinical programs, and prevention programs for largely marginalized communities. They have four offices in Southeast Washington, including a clinic and harm-reduction program in Kennewick.
BMH2H’s mission:
We improve the health and quality of life for our clients, through the use of evidence-based, high quality, client-centered harm reduction and case management approaches for stigmatized patient populations, including people living with HIV/AIDS and substance use disorder.
Master of Public Health Everett Maroon, the Executive Director of BMH2H, tells us that the organization’s aim is to promote public health by providing advocacy and education, as well as clinical services and harm reduction practices. Maroon is also an expert on fentanyl and overdose. One of the services BMH2H provides is to hand out Naloxone and other overdose reversal agents. “As of December 11, 2024, we are at 1775 overdose reversal attempts with our Naloxone program for the year,” said Maroon.
According to the National Institutes of Health:
Naloxone is a medicine that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose…. Naloxone can quickly restore normal breathing to a person if their breathing has slowed or stopped because of an opioid overdose.
As you can see in the ‘NALOXONE SAVES’ graphic [name where XX], the reported use of overdose reversal agents has gone up dramatically in the past five years. We asked Maroon if the data we were seeing was more-or-less accurate, or if the numbers are under-reported. “It’s almost an impossible question to answer,” he said. There are a few complicating factors.
First of all, BMH2H is able to record reversal agent usage only when people come to their Syringe Service Programs (whose purpose it is to prevent the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C). “These are self-reported numbers from our program participants at the point at which they’re asking for Naloxone,” said Maroon. BMH2H knows how many doses of Naloxone they distribute, and they keep track of these self-reports to see how many are ostensibly being used to reverse overdoses each month. “When about 20% of what we put out there into the world was used to reverse an overdose, that’s a good percentage,” he said.
But there are other issues with data reporting. Part of what various health organizations track is how many overdoses result in death. But it’s a lot trickier to find out those numbers than it would seem on its face. There is a lot of stigma around addiction and overdose, and sometimes family members or other people push for the cause of death of a loved one to be listed as something other than drug overdose. Maroon told us that it gets even more complicated when coroners and medical examiners try to separate accidental overdoses from suicides. He recalled:
A long time ago, I worked on a program, a project for National Institutes of Health, that was looking at how we define suicide. And that project clearly showed that there was a lot of interference in the death certificate preparation. Families would call and say, “This person won't go to heaven if you put ‘suicide’ on this document. Can you just say accidental?’
So, not only are suicides massively under-represented in the data, so are overdose deaths.
But all of that being said, the fact is that the increase in Naloxone and other reversal agents being administered has saved hundreds of lives, just here in the Tri-Cities. But Benton-Franklin Health District (BFHD) has tracked a sharp increase in overdoses, especially last year in 2023. BFHD wants more people to have Naloxone handy in case someone around them has an overdose. The Washington State Department of Health outlines the ‘Good Samaritan Law’ which protects people administering overdose reversal drugs from prosecution.
BFHD leads a program called Carry a Second Chance that encourages people to carry and learn to administer Naloxone. That program makes it easy to order the Narcan (Naloxone) nasal spray. We spoke with some local advocates who have been distributing Naloxone to unhoused people here, and they told us a lot of people prefer the injectable Naloxone; they get that from Remedy Alliance.
HELP SAVE A LIFE.
Carry Naloxone.
https://www.carryasecondchance.com/resources
https://remedyallianceftp.org/pages/apply
Everett Maroon, MPH is the Executive Director of Blue Mountain Heart to Heart. He supervises their program areas and is also responsible for fundraising, development, and evaluation of the agency. He has overseen a broad expansion of HIV case management services in Asotin and Garfield counties; harm reduction programs in the Tri-Cities and Clarkston; and an innovative, outpatient opioid recovery program across six counties in Southeast Washington.
Everett co-authored the Grand Columbia Opioid Response Consortium, and contributed to the Washington State Opioid Strategy. He serves as a technical assistance provider on Washington Health Care Authority’s Law Enforcement-Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program expansion in Washington State, and a state commissioner on the LGBTQ Commission. He also sits on both the finance committee and the behavioral health council for the Walla Walla County Department of Community Health. He has worked on quality improvement projects for various federal and state agencies for nearly three decades.
Find more information about Blue Mountain Heart to Heart at bluemountainheart2heart.wordpress.com.
