LA resorts to sending mobile teams with oxygen cylinders to Skid Row to prevent overdoses during opioid crisis

An LA nonprofit is sending mobile teams with oxygen cylinders to Skid Row to prevent overdoses during the opioid crisis.

Homeless Health Care Los Angeles workers also carry naloxone, a drug commonly known as Narcan that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.

For overdoses involving more than one drug, including non-opioids that don’t respond to naloxone, oxygen can be used to stabilize people faster, address a range of drug threats, and prevent more serious brain damage.

Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is the simplest way to do this, but the nonprofit’s teams use masks connected to oxygen cylinders, The LA Times reports.

Kailin See, senior director of programs at OnPoint NYC, said opioid overdose is essentially “a slow cessation of breathing,” so “it makes sense that oxygen should be your No. 1 resource.”

LA County officials said they were not aware of any other community group in Southern California using oxygen to address the issue in this matter.

The LA County Department of Public Health argued that to address the problem, changes needed include: increasing the distribution of naloxone; improving access to drugs such as methadone and buprenorphine to prevent addiction; expansion of mobile clinics for the homeless; and making progress with supervised sites where people can use drugs so that trained personnel can intervene and prevent overdoses.

Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a state law to set up these kinds of supervised sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, but said he would remain open to the discussion if local officials returned. to the California Legislature with “elaborate plans.” .

An explosion in drug overdoses in recent years has led to more homeless deaths in Los Angeles County, along with the increasing toll of traffic accidents and homicides, according to a public health department report released in May.

Fatal overdoses have more than doubled in the Skid Row area in two years, with more than 110 deaths by 2021, according to the LA County Department of Health Service.

For people in the 90013 zip code, which includes Skid Row, the overdose death rate was more than 77 times the national rate, adjusted for age.

For people in the 90013 zip code, which Skid Row is part of, overdose deaths were more than 77 times the nationwide rate, adjusted for age (file photo)

Spanning four square miles, according to the 2022 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, there are 4,400 homeless people in Skid Row, 2,695 of whom are unprotected.

It is the densest concentration of people experiencing homelessness in the province.

The death rate rose 55 percent between 2019 and 2021 among people experiencing homelessness in LA County, a much higher increase than in the years before the coronavirus pandemic, public health officials found.

There were more than 2,200 homeless deaths countywide in 2021, marking the first time the agency has reported an annual toll of more than 2,000, said Will Nicholas, director of the Center for Health Impact Evaluation at the LA County Department of Health. PublicHealth.

He said that “being homeless is becoming more deadly or dangerous.”

Drug overdoses were the leading cause of death, according to the report, accounting for more than one-third of homeless deaths in LA County in 2020 and 2021 combined. Fatal overdoses often involved more than one drug.

The dramatic rise of fentanyl appears to be linked to the rising number of overdose deaths, public health officials said.

The rate of fentanyl overdose deaths among the homeless has nearly tripled from 20 percent in 2019 to 58 percent in 2021.

Fentanyl deaths almost always involved drug combinations.

By 2021, 71 percent of all fentanyl deaths among people who were homeless also involved methamphetamine.

Methamphetamine was involved in nearly 77 percent of overdose deaths.