A medication used to reverse opioid overdoses is now available for free to any Centre County community member or organization through a local addiction treatment center.
AppleGate Recovery State College, 915 Benner Pike, offers Narcan, a brand name for the drug naloxone, and the higher dosage Kloxxado free of charge to anyone, thanks to a new program launched by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) and Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.
The Pennsylvania Overdose Prevention Program (POPP) was developed to “enhance community-based distribution and harm reduction efforts,” according to the Centre County Heroin and Opioid Prevention and Education (HOPE) Initiative.
AppleGate Recovery is a “Recognized Entity” by POPP, and provides for free to the public naloxone products and drug testing strips designed to detect xylazine and fentanyl.
“These drugs are really important for overdose prevention,” Katelyn Bucheit, treatment center director at AppleGate Recover, told the Centre County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday. “It’s something that can be hard to talk about, but it’s super important that we have this available for the community.”
Bucheit emphasized that individuals do not need to be affiliated with any organization or personally know someone who has a substance use disorder to obtain naloxone products, which are available in intranasal form and provide a rapid response in reversing opioid overdoses.
She added that if someone is having a medical emergency that turns out not to be an overdose, administering naloxone will not harm them.
“I think anyone should have it,” Bucheit said. “Even if you’re saying to me, ‘Well I don’t know anyone who uses drugs,’ you never know whenever someone is prescribed an opiate, maybe even from a surgery or something, and accidentally takes too much and they are in an event where they need this. It’s really important for it to be out there on the street, and it can’t hurt anyone.”
Board of Commissioners Vice Chair Amber Concepcion suggested that businesses open to the public should consider adding naloxone to their first aid kits, an assessment with which Bucheit agreed.
“This is the sort of thing that if you have a restaurant or a store or anywhere that you have the public coming in and out it might be a good idea to have this…,” Concepcion said.
Commissioner Steve Dershem, who has been strongly involved with the HOPE Initiative since its formation in 2016, noted that as naloxone has become more widely available, it has become a life-saving tool
“It used to be you needed a prescription, you had to go through a process, but the value of this has been proven over and over,” Dershem said. “When you have in excess of 70,000 folks a year that are dying of drug overdoses in our country, it is an indication that this is certainly necessary. It’s been a lifesaver here in this county, and I think it maybe reflects why we have some of the lowest statistics in the state for overdose deaths.
“To Katelyn’s credit and a lot of other folks in the community, we’ve made sure that these things are available… and make use of them because they will save lives and there will be lives changed because of it.”
Dershem added that he expects naloxone will become more widely available in another way, through NaloxBoxes installed in accessible places, much like automated external defibrillators.
County Criminal Justice Planning Director Karri Hull said a NaloxBoxes are already in place next to the AED in the lobby of her department’s office at the Willowbank Building and in several other county government buildings.
“We’re actually going to roll out more of those,” Hull said. “The HOPE initiative wants to partner with different businesses in the community to look at putting NaloxBoxes in their restaurants and their businesses, things like that, to have it available so we can really think of this as a lifesaving tool like we do an AED machine.”
All first responders in the county have also carried naloxone for years thanks to the PCCD. The new POPP initiative launched in August 2023 is meant to now make it readily available to all residents at no cost.
For information on obtaining naloxone and drug testing strips from AppleGate Recovery, call 814-869-7187 or visit applegaterecovery.com/locations/pennsylvania/state-college/.
“We’re just trying to get the word out there and make sure that this is available to the community and in the most hands possible, because this is a lifesaving drug and seconds count in an emergency,” Bucheit said. “The quicker that it can be administered, the sooner we can save that person’s life and hopefully have them onto the life of recovery.”
