On a recent Thursday at Nick’s Super Store on Monroe Avenue, Deborah Leach was doing some restocking — but she wasn't dealing with typical convenience store snacks like beef jerky or candy bars.
She was refilling a case inside the store with something that can save lives.
Leach, the addiction services outreach supervisor for Monroe County’s Improving Addiction Coordination Team — or IMPACT — visits the store about once a week to check on its NaloxBox.
The white case usually contains 12 boxes of naloxone, a drug that is also known as Narcan. It can be used to reverse an opioid overdose.
On this day, the case had only six.
Nick’s is one of almost 100 locations that harbor one of these boxes. Eventually, county officials say, there will be over 500 boxes in the community.
County Executive Adam Bello introduced the harm reduction strategy in July 2022 in response to the growing number of opioid-related deaths. In 2020, the county reported 238 deaths attributed to opioid overdoses. That was a 31% increase from the previous year. Reports show that about 98% of those deaths were directly linked to fentanyl.
In her role, Leach is in charge of implementing and monitoring these boxes. She said the neighborhood surrounding Nick's has seen an uptick in overdoses. She said folks in this neighborhood are familiar with the box — and what's in it.
“They know when the store is open, I can come right over here, I can grab this Narcan, and I can help save a life if needed,” Leach said.
The county opioid overdose dashboard shows that a quarter of the people administering Narcan are friends and family — a higher percentage than law enforcement.
When deciding where to start installing the boxes, officials looked at where most of the overdoses were occurring and targeted those areas.
“We just set out on his path to kind of use the data that we've been given and try to really flood the streets with this wonderful resource,” said Tisha Smith, director of addiction services for Monroe County.
The county recognizes that there are multiple pathways to recovery, and this one, Smith said, along with some street outreach, has been successful.
While it's not possible to determine how many overdoses were prevented because of the NaloxBoxes, county health officials did say that people have picked up roughly 2,000 Narcan boxes from the cases. Through street outreach, they said, 9,000 more kits were distributed.
Rebecca Jaroszek, who lives near the Monroe Avenue store, said she wishes the boxes were installed sooner.
“If it would have been accessible, maybe my son might not have died of an overdose,” Jaroszek said.
Now the county is out to ensure that this medicine is always accessible.
“It's definitely an effective strategy because people are living,” Smith said. "And so as long as we can help them live, we have the opportunity to motivate and encourage them to get the help that they need so that they don't have another overdose or continue to use moving forward.”
Leach agreed, saying their goal is simple: "The most important thing for us is to keep the folks in this community alive until they're ready to go to treatment."
This report is part of a statewide, multi-platform public media initiative addressing the overdose epidemic.
