WAYNE COUNTY, Mich. – Wayne County leaders are coming together to make life-saving medication more accessible.
Every city and township in Wayne County will have its own free Narcan vending machine by summer.
“This will be the single biggest investment in Narcan access by a municipality in US history,” says Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Humans and Veterans Services.
A total of 100 vending machines will be deployed starting this June.
Nearly half of them will go to individual municipalities in locations that are still being worked out. The rest will be strategically placed in areas that need them the most.
Those determinations will be made based on data collected and analyzed by the Center for Behavioral Health and Justice within the Wayne State University School of Social Work.
School of Social Work.
“When you can use Narcan, it can fully and 100% reverse what could have been a deadly OD,” El-Sayed said. “That person can literally walk away from the scene of what would have been their death.”
Since 2013, overdose deaths in the county are up 200%.
The county is hoping by providing access to the emergency intervention medicine, more lives can be saved.
“The challenge right now is 80% of drug-related deaths and ODs happen in the home, 40% of the time there’s someone there, but too often they don’t have the medication,” El-Sayed said.