Allegheny County combats opioid abuse through 'harm reduction' campaign

Stacie Brown remembers the date her life came crashing down — and when she started to take it back.

“June 1, 2012, is the day I overdosed and stopped using,” said Brown, 51, of Pittsburgh’s Spring Hill, an overdose outreach coordinator for Allegheny County Health Department. “I remember I was high. I remember the people I was with dragged me into the hallway of the apartment building and called 911 — I didn’t want to die.”

“There’s no warning signs for an overdose, like there is for a heart attack,” she added. “I was just out with friends, getting high. And it happened.”

On Tuesday, Brown staffed a table at a pop-up drug awareness event in McKeesport — a park fair of sorts near a street dotted with abandoned storefronts. She handed out Narcan nasal spray, which reverses the effect of an opioid overdose, and recently legalized fentanyl test strips that test for the presence of the life-threatening opioid.

Two packs of the 4 mg Narcan nasal spray, which were given to passersby for free, sat near free condoms and bright buttons with messages such as “I love someone who uses drugs” and “Stop the stigma.” At a nearby table, an organization was offering complimentary HIV tests.

The Narcan and test strips are being distributed by Allegheny County, in part, thanks to a $5.3 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Otis Pitts, the county health department’s deputy director of housing, food and policy.

About $400,000 of that grant money has funded a public awareness campaign, which promotes the available Narcan and test strips and other resources on radio and TV, online and through billboards placed throughout Allegheny County, Pitts said.

“We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from this campaign … and they are targeted to the highest of high-risk populations,” he said.

Pitts estimated that Allegheny County has about 3,000 test strips remaining to distribute. Last year, county staffers handed out about 19,000 Narcan kits.

Nearly 6,700 people died from accidental opioid overdoses in Allegheny County between 2008 and 2022, according to the group OverdoseFreePA. Statewide, coroners and medical examiners reported nearly 4,500 drug-related overdose deaths in 2018 alone — a 36% increase since 2015.

Pitts said the county health department promotes “harm reduction” — a dramatic shift in policy from the “Just Say No” approach of the 1980s and early 1990s.

“We’re advocating that people take steps to mitigate the worst features of drug use, such as overdose,” Pitts said. “Another harm-reduction technique is to use with someone else.”

“This transcends race, this transcends rural/urban and economic divides,” he added. “All it takes is one unknown, one lethal exposure to fentanyl.”

Melissa Breckenridge is the director of Pathway to Care and Recovery, a Downtown-based organization that’s open around the clock to provide drug users with access to services.

“We’re open 24/7 — there’s no other program in the area like this,” Breckenridge said. “When you don’t know who to call, where to go, call us.”

Pathway to Care and Recovery has 14 beds to house people suffering from Substance Use Disorder if they have to wait more than a few hours for treatment.

“We just do whatever we can to become engaged,” she said.

At Tuesday’s event in McKeesport, David Anthony Powdrill Sr. picked up Narcan and several handfuls of fentanyl test strips, as well as some drug-related literature, for a loved one.

“I know some people using and I wish that they would stop,” said Powdrill, 58, of Duquesne. “I don’t think I’m better than nobody else. I just think differently.”

Carol Speaks also thinks differently about drug use. A former drug user herself, Speaks leaves bottles of Narcan in the trees and bushes in Homewood, near places where she knows people are scoring drugs.

“Nobody has to die from an overdose if there’s Narcan,” said Speaks, 67, of Homewood. “Those guys are out doing their thing and I’m out there doing mine.”

Speaks, who was featured on one of the Allegheny County public awareness billboards, lost a cousin — a veteran who was on pain medication — to a fentanyl overdose.

“He went and got a bag of fentanyl and they said he was dead before he hit the floor,” Speaks said. “That’s when I really started to go hard in (distributing Narcan).”

Brown, the county overdose outreach coordinator, loves coming to pop-up events like the one Tuesday in McKeesport.

“You’ll hear tons of conversations,” Brown said. “But nobody woke up and said, ‘I think I’m going to become addicted to heroin by the end of the week.’”