It was only a few weeks ago, according to Longmont Police Officer Rachel Hasting, that a call came in from a frantic 17-year-old boy — his 14-year-old girlfriend was unresponsive.

When officers arrived, the caller was confused about how this could have happened. He and his girlfriend, wanting to experiment, had purchased and consumed what they were told was cocaine. Why had she fallen asleep? Why couldn’t he wake her up?

The answer became clear when officers administered naloxone, a nasal spray medicine that reverses an opioid overdose, and the young girl resumed breathing. What the two teens had thought was cocaine was, officers on the call suspect, actually fentanyl.

(Colorado’s Good Samaritan law provides immunity from “criminal prosecution for an offense when the person reports, in good faith, an emergency drug or alcohol overdose even to a law enforcement officer.”)

A few minutes later, while the police were still present, the 17-year-old began showing signs of an opioid overdose and had to be administered naloxone.

In other words, it was a frighteningly close call. Things could have been deadly if 911 wasn’t called, if officers hadn’t arrived in time, or if they weren’t carrying life-saving naloxone.

It was, according to Hasting, one of the many naloxone saves police officers have been making more and more frequently. (Naloxone is often referred to as Narcan, which is a brand-name product.) In Longmont, where Hasting works, police performed 34 naloxone saves in 2021, the most recently available accurate data.

Not everyone, though, gets saved. In 2022 in Boulder County, there were 66 drug-related deaths, according to District Attorney Michael Dougherty. Fentanyl was present in 28 of those 66 deaths.

Nationally, the trend is even bleaker. Last year, for the fifth straight year, overdose-related deaths hit an all-time high in the U.S. Early reports show roughly 110,236 people died from overdoses in 2022. If the trend follows the previous year, more than 75% of those deaths will be opioid-related.

Two decades ago, in the year 2000, fewer than 20,000 people died from any sort of overdose-related death.

And the terrifyingly close call in Longmont highlights a new threat: the prevalence of fentanyl-laced street drugs.

The opioid crisis that has been raging for the last 20-plus years has always been complex and a true response has been in short supply — as evidenced by year after year of record-breaking overdose deaths. But now, in addition to individuals who are knowingly ingesting opioids, we have a new wave of people who have no idea that the drug they are consuming is laced with a potentially deadly synthetic opioid.

(Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine. Carfentanil is 100 times more potent than Fentanyl. Both are cheap to produce, primarily in China, and are being found more and more frequently laced into illicit street drugs. The consequences are deadly.)

We could have and should have been doing more to address our opioid crisis all along. But now, as the situation continues to spiral out of control and accidental overdoses — or poisonings as many experts have taken to calling them — continue to mount, it is necessary for our community to take action.

The first thing we need to do is stop people from dying. And we can do that by making sure everyone in our community who might need naloxone has barrier-free access to it, and by engaging the public in an educational campaign to teach people to use naloxone and to raise awareness of the potentially deadly consequences of consuming any drug that hasn’t been legally acquired from a pharmacy.

According to Boulder County Medical Society President Dr. Cliff Gronseth, this relatively straightforward initiative — which is wholeheartedly backed by the very doctors in our community responsible for prescribing opioids — has the power to reduce opioid-related overdose deaths to zero in Boulder County.

And that should be our primary goal: zero opioid-related deaths.

Because the truth is, we are not going to stop the drug trade in Boulder. Municipalities and states and governments have been fighting drug trafficking for decades. Billions of dollars have been poured into the battle. But things just keep getting worse. Drugs keep coming. People continue having the desire and need to procure them. And the deaths keep mounting.

Boulder is not going to get opioids off the street. At least not anytime soon.

But we can prevent people from dying.

Recently approved for over-the-counter sales by the FDA, “Naloxone is a medicine that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose. It attaches to opioid receptors and reverses and blocks the effects of other opioids. Naloxone is a safe medicine. It only reverses overdoses in people with opioids in their systems,” according to the National Institute of Health.

Naloxone, though, is expensive. The wholesale price of a two-pack of Narcan can often cost more than $120. But the prohibitive cost of a life-saving medicine should not be the reason anyone in our community dies.

This is why our city and county must find ways to remove the barriers to access for those who believe they might need it (vending machines that distribute free naloxone have begun to appear around the country), why doctors and pharmacists must distribute naloxone with opioid prescriptions, and why our schools should not only have naloxone but teach students about how to use it.

Boulder County-based Mental Health Partners is working on a similar and very worthy initiative called You-CAN that is aiming to raise $60,000 to establish a network of free naloxone-dispensing vending machines throughout Boulder and Broomfield counties.

(Another important public awareness campaign, according to Gronseth, is to teach people the three principles of doctor-prescribed opioids: Use them properly for acute pain, store them properly and out of reach of children, and dispose of them once they are no longer needed for acute pain.)

As we work toward getting naloxone into our community, we must also work to destigmatize its necessity.

Here we must acknowledge that there are cynics among us who — privately or publicly — will wonder if addicts and users, those seeking the oblivion of a synthetic opioid who know and understand the risks associated with use, are worth saving.

The answer, of course, is yes. Everyone is worth saving. That truth should stand on its own. But it is worth pointing out that, according to Gronseth, roughly one in six people are genetically predisposed to opioid addiction.

Add to this the increasing rate of poisonings related to fentanyl-laced drugs, and the need becomes impossible to ignore.

Saving every life must be our goal. Then we can focus our energies on addiction treatment and providing our community with the support and resources necessary to address the systemic underlying causes of substance use.

Throughout our community, 28 people died from fentanyl-related overdoses last year. Twenty-eight people with friends and families and co-workers and classmates. That devastation splinters and radiates out into our community. We owe it to each and every one of them to do everything we can to save every life.

Let’s all do our part to learn about naloxone. To bring it into our homes. To push our leaders to provide it to our community. And let’s have the difficult but necessary conversations with our children and friends about the horrific dangers of fentanyl-laced drugs and the lifesaving ability of naloxone.

As we face this plague of opioids, let’s start by saving every life. Then, and only then, can we begin helping people get the support and treatment they need, getting these deadly drugs off the street, and showing once again that Boulder can lead the way out of this crisis.

— Gary Garrison for the Editorial Board