After an overdose in Kennedy Plaza, advocates fault police, RIPTA for not carrying naloxone

PROVIDENCE – Advocates are calling for harm reduction measures to be implemented as soon as possible at Kennedy Plaza amid complaints about Rhode Island Public Transit Authority staff refusing to assist people who have overdosed or even call 911, and Providence police officers responding to the scene without naloxone.

Haley McKee, a recovery and public health advocate, detailed in an email to public officials her encounter earlier this month with a woman overdosing in the bathroom at Kennedy Plaza. McKee said she directed someone to do chest compressions as the victim’s skin turned “an awful shade of deep blue” as she searched for naloxone, a drug that saves lives by rapidly reversing an opioid overdose.

McKee said she asked a RIPTA employee “who is not unknown to our recovery community” for naloxone to which he retorted that staff would not carry the drug. He then refused to call 911.

“It’s not `we don’t carry Narcan’; it’s `we won’t carry Narcan,’” McKee said of the man’s response. “He's been a complete menace down there.”

McKee, who had given all of her doses away earlier, found a single dose and administered it in the woman’s nostril before continuing to search for more.

A handful of Providence police officers arrived at the scene, none of whom carried naloxone, as required by departmental policy, McKee said. The Providence Police Department, the largest police force in the state, has been trained and equipped to use Narcan since 2014.

An officer found a dose and administered it, prompting the woman to gasp for breath as rescue workers arrived, said McKee, who was collecting data for an opioid and overdose study at the time of the incident.

A RIPTA spokeswoman said, "We have been in touch with Mayor-elect Smiley's office and are happy to be part of any discussions on these matters."

A spokeswoman for the Providence Police Department said she did not know about officers not carrying Narcan.

McKee said she experienced a similar incident involving a man overdosing two months ago in which she also encountered derision from RIPTA supervisory staff.

“They made disparaging remarks about not bothering to help him because he had overdosed before,” McKee said.

“This failure to assist, hatred and intimidation kills vulnerable people,” she said.

Now McKee is among the advocates calling for RIPTA to take steps to reduce harm in the busy bus terminal, where overdoses occur with some frequency.

They are asking that NaloxBoxes be placed in all of the restrooms at the Kennedy Plaza bus station, and that they be regularly serviced to keep naloxone in ready reach if needed. In addition, they call for harm-reduction vending machines, containing naloxone, fentanyl test strips, safer-sex kits and harm-reduction kits, to be placed outside of the building.

They are pushing, too, for police to be required to carry naloxone.

“The difference between a nonfatal overdose and a fatal overdose is naloxone, and police should be carrying it,” Alexandria "Alex" Macmadu, a presidential postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at Brown University School of Public Health, said Wednesday.

They are also advocating for the expansion of Good Samaritan Law protections to prohibit police from conducting searches for outstanding warrants on people at an overdose scene.

“This is important because the risk of arrest strongly deters people from calling 911 for help when an overdose happens. Every minute matters during an overdose, and any delay or hesitation in seeking help can cost lives,” Macmadu said.

Rhode Island’s Good Samaritan Overdose Protection Act protects people who call 911 to save someone overdosing on drugs or alcohol. The law provides immunity from prosecution for possession of a controlled substance or drug paraphernalia, or charges related to the operation of a drug-involved premises. It also covers parole and probation violations, not just arrests on new charges.

Macmadu’s recommendations come after an analysis of more than 200 police reports in an unspecified Rhode Island city, which concluded that few overdose scenes required the presence of law enforcement.

The study conducted by Macmadu and other researchers found that police administered naloxone at only 10% of the overdose scenes they responded to, often because they were the last to arrive on scene. Though arrests were rare, those that occurred were based on outstanding warrants, indicating a need for expanded Good Samaritan Law protections, according to the findings.

Ideally, all jurisdictions should have emergency staffing adequate to ensure a rapid response to overdose events, with police rarely or never dispatched to respond to overdoses, the researchers said. Critically, warrant searches by police of persons on the scene should be prohibited.

“This is important because previous research indicates that police attendance at overdoses strongly deters people from calling 911 to seek help for an overdose,” Macmadu said.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Overdose death in Kennedy Plaza means advocates call for more naloxone