CLEVELAND — The opioid crisis has touched many communities, including here in Northeast Ohio. According to the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner, 2022 is on pace to see 650 people killed by drug overdoses. That’s compared to 675 in 2021.
The numbers are down from a 2017 record of 727 fatal overdoses, but have remained consistently high in recent years as more potent and deadly drugs flood the market.
This October marks 5 years since Kristy Steele lost her mother Nita to an opioid overdose.
“In 2017, my mom got a hold of a bad batch of heroin. It was infused with carfentanil and fentanyl,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking; it’s devastating to think I don’t have my mom because of a drug.”
Steele was aware of her mother’s substance use disorder. She began carrying naloxone, an overdose reversal medication, after her mother was resuscitated from a prior overdose. The ultimately fatal overdose in 2017 couldn’t be reversed with naloxone.
Her mother’s death came a decade after she lost her father to an overdose.
“Fentanyl made me an orphan,” she said. “I don’t have any other living relatives. My mom was my last family member that is local.”
Fentanyl is at least 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. In 2021, the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner found the synthetic opioid present in nearly 3-quarters of overdose deaths in the county.
“Fentanyl and all of the analogs—they’re very powerful, they’re very magnetic in the brain. So when they’re taken, they work really quickly,” explained Kristen Breton, the director of Public Health and Advocacy at US WorldMeds.
Breton said the pharmaceutical company’s recently FDA approved device, ZIMHI, also works quickly to counter an overdose.
“We’re really confident this is going to be a game changer in helping to reduce overdose deaths,” she said.
The widely known brand Narcan administers 4 milligrams of naloxone through a nasal spray. ZIMHI delivers 5 milligrams of the medication through an injection in the thigh. The company says more of the higher dosage is absorbed more quickly into the bloodstream because of the way it’s administered.
“It’s 100 percent bioavailable. So what that means is you get that full 5 milligrams of naloxone, which is going to give you a higher concentration—blood plasma concentration level—as opposed to the intranasal devices, where it’s only about 44-50% bioavailable,” Breton said.
Steele recently began offering the product through her nonprofit Save Our Families.
“I’ve made it my purpose to start keeping these in our inventory because they are life-saving devices,” she said.
The organization, which Steele was inspired to create in her mother’s memory, provides harm reduction supplies and other essentials throughout Cleveland.
“I want to keep her memory alive and let people know she didn’t die in vain, that she does live on through me. And the love she gave other people, I now give to other people,” she said.
She hopes providing naloxone products, like ZIMHI and Narcan, will give others the second chance her mother didn’t receive.
“If they would’ve had that on hand when they found her, maybe given her that injection in her thigh, [it] would have changed the trajectory of my life. But with her passing the way she did… it has put me in my purpose to do the work that I now do,” she said. “I don’t want to hear of another child going through the heartbreak that I went through by losing a parent.”
You can find more information about how to receive naloxone and support Steele’s mission by clicking on this link.
The Cuyahoga County Board of Health also offers resources here: https://www.ccbh.net/naloxone/
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