TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) — The Tallahassee Fire Department is making the most of a life-saving drug called Narcan.
The Tallahassee Fire Department said they responded to over a dozen overdoses in just the the last month.
Trey Dollar is with the fire department.
He told ABC 27 he's used the drug called Narcan to help resuscitate patients who overdosed and were breaths away from dying.
"When you have an overdose patient on an opioid they go into a respiratory arrest and we give them Narcan intro nasally, we give an IV intravascular or IM intromuscular," said Trey Dollar.
Narcan then reverses an overdose by blocking the effects of opioids.
The Big Bend area is not alone.
More people in the US are dying from synthetic opioid overdoses than ever before, that's according to new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Dr. Trent Hall, with the Ohio State University's Department of psychiatry and behavioral health, said that's why awareness is important.
"I care for a lot of people in the hospital after they've survived overdose and it's very common for people to tell me that they had not intended to use fentanyl at all," said Dr. Trent Hall.
But that fentanyl is taking lives across the country and here in the Big Bend; including the nine deaths reported in Gadsden County earlier this month.
With Narcan available, first responders like Dollar said they're glad to help save lives when they can.
"The patient starts to breathe again the respiratory effort increases and they come back to normal," said Dollar.
Dollar said he's not sure where the deadly drugs are coming from.
In some cases people are overdosing on fentanyl not knowing it's in the counterfeit drugs they're taking.
In the U.S., synthetic opioids were involved in nearly 73,000 deaths in the 12-month period ending in February according to the latest CDC date.
Deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids have jumped 85% in the past two years.
The CDC data shows psychostimulants, such as methamphetamine were involved in about a third of overdose deaths in the 12-month period ending in February of 2022.
