Dunwoody police saved a man from an opioid overdose July 14 with the help of a prescription drug.
Two officers went to an apartment complex after receiving a call about a medical emergency. The officers found an unconscious man with “labored breathing.”
The officers administered four doses of the drug Evzio Naloxone to the man. Within five minutes, the man regained consciousness.
According to police, the man was one of four people who have been saved by the drug since the department first acquired it. Dunwoody PD received 60 of the hand-held auto-injector devices through a grant from kaléo, the Virginia-based pharmaceutical company that produces the drug.
“We got them around September of last year,” police spokesman St. Robert Parsons said. “They are becoming a lot more popular with the increase of opioid-related overdoses we are seeing.”
In December 2015, Dunwoody PD used the drug for the first time when responding to a situation at an apartment complex. Parsons found an unconscious man at the complex and thought he was the victim of a drug overdose. He administered two doses of Naloxone to the man.
“He regained consciousness immediately, within a minute or two,” Parsons said.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the hand-held auto-injector in April 2014. According to the FDA, Evzio is the “first auto-injector designed to deliver a dose of Naloxone outside of a health care setting.”
Parsons said that the drug will not have adverse effects if administered to someone who is not having an overdose. He added that the overdose reversing properties of the drug could greatly increase the amount of victims that first responders are able to save.
“If a person is experiencing a life threatening overdose, those are critical minutes,” Parsons said. “Once the law changed that allowed first responders to administer medications, that gave us critical minutes to tend to a victim.”
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