AUSTIN – If you’re attending the Austin City Limits Music Festival over the next two weekends, don’t be surprised if someone hands you a Narcan spray bottle.
The nonprofit organization, This Must Be the Place, will be handing out the sprays as a way to educate people about the dangers of Fentanyl and to get the life-saving opioid reversal medicine in more hands.
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Naloxone is the name of the medicine — Narcan is a brand name. It’s approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for over-the-counter (OTC), nonprescription, use to rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
This Must Be the Place will attend dozens of music festivals this year to distribute more than 30,000 naloxone kits.
“We strive to continually update and evolve our safety and security protocols, which includes education and preventative measures to keep people safe,” ACL officials said on the festival’s website. “We encourage fans to stop by their booth at the festival and learn more.”
About Fentanyl
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is considered exponentially more addictive than heroin and is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49. A tiny amount, 2 milligrams, ingested into the body can be fatal.
It costs less than a penny to buy the chemicals needed to make a lethal dose of fentanyl, making its potential availability “virtually limitless,” she said.
The drug is frequently mixed into the supplies of other drugs or pressed into counterfeit prescription pills, like oxycodone. Some people never know they are taking it.
More than 100,000 deaths a year have been linked to drug overdoses since 2020 in the U.S., about two-thirds of those are related to fentanyl. The death toll is more than 10 times as many drug deaths as in 1988, at the height of the crack epidemic.
In a speech at the Family Summit on Fentanyl, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the Justice Department is sending out some $345 million in federal funding over the next year, including money to support mentoring for at-risk young people and increase access to the overdose-reversal drug naloxone.
“We know that fentanyl is a nearly invisible poison, and that many people who take fentanyl have no idea they are taking it,” Garland said. “We know that no one -- no one person, and no one family -- can defeat this epidemic alone. We need each other.”
*The Associated Press contributed to this article