
The Los Angeles Unified School District will give all of its campuses access to a drug that can reverse opioid overdoses. This comes on the heels of at least seven students overdosing on tablets presumably laced with fentanyl in recent weeks, including a 15-year-old who died on a high school campus.
In the next weeks, doses of naloxone, also marketed under the name Narcan, will be distributed to all schools from kindergarten through 12th grade, or around 1,400 schools overall. The drug will be free of charge thanks to the county public health department.
Opioids are a class of substances that are typically used in pain relief. The opioid crisis is hardly unique to Los Angeles. There were over 69,630 opioid-involved overdose deaths in 2020. In response to the crisis, President Biden announced on Friday that his administration would provide states, territories, and tribal lands a total of $1.5 billion to help fight opioid overdoses and aid in rehabilitation.