texas nonprofit out of funding

CADDO MILLS, Texas — Callie Crow stood in a small room in the Caddo Mills Police Department in front of eight officers – the city’s entire police force at the time – and demonstrated how to save a life with a simple nasal spray.

The video above is from a previous report.

She held the bottle close to her nose and compared it to run-of-the-mill allergy spray: Once you put the nozzle into a person’s nose, you simply press the plunger in to release the dose of naloxone, a drug also known as Narcan that reverses and blocks the effects of opioids.

“Narcan cannot hurt someone,” Crow, a paramedic of 27 years, stressed. “If you give this in a situation when it’s not an opioid overdose, it does nothing.”

And, she added, people who deploy Narcan to try to save someone from an overdose face no liability in Texas. The eyes of the officers widened. They scratched down notes on their pads.

“You can’t get in trouble. You can’t hurt anyone,” Crow said. “It’s pretty simple, it’s like a no-brainer.”

During the training event in late March in northeast Texas, Crow gave the police department 12 Narcan kits.

“Your device is the most simple one, and it’s like gold,” she told the group.

Then, her voice saddened. “You guys are my second-to-last training, and now there’s no more in the entire state.”

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For years, Crow and her charity, Drew’s 27 Chains, have depended on a federally funded state program run out of the UT Health San Antonio School of Nursing for free Narcan. But in January, the program ran out of money for the fiscal year, which began in September.

Since then, Crow and her charity have been unable to access more. That means the free training Crow and other groups like hers regularly put on for law enforcement across the state and other first responders has been halted for months.

While large police departments in metro areas like Houston and Dallas can pay for the high cost of the drug from their budgets, smaller nonprofits and law enforcement agencies do not have big enough budgets to pay for naloxone out of pocket.

“Everybody that’s been providing this training over the last few years, we’re all out,” said Joy Alonzo, co-chair of the Opioid Task Force at Texas A&M University in College Station. “We’re kind of on our own.”

For the advocates, the state program could not have run out of the drug at a worse time. Opioid overdoses continue to rise nationally. The Centers for Disease Control and…