Naloxone, commonly known as Narcan, has been around for nearly two decades. But it wasn’t until last year when Chautauqua County saw it have a significant effect on overdose deaths in the county.

Chautauqua County’s public health director Lacey Wilson credits both Narcan as well as the partnership of various stakeholders in the county for bringing overdose deaths down so dramatically.

In 2023, there were 61 overdose deaths in Chautauqua County. In 2024, there were 30. In fact in all of last year, there was only one overdose death recorded in the city of Dunkirk.

Steve Kilburn, a contractor with the county Health Department, along with Wilson, gave a presentation to the county legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee where they discussed the dramatic drop in overdose deaths.

Wilson noted that it’s more than just Narcan that has made a difference.

“We know that Narcan has been publicly available since 2006, but we’ve not seen a reduction for 20 years so what does that mean? It’s been the planning, the coordination, the development, the access, the education. All of that takes so much time, but when you pull those purse strings together, you see these reductions happen. We are seeing them,” she said.

Wilson credits the partnership for the drop in overdoses.

“What we are seeing in our county is the underpinnings of the coordination of a county that’s large enough to put some resources behind these endeavors, assign a person full-time to really handle that coordination, but small enough to bring the necessary stakeholders to the table to get it done,” she said.

Kilburn agreed, and noted that the public needed to get comfortable using Narcan.

“Those sustained efforts at both distributing it and educating the public about it has kind of brought us to a tipping point where, more often than not, when I talk to someone at a public event, they’re already familiar with Narcan,” he said.

Another key component Kilburn noted is prevention.

“Epidemics don’t end by just sort of treating your way out of them. They end when you can find ways to prevent them,” he said.

He shared how for many years, there was a “shock and awe” effort in schools to warn students about the dangers of drugs.

Today, there’s more of an effort to get students to address their social emotional skills, which can cause a student to want to use harmful substances, trying to mask their feelings.

“It’s developing the skills of how to manage one’s emotions,” Kilburn said.