N.S. jails to provide overdose treatment Naloxone to frontline staff

Nova Scotia’s director of corrections says the arrival of the highly potent opioid fentanyl in the province is prompting his department to move more quickly on a plan to provide frontline staff with Naloxone, a drug that can quickly reverse the effects of drug overdoses.

READ MORE: Fentanyl overdose deaths expected to rise in Nova Scotia, province says

Sean Kelly isn’t saying exactly when guards or other staff in jails will be trained to provide Naloxone in overdose cases, but he says a plan to make Naloxone “immediately accessible” in the province’s prisons is underway.

“What we’re doing is constantly trying to stop drugs from coming into the facility,” said Jason MacLean, who was a jail guard for 20 years, and is now president of the NSGEU, which represents correctional workers.

“I just really want to say that I think it’s a great thing what the department is doing, it’s proactive and our officers welcome it whole-heartedly.”

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Paramedics who rush to the scene of prison overdose cases normally have Naloxone, but in two cases over the past two-and-a-half years inmates have died in prison cells from opioid overdoses and the existing response system wasn’t able to revive them in time.

Forty-two-year-old Jason LeBlanc died on Jan. 31 at the Cape Breton Correctional Facility from a combination of methadone and a tranquilizer, while 23-year-old Clayton Cromwell died in the Central Nova Correctional Facility in April of 2014 after overdosing on methadone.

READ MORE: Nova Scotia RCMP given Naloxone kits amid spreading fentanyl crisis

Kelly says research has been ongoing on how to bring Naloxone into the provincial jails, but the emergence of fentanyl — which can be fatal in amounts the size of a grain of salt — has heightened the sense of urgency in the project.

The corrections director is sitting on one of seven committees the province has set up through the chief medical officer of health to come up with ways of heading off a British Columbia-style epidemic of fentanyl-related deaths.

— With files from The Canadian Press.