Nobody did. Chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, nothing worked. Eight minutes passed. The emergency medical technicians arrived, and, yes, they carried naloxone, known best by one of its more popular trademarks, Narcan. It is a nonaddictive substance, available as an intravenous injection or as a nasal spray, which binds to opiate receptors in the brain, temporarily blocking the high that depresses the central nervous system and slows breathing to the point of death.
Brendan was revived.
“If that ambulance had been on the other side of Quincy, my son wouldn’t have made it,’’ Nancy Holler said in a recent interview, more than two years later. “I was at the next City Council meeting asking, ‘Why don’t our police and firefighters have Narcan?’ We are talking about saving lives here.’’
Holler, along with Kathy Deady, also a Quincy mother of an adult son with an opiate addiction, lobbied for change. Fire and police personnel, the mothers argued, should possess the easy-to-carry medical aid capable of reviving a person overdosed on opiates when the death clock is ticking.
Today Quincy police officers do carry Narcan - resulting in 45 lives saved since June 2010, when they began packing the nasal spray in cruisers, according to Lieutenant Detective Patrick Glynn, head of the Quincy Police Department’s anti-drug unit. Advocacy efforts by concerned parents proved instrumental in sparking the change, he said, and some of the city’s police officers have now made four or five saves each, using Narcan.
The Quincy Fire Department cannot make a similar claim. While the city’s firefighters, as part of a state pilot program supported by, among others, the Office of the Mayor, have been trained to use Narcan, and offered a free supply, firefighters to date have refused to carry it.
Firefighters are not convinced that equipping themselves with Narcan is necessary or makes sense, said Ernest Arienti, president of the Quincy firefighters union. He said the union continues to explore the pros and cons.
