Narcan

On the night TJ McGee overdosed from a mixture of drugs and alcohol in his freshman year at UC Berkeley, his friends found him passed out in the hallway by their shared dorm room.

The roommates tried to help, but when McGee stopped breathing, they called 911.

McGee survived and, racked with guilt over what happened that night, committed to confronting his substance-use problem. Then, in the days that followed, McGee received a surprise email from campus officials that ushered in a whole new wave of emotions.

The letter said the administration would be placing McGee on academic probation for violating Berkeley’s residential conduct rules against drug and alcohol possession, use and distribution — possibly jeopardizing his academic career.

“They made me feel as if I was a villain for the choices I made,” said McGee, 20, now a junior. “I felt shameful enough already.”

Today, McGee speaks regularly in support of California State Assembly Bill 602, which would prohibit public colleges and universities from punishing students if they call 911 during an overdose emergency, or if a peer does so on their behalf. It requires schools to offer rehabilitation options and requires students who seek emergency medical assistance to complete a treatment program.

“The bill would protect students just like me from even receiving a letter like that,” and ensures that they are given care instead, McGee said.

The bill recently passed in both houses of the state Legislature; it awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. A spokesperson for Newsom said he typically does not comment on pending legislation.

Despite a recent nationwide plunge in the number of deaths stemming from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and contaminated versions of those drugs, overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans age 18 to 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Though numbers could be revised as new data from California come in, the CDC provisionally estimates a 21% drop in overdose deaths in the state to 9,660 between March 2024 and March 2025, compared with 12,247 in the previous 12-month period. Opioid-related deaths, in particular from fentanyl, made up the bulk of California’s overdose fatalities in 2023, the most recent year for which statistics are available on the state’s opioid-prevention website.

In response, California started requiring campus health centers at most public colleges and universities to make the opioid overdose-reversing nasal spray Narcan available to students in campus residences.

McGee said that while he hadn’t taken any opioids the night of his overdose, he was administered Narcan while incapacitated.

Advocates for AB 602 say more needs to be done to increase the likelihood that college students will seek immediate help during a drug-related emergency.

It’s important for lawmakers and college officials to realize how much fear is involved when an overdose occurs — not just with the person who is overdosing but among peers who seek to help but don’t want to get a friend in trouble, said UC Berkeley student Saanvi Arora. She is the founder and executive director of Youth Power Project, a nonprofit that helps young people who’ve had adverse health experiences use their personal stories to promote policy reforms.

“California has dramatically increased investments in school-based mental health and crisis-intervention resources and access, for example to fentanyl testing strips on college campuses and access to Narcan,” Arora said. “But one big gap that we see … is that there’s still a really low utilization rate among young people and students.”

Fear of academic probation, suspension or expulsion leads some students with substance-use problems to avoid reaching out to residential advisors, instructors or school administrators for help, leaving them feeling so isolated that they see few other options besides turning to the police as a last resort or doing nothing at all, Arora said.

Youth Power Project authored a bill to combat these problems; Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco), its chief sponsor, introduced it to the state Legislature this past spring. “During an overdose any hesitation can be deadly,” the lawmaker said in a statement. “AB 602 makes it clear that calling 911 will never cost you your academic future.”

Campus discipline and legal prosecution can be counterproductive if the goal is to prevent overdose deaths, said Evan Schreiber, a licensed clinical social worker and director of substance abuse disorder services at APLA Health, an L.A.-based nonprofit that offers mental-health and substance-use services and backs the bill.

“By removing the fear of consequences, you’re going to encourage more people to get help,” Schreiber said.

Schreiber and Arora said AB 602 extends to places of higher learning some of the protections guaranteed to Californians outside of campuses under the “911 Good Samaritan Law,” which went into effect in 2013 to increase the reporting of fentanyl poisoning and prevent opioid deaths.

That law protects people from arrest and prosecution if they seek medical aid during an overdose-related emergency, as well as individuals who step in to help by calling 911. It doesn’t, however, cover disciplinary actions imposed by colleges and universities.

One difference between the 911 Good Samaritan Law and the version of AB 602 that passed both houses of the Legislature is that the latter does not cover students who call on behalf of an overdosing peer and who are themselves found to have violated campus alcohol and drug policies, said Nate Allbee, a spokesperson for Haney. Allbee noted that Haney hopes to add this protection in the future.

Even though AB 602 doesn’t include all of the protections that supporters wanted, the rule solves what Arora identified as a major problem: UCs, Cal State campuses and community colleges in California are governed by a patchwork of policies and conduct codes regarding substance use that differ from campus to campus, making it difficult for students to know where they stand when they are in crisis.

McGee said he wished he’d learned more about the support services that were available to him at Berkeley before his overdose. But he was already struggling emotionally and living on his own when he entered college in fall 2023.

McGee described growing up in an environment in which substance use was common. He never felt that he could turn to anyone close to him to work through feelings of loneliness and bouts of depression. It was easier to block it all out by partying.

McGee started using harder drugs, missing classes and spending whole days in bed while coming down from his benders. He wouldn’t eat. Friends would ask what’s wrong, but he’d stare at the wall and ignore them. His grade-point average plummeted to 2.3.

Some of the friends who helped McGee on the night of his overdose grew distant for a time, too dismayed over the turmoil he was causing himself and those around him.

McGee knew he needed to keep trying to salvage his academic career and earn back the trust of his peers. All he could think was: “I need to fix my grades. I need to fix myself.”

One day during his recovery, McGee sat his friends down, apologized and explained what he was going through.

Then in his sophomore year, McGee happened to be lobbying lawmakers in Sacramento over campus funding cuts when he overheard a separate group of students from Youth Power Project talking about a bill they authored that would become AB 602.

It was like eavesdropping on a dark chapter in his own life. McGee agreed to present the bill to Haney and share his experience at meetings with legislators and in hearings.

McGee’s disciplinary probation on campus lasts until the end of 2025, but working on the overdose bill has given him a new sense of purpose. A psychology major, McGee eventually took on public policy as a minor.

“I feel like I became a part of this bill and it became such a large source of hope for me,” McGee said. “It would be amazing to see this support and care implemented nationally. This is not just a California issue.”

What do you think would happen, I asked my daughter, a nurse practitioner who works in addiction medicine, if Narcan, the drug that reverses opiate overdoses, were suddenly to disappear from pharmacy shelves?

“More people would die of overdoses,” she replied. Pretty simple.

Now, maybe you are the sort of person who thinks it’s OK for people to die from overdose because they shouldn’t be taking drugs like fentanyl in the first place. If you are that callous, I don’t have much to say to you.

But if you consider addiction a disease, as most medical experts do, then you would certainly be in favor of anything that helps preserve lives, and helps avoid the grief of those whose loved ones have died accidentally from a drug overdose.

And if you had spent, say, 14 years as a heroin addict, you would surely push as hard as you could to make Narcan, the trade name of naloxone, as widely available as possible, especially at a moment when fentanyl continues to kill Americans in depressingly high numbers.

That, at any rate, is what I would expect from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the aforementioned heroin addict. However, a leaked version of President Trump’s budget proposes cutting the department’s $56-million program that distributes naloxone kits and trains people on how to use them.

The leaked document is a preliminary plan, and Kennedy has not specifically addressed the proposed cut. In fact, in late April at a drug summit in Nashville, he spoke about his addiction and acknowledged that solving the addiction crisis requires strategies including maintenance treatments using suboxone and methadone, which lessen drug cravings; fentanyl detectors to prevent unwitting ingestion of the drug; and Narcan, which has saved countless lives.

But in the face of numerous news reports about the proposed cuts, Kennedy has not offered full-throated, public support for the naloxone program. Maybe he simply doesn’t have time, busy as he’s been overseeing what the Washington Post described as “a sweeping purge of the agencies that oversee government health programs.”

In his quest to “make America healthy again,” Kennedy — with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — has slashed 20,000 of the agency’s 82,000 employees for an estimated annual savings of $1.8 billion. Here are some of the Health and Human Services programs that have vanished amid the cost-cutting frenzy:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s lead poisoning prevention staff was sacked. “They played a key role in addressing lead contamination in applesauce pouches,” reported the Post.

The black lung screening program for coal miners was briefly killed off before an outcry led to a temporary reinstatement.

Programs on smoking cessation, diabetes prevention and cancer screenings have all been canceled.

The Food and Drug Administration lost senior veterinarians who worked to keep milk and pet food safe during the bird flu outbreak.

Scientists at the U.S. labs that track sexually transmitted diseases, such as drug-resistant gonorrhea and viral hepatitis, were laid off.

The list goes on. But the most worrisome development in all this bloodletting is how Kennedy’s antipathy toward vaccines is playing out.

For years, he has promoted conspiracy theories and undermined public confidence in vaccines.

Last month, he announced that in September, he will reveal the cause of autism, which has eluded actual experts for decades.

Chillingly, he has reportedly hired David Geier, who has no medical license, no scientific training and has been described as a “vaccine cynic and fraudster,” to conduct a study on whether vaccines and autism are linked. This is insanity masquerading as science.

The question has been studied, you might say, almost to death. The scientific consensus is clear — vaccines do not cause autism.

But can you imagine the damage Kennedy’s war on vaccines is going to do to the health of American children? These days, it takes very little to shake the public’s faith in vaccines.

After all, the misconception about vaccines and autism took flight after a single, fraudulent 1998 study involving only 12 children. The study was retracted, and its author Andrew Wakefield, guilty of ethical breaches and scientific misconduct, lost his medical license over it.

And yet the lie lives on.

Just last week, Kennedy told American parents to “do your own research” on vaccines as if the average American mother is capable of running a double-blind study at her kitchen table in her abundant downtime.

“It seems the goal of this administration is to prove that vaccines cause autism, even though they don’t,” Autism Science Foundation president Alison Singer told the Post. “They are starting with the conclusion and looking to prove it. That’s not how science is done.”

We are at a sad moment in American history for so many reasons. But putting a charlatan like Kennedy in charge of the nation’s health is like hiring an arsonist as your fire chief. It’s not going to end well.

Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social Threads: @rabcarian