Narcan vending machines? They’re coming to Pierce County, and there’s good reason for it

The Tacoma Needle Exchange always has been cutting edge. In fact, the nonprofit — which traces its origins back nearly 35 years to the late Dave Purchase, who first set up a television tray and folding chair downtown and started handing out clean needles to people battling intravenous-drug addiction — has often operated on the edge.

When Purchase first began distributing fresh needles in 1988 as the HIV and AIDS epidemic started to peak, he was doing so illegally and everyone knew it, including then Tacoma Police Chief Ray Fjetland. To give the upstart program a chance, Fjetland instructed his officers to suspend enforcement of drug paraphernalia laws. The operation proved successful, becoming the first legally sanctioned and publicly funded needle exchange in the country.

More recently, when a need to serve the suburban and rural parts of Pierce County emerged, Tacoma Needle Exchange dispatched a van to make regular deliveries of clean needles and other supplies, direct to drug users’ homes. As Daniel Beekman of the Seattle Times reported earlier this year, the exchange recently started distributing drug smoking supplies and pipes, in response to a growing number of overdoses related to the smoking of drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Soon, according to executive director Paul LaKosky, Tacoma Needle Exchange will add another tool to its arsenal — unveiling three naloxone vending machines across the county as part of a $200,000 initiative.

The machines will distribute the medication — commonly known as Narcan and used in emergencies to reverse the effects of an overdose — for free, to anyone who might need it.

Will the program — which will be one of the first in the state — be controversial? Perhaps. Taking a harm-reduction approach to addiction often is.

But the realities of the current drug crisis, including her in Pierce County, and particularly the tragic rise of fentanyl, make one thing clear: The work Purchase inspired, in all its new forms and iterations, is just as important and urgent as it was in 1988.

LaKosky describes the vending machines as another tool Tacoma Needle Exchange can use to help keep people alive and — hopefully, ultimately — help them get clean.

The first vending machine will appear at the Recovery Cafe in Orting next month, LaKosky said. He expects one to follow in Tacoma and another to be placed in a rural Pierce County location, “where there’s a need.”

“I have seen … the most rapid change in drug consumption patterns that I have ever seen in my 20-plus years of working in HIV and disease prevention. It is very difficult these days to even find heroin. Most folks have switched over to fentanyl, which for a lot of reasons is a lot more dangerous,” LaKosky told me by phone from the Tacoma Needle Exchange’s new brick-and-mortar location at South 37th Street and Pacific Avenue.

“We’re getting lots of calls late at night saying, ‘I need Narcan, and the syringe exchange is closed,’ or there are places where they need Narcan but we can’t always get out there and get it to them. So the vending machines will allow people to have a place where they can just go and get it, no questions asked.”

Like other places across the United States, the use of methamphetamine and the emergence of fentanyl have changed the local addiction landscape in Pierce County, inflicting a staggering toll. According to information released by Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department provided by the Pierce County Medical Examiner, there were nearly four times as many fentanyl-related deaths in 2021 as in 2019, and early data from 2022 suggests there’s no slowdown in sight. Opioid-related overdose is now the most common cause of accidental death in Pierce County, outnumbering traffic and firearm deaths, according to the stats.

There were more than 150 fentanyl-related deaths in 2021 alone. Oftentimes, according to Tacoma Needle Exchange operations manager Stephanie Prohaska, clients report encountering the drug on the streets by accident, increasing the chances of overdose or death.

LaKosky and Prohaska believe the naloxone vending machines — along with Tacoma Needle Exchange’s other harm-reduction programs — can help stem the troubling tide.

That’s a goal we should all support.

“Just because somebody uses drugs doesn’t mean they deserve to die,” Prohaska said.

“Everybody is somebody’s someone, and they all deserve a second chance.”