(NewsNation) — Festival season is underway, with 125,000 people per day expected at Coachella alone this weekend, not to mention numerous smaller gatherings across the country.
Yet hovering in the back of many minds is the dark cloud of fentanyl — a deadlier opioid making its way into party drugs and stimulants like Adderall.
That’s why the husband-wife team of William Perry and Ingela Travers-Hayward founded This Must Be the Place. The couple is traveling to more than 20 festivals across the country this year, passing out tens of thousands of doses of life-saving naloxone and educating people on how to use it.
“Fentanyl is the No. 1 accidental killer of adults age 18 to 45,” said Perry, who has been in recovery from opioid addiction for five years. “If you look at the age group that is most likely to attend a concert or music festival this year, it is that exact same demographic.”
While the existence of fentanyl is not new, its presence in what have typically been seen as “softer” drugs is, according to Dr. David Deyhimy, who has worked in addiction medicine, anesthesiology and preventive medicine for more than 20 years.
“Six, seven years ago … there were no overdoses for people using cocaine or methamphetamine or taking an Adderall pill that somebody gave them. But that’s exactly what we’re talking about now,” Deyhimy said.
Sixty percent of confiscated fake prescription pills in 2022 contained enough fentanyl for an overdose, according to an analysis by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency also began tracking fentanyl-related mass-overdose events that same year.
Deyhimy said the drug cartels that traffic fentanyl and other substances are putting it in other recreational drugs as a way to make users dependent on the synthetic opioid to keep them coming back to buy more drugs.
“That’s why the deaths are escalating so rapidly,” Deyhimy said.
By connecting with festivalgoers, Perry and Travers-Hayward are meeting people at the time and location they may be taking substances, making their approach effective because it puts naloxone in people’s hands at the moment someone might overdose, Deyhimy said.
“Time to reversal is probably the single biggest determinant as to whether or not somebody is going to survive intact,” Deyhimy said.
Take, for example, a 19-year-old woman who was trained by This Must Be the Place. She left the venue only to find someone who was overdosing across the street.
“(She was) not a drug user, but was just one of these people who thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to throw this stuff in my bag. Who knows what you’re going to see out there?’” Travers-Hayward said. “This young girl administered (naloxone) on this perfect stranger in this city that she didn’t even live in. And she saved his life.”
“That’s the power of meeting people where they are … because you literally can turn into a lifesaver,” she added.
Perry and Travers-Hayward, who both had careers in the music industry, know traditional methods wouldn’t make a dent in such a fast-moving epidemic. They keep their setup simple and approachable (think large photos of their corgi, and naloxone on colored lanyards). Their mini-training is just five minutes.
“We just sort of look at what a festival or what a health department would traditionally do, and then do the opposite,” Travers-Hayward said. “We want to feel like this comfortable space where someone can come up and ask the questions that they may have been too nervous to ask before.”
A majority of the people they train identify as millennials or Gen Z, and report only using drugs occasionally, according to a survey taken after the training. More than 40% said they personally knew someone who had overdosed — yet 80% reported they were receiving their very first naloxone kit.
“You can see the look of empowerment,” Perry said of people after the training. “A lot of people are thinking of a specific someone in their life that they … are going to be able to keep safe now.”
Deyhimy also emphasized that witnessing an overdose and not being able to stop it is traumatic and can stay with a young person their entire life.
“A lot of parents say, ‘My kid doesn’t do fentanyl.’ And I said, ‘Great, I totally understand that. But your kid might be in a situation where their friends or their friends of friends, at a party, at a concert, at a club, at any number of events, (are) using drugs and they could overdose in front of them,’” he said.
Just in its second year, This Must Be the Place is largely funded by small donations. Because they are so new, the nonprofit doesn’t qualify yet for many government or nonprofit grants, Travers-Hayward said.
They were able to expand this year from a few private donations, such as Hikma Pharmaceuticals giving them 20,000 doses of Kloxxado, a brand of naloxone that delivers a double dose.