Oak Park’s public health office is hosting a free event to educate community members on how to prevent opioid overdose deaths.
The workshop will be held at the park district’s Community Recreation Center, 229 Madison St., from 1 to 3 p.m. May 10. The workshop will provide attendees with practical guidance on how to handle opioid emergencies, particularly by training people on how to use Narcan, according to the village.
“The training covers harm reduction principles, signs and symptoms of opioid overdose, how Narcan works in the body, hands-on practice with Narcan nasal spray and time for questions and answers,” the village said in promotional materials for the event.
Narcan is the brand-name product for the drug naloxone, which blocks the effects of opioids on the body to prevent fatal overdoses. Event participants will receive a free overdose prevention kit, according to the village.
In recent years, harm reduction around opioid exposure has been a major priority of Oak Park leaders. A key aspect of that push has been making naloxone freely available to the public. Currently, there are seven locations around the village where boxes are stocked with the drug and instructions on how to use it to administer first aid to someone experiencing an opioid overdose.
Those locations include several street corners, the Oak Park Public Library Main Branch and restrooms at Maple Park.
Housing Forward, which serves people struggling with housing instability at several Oak Park locations, is one of four Chicagoland organizations identified as an opioid-prevention grant partner by the Cook County Department of Public Health.
Several Oak Park residents have died as result of opioid overdoses since last year, with the overdose deaths coming mostly as result of exposure to fentanyl, according to finalized case reports from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Fentanyl is an opioid that’s 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. The substance, which is often found laced into other drugs, has been considered the “primary driver” of drug overdose deaths in the United States in recent years, according to the CDC.
Since the beginning of 2024, a 41-year-old man, a 37-year-old man, a 56-year-old man, a 70-year-old woman, a 66-year-old man, a 55-year-old woman and a 67-year-old man have all died as a result of accidental fentanyl exposure in Oak Park. In several of those cases, the fentanyl had been combined with other drugs, including cocaine and methadone, according to the medical examiner.
A 58-year-old woman also died from a heroin overdose in Oak Park last year. The most recent overdose death in Oak Park occurred on March 13, according to the medical examiner.
Last December, a 64-year-old Oak Park man pled guilty to charges in DuPage County related to the fentanyl overdose death of a 29-year-old woman in 2022, according to court records.
Opioid overdose cases in Cook County overall are on the decline since hitting a peak in 2022, when 2,001 residents died as result of accidental opioid overdose, according to the medical examiner. When the medical examiner published its preliminary report on Cook County’s 2024 death statistics on Jan. 3 only 1,026 residents had been confirmed to have died from accidental opioid overdoses, but the agency expected pending cases to add at least 200 more deaths to that total. Among those 1,026 overdose cases confirmed in 2024, 87% involved fentanyl, according to the medical examiner’s office.
Cook County has not had a year with less than 1,295 opioid overdose deaths since 2018 and has not had a year with less than 1,000 since 2015. The medical examiner has not yet published its full report on 2024’s death statistics.
Several reports in recent years have identified Oak Park and some of its neighbors as hot spots for dangerous opioid exposure among Chicago’s suburbs. A Cook County Department of Public Health report on local opioid exposure from 2016 to 2020 found that Oak Park’s rate of opioid overdose-related hospital and poison control center visits was twice as high as the average among suburban Cook County communities during those years.
A 2022 report by that agency also identified nearby Forest Park, Maywood and Broadview as having some of the worst opioid-overdose mortality rates of any suburban Cook County communities.