Pictured are Save a Life Day volunteers in Logan County. (Courtesy SOAR WV)
More than 30,000 doses of naloxone were distributed in West Virginia during this year’s Save a Life Day, organizers say.
Volunteers in all 55 counties gave out 15,269 kits, totalling 30,539 doses of the opioid overdose antidote during this year’s event on Sept. 26, said Joe Solomon, a co-founder of SOAR, an overdose prevention organization that helped coordinate the program in West Virginia.
Save a Life Day started in two West Virginia counties, Kanawha and Putnam in 2020, as the number of fatal overdoses rose during the COVID-19 pandemic. The annual distribution event expanded this year to 32 states, including every state east of the Mississippi River.
A few West Virginia counties postponed their events because of Hurricane Helene, Solomon said.
SOAR coordinated efforts in West Virginia, where it partnered with the Pallotine Foundation, the Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation and CareSource to distribute naloxone vending boxes to a dozen counties in West Virginia, Solomon said.
The number of doses distributed nationally was still being tallied Tuesday but had surpassed 60,000.
The majority of the naloxone for West Virginia was provided by state opioid response funds from the West Virginia Office of Drug Control Policy.