AUSTIN, Texas — It's almost time for the Austin City Limits Music Festival (ACL), and as officials strive to keep up with safety and security protocols, ACL and C3 are partnering with This Must Be the Place, an overdose prevention nonprofit, to educate music fans about the dangers of fentanyl.
This year, the nonprofit will supply fest-goers with the life-saving opioid reversal medicine, Naloxone, commonly known as Narcan.
This Must Be the Place will have a booth set up at the festival to teach attendees about the dangers of fentanyl and demonstrate how to use Narcan. Co-founders Ingela Travers-Hayward and William Perry say they absolutely don't want any incidents to happen at the festival, but if the medication is needed, people will know what to do.
"Our real hope is that it makes it into different people's homes, into their cars, you know, being carried around in their purses where it does eventually save a life," Perry said.
When fest-goers go up to the booth, experts will be there to answer questions on how to administer Narcan and the medication will be handed out in clear bags. The festival's security staff is already aware of what those pouches look like, exactly what Narcan is and what it does, and that it's festival-safe to carry around.
"What generally happens is they walk up to our booth. We sort of ask, 'Are you familiar with naloxone, how it works?' And most people have heard the word already. So we just run through the signs and symptoms of what you would notice. We let them know that, 'Look, this is harmless. It does one thing, so that if you happen to give it to someone, it's not an overdose,'" Travers-Hayward said.
At the booth, representatives with the nonprofit will be handing out eight milligrams of Naloxone, which is essentially two doses in one, giving people the ability to save someone's life.
Generally, police and medics need multiple doses of Narcan to revive someone if they are overdosing.
"Security knows the gravity of the situation. They encourage people to be walking around with this [Narcan] because should something bad happen, we all know that the seconds, the minutes matter. And so, we we need to get this stuff, you know, get this stuff into somebody as quickly as possible," Perry said.
This year, This Must Be the Place has set up at about 28 major music festivals across the country and passed out close to 30,000 individual kits.
"Once the word was out that we were there, you know, we had we had parents coming up. We had high schoolers and college kids coming up. We had parents bringing their high schoolers up," Perry said. "That's exactly what we want. We want to create that safe space where people can just talk to us. Because at the end of the day, we're just regular folks."