AUSTIN, Texas — Ahead of the second weekend of the Austin City Limits Music Festival (ACL), overdose prevention nonprofit This Must Be The Place shared it had an overwhelmingly large turnout during the first weekend of the festival.
William Perry, the director of This Must Be The Place, said when gates opened on Friday, Oct. 6, the organization had a variety of parents, young students, school teachers and Travis County Sheriff's deputies stopping by to grab a free pouch of overdose reversal medication and learn more about how to administer it.
"We would have like, you know, parents who walked up with their high school kids and they're like, 'OK, we're here for the education. What do you got for us?' And we were able to have these really good conversations with a whole lot of people, and that's exactly what we hope for, is to have that, to be able to have those conversations, to be those sounding boards," Perry said.
Since the opioid fentanyl is getting stronger by the day, the nonprofit was handing out Kloxxado, a nasal spray packed with a double dose of the overdose reversing agent Naloxone. The medication was being passed out in orange cartridges that indicate it's twice the strength of single-dose Narcan, which comes in a red cartridge.
Organizers said each single Kloxxado nasal spray is equivalent to an entire box of Narcan.
PHOTOS: Narcan nasal spray vs. Kloxxado
"Which means you're not going to have to, sit around and hope that it works at or see if you need to give that second one. And that's why we like to make the the distinction between the two because it literally is a double dose," Perry said.
Perry said the nonprofit's goal is to always reach about 1 in 25 people. Over the weekend, staff, along with volunteer students from the University of Texas at Austin, handed out just over 3,000 doses – equivalent to more than $100,000 worth of free medication.
"Every single person who wanted some got some. But the people who didn't want something just wanted education. They got that as well," Perry said.
By passing out Kloxxado, the nasal spray was distributed to eight different ZIP codes in Austin, including 78704, 78745, 78748, 78741, 78746, 78702, 78744 and 78723.
Organizers said going into Weekend 2, they hope to distribute even more than during Weekend 1 and get Kloxxado into more hands to get more people prepared and educated for the future.
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.