Delta plans to equip flight attendants with Narcan after a passenger suffered a fatal opioid overdose on a flight earlier this month.
A Delta passenger who witnessed the overdose first reported the incident on July 13 via Twitter. The long-haul flight was traveling from Boston to Los Angeles.
A man just #overdosed on my @delta flight, needle in arm he passed out in bathroom. The plane didn’t have a #NarcanKit. The paramedics took 10 minutes to arrive. They just carried him out in a body bag ??@Delta please practice #harmreduction and get a #NarcanKit on every ✈️
— Lynne Lyman (@lynnelyman) July 14, 2019
BTW, the flight attendants were great, they tried everything. As was the man who broke the bathroom door open and pulled him out, and the doctor that tried to help.
— Lynne Lyman (@lynnelyman) July 15, 2019
Passenger airlines are currently not required by the Federal Aviation Administration to carry Narcan on their flights. The life-saving nasal spray is an opioid antagonist, binding to opioid receptors to reverse the effects of an overdose and restore breathing to the patient.
In February 2018, the Flight Attendants Association issued a statement advocating for Narcan to be added to emergency medical kits on board.
“I can’t speak to details of the event specifically due to passenger privacy,” a Delta representative told Fox News. “That said, Delta earlier this year made the decision to improve our on board emergency medical kits by adding Narcan. The process to outfit medical kits will begin this fall.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Lynne Lyman, a policy consultant for criminal justice reform and cannabis organizations, to confirm her account, but did not immediately receive response. If her story accurately reflects the incident, the drug paraphernalia reportedly found at the scene slipped passed TSA security.
According to a Phoenix ABC News affiliate, heroin and fentanyl were found in a passenger’s computer bag in the Sky Harbor Airport last month. The passenger’s bag was checked before his Delta flight and searched by TSA personnel for suspected explosive material.
While the suspicious item was found not to be explosive, an additional search of the bag revealed pills that were “artfully concealed” in hair gel. The suspect told police he hid a kilogram of heroin and 500 fentanyl pills in his luggage for a $4,000 sale he planned to do in Seattle.
A 2017 undercover operation into TSA operations found screening procedures and equipment failed to find restricted items more than half the time. In 2015, the agency had a 95% failure rate.
