By Hunter Hine
Combatting Overdoses in Rural Areas, or CORA, held its first in-person training session on Nov. 8 in the Jimenez building, teaching students emergency responses for opioid overdoses.
CORA is a University of Maryland organization tasked with providing opioid education, harm reduction training and resources to rural communities facing the ongoing opioid epidemic, said Kevin Tu, the founder of CORA.
Tu, a junior double major in physiology and neurobiology and economics with a minor in nonprofit leadership and social innovation, started the organization in June 2020, he said in an email.
At the presentation on Nov. 8, senior physiology & neurobiology and psychology double major Sanjit Sachdeva led the training presentation with another CORA member. Sachdeva is CORA’s Harm Reduction Director, he said.
The two presented response training for treating people overdosing on opioids. Videos and instruction on life saving procedures showed steps for resuscitating someone who is overdosing and highlighted the importance of restoring someone’s breathing after they have overdosed.
They also demonstrated how to use Naloxone, a medicine that is sprayed up the nostril and quickly reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Sachdeva and Tesfamariam passed a sample of Naloxone to students around the room. Over 40 students attended the training session.
CORA has drawn about 1,000 people to their presentations and created 20 modules that cover topics such as opioids and athletes, how to use prescribed opioids safely, fentanyl and education on reducing stigma surrounding opioid addiction, Sachdeva said.
The Maryland Department of Health authorized CORA as an overdose response program, and CORA gets their training curriculums from the health department , Sachdeva said.
CORA does not currently dispense Naloxone, but for their first training session they partnered with the University of Maryland Health Center who does dispense the medicine, Sachdeva said.
CORA surveyed students across campus and found that average students couldn’t answer more than 6/10 questions right about opioid overdoses, Tu said. The training sessions are meant to give students the power to save lives, Tu said.
“Just like how people learn CPR to help a person having a cardiac arrest, we are giving students the tools to save a person having a potentially fatal overdose,” Tu said.
Tu has been a counselor on the national suicide prevention hotline since he was 18, where he would hear get recurring calls from people struggling with substance use disorder, or SUDs. These recurring callers never seemed to solve their underlying problems, despite seeking help, he said.
“Over time, I would hear updates on their lives and I got close with some of them — at least as close as you’d expect on an anonymous 15-minute phone call,” Tu said. “So any bad news they’d share would hit me particularly hard, and I wanted to help people like them outside of the call.”
Rural areas face unique problems when it comes to opioids, since they tend to be lower income, have less education about dangerous drugs and have little to no resources near them that help with substance abuse, Sachdeva said.
“A person in a rural area may have to drive about an hour to get to the closest SUD clinic, and then drive back home. And usually, treatment courses will require the person to drive to the clinic every day for several months,” Tu said. “It’s unsustainable for rural Americans.”
Stigma surrounding the opioid epidemic, especially in rural areas, creates a lack of media coverage, Tu said. Stigma also make people facing addiction feel scared or ashamed to get help, Tu said.
CORA Treasurer Annie Feng, a junior accounting and information system double major, runs bookkeeping, helps write applications for grants, funding and takes care of tax related issues.
Feng helped Tu with the details of creating CORA since its beginning, she said. Feng hopes that CORA not only educates students about substance abuse and life-saving training, but also inspires people to pursue activism in other topics, health-related or not, she said.
“It is a public health issue that should be more known and can affect anyone,” Feng said. “We often think about substance abuse as something that only ‘bad’ people do when realistically everyday people can struggle with it.”
“Several students from rural areas have asked why the opioid epidemic is rarely talked about at UMD because it’s such a huge deal in their respective communities,” Tu said
According to the 2017 Morning Consult survey sponsored by the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union, 45% of rural adults and 74% of farmers and farm workers have been directly affected by the opioid epidemic.
Maryland had 2,518 fatal opioid overdoses in 2020, according to the Maryland Opioid Dashboard from Maryland’s Operational Opioid Command Center. There have been 1,217 fatal opioid overdoses in 2021 from January to June, while there were 1,204 for the same time range in 2020, according to the dashboard.
In the past year, CORA implemented action teams to visit rural areas in Montgomery County, Howard, Prince George’s and Allegheny counties to ask residents about opioid problems and provide resources to them, Sachdeva said.
CORA is involved with several other organizations, including Maryland Rural Opioid Technical Assistance, the U.S. Air National Guard Drug Demand Reduction Program, the Maryland State Center for Harm Reduction Services and a clinic called MD Matt, Tu said.
MD Matt is a substance use clinic in Baltimore that recently opened a new location in College Park. Soon CORA will hold an art drive so volunteers can donate art to be put inside their new clinic, Sachdeva said.
MD Matt focuses on making healthcare more accessible and breaking down barriers to treatment for people facing addiction problems. The clinic has presented to CORA in the past, Sachdeva said.
On Oct. 23, CORA partnered with the University of Maryland Police Department to hold a drug take back day, when people could safely dispose of extra prescription drugs, Sachdeva said.
Now CORA is expanding and has created a starter kit so people can open CORA chapters elsewhere, Sachdeva said. Recently, chapters opened in other parts of Maryland, Mississippi and California, and another is beginning in West Virginia, Tu said.