- Credibility:
CHICAGO — A new team of first responders will specialize in helping people experiencing drug overdoses and will expand its effort to provide emergency mental health care that does not rely on police.
The city’s Opioid Response Team launched Monday on the West Side, according to a news release. The team has a paramedic and a peer recovery specialist from the University of Illinois Chicago Outreach Intervention Project who will team up to help people with substance use emergencies, according to the city.
The team members will do things like give people Narcan and follow-up support after an overdose, officials said.
The team will work weekdays in East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park and Humboldt Park, the neighborhoods with the highest opioid-related 911 calls, according to the city.
It’s the latest effort by the city to reduce police encounters with people in crisis.
The opioid response team will fall under the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement program, which already out teams of social workers and paramedics, sometimes with plainclothes officers, to assist people having mental health emergencies.
The first responder teams have responded to 539 incidents, with 465 follow-ups for further support and zero arrests, according to the city.
The first teams were deployed in Auburn Gresham, Chatham, Chicago Lawn, East Garfield Park, Gage Park, Humboldt Park, Lake View, North Center, Uptown, West Elsdon, West Lawn, West Englewood and West Garfield Park.
The city now plans to bring mental health emergency response teams to Downtown and Near South Side in March, officials said. By summer, teams will serve Rogers Park, West Ridge and parts of Edgewater, and the Far South Side, including South Chicago, Avalon Park, Calumet Heights, South Deering, East Side and Hegewisch.
Credit: Mack Liederman/Block Club ChicagoThe teams also will be able to serve people as young as 12, down from a minimum age of 18, and start responding to calls involving suicide threats as well as wellbeing checks, criminal trespassing, or suspicious people when they involve a mental health component, according to the city.
The newest response team comes as Chicago is in “the midst of an opioid overdose crisis,” Anna Dolezal, spokesperson for the city health department, said in November.
Cook County overdose deaths in 2022 were expected to set record highs, possibly surpassing 2,000 deaths, according to the Sun-Times.
Outreach workers say the rise of fentanyl — a synthetic opioid that can be fatal and now laces many drugs — is driving the crisis.
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