Efforts in McLean County for opioid prevention are ramping up as Narcan becomes more prevalent in the community and the county has started spending its Opioid Settlement Fund dollars.
Both the county Health Department and Chestnut Health Systems have invested in vending machines that dispense Narcan — a brand-name naloxone overdose reversal drug.
Nadia Klekamp, director of integrated community education at Chestnut, said the point of the vending machine is to give the public another avenue to access Narcan for free, within the community.
“It is invaluable to have in light of, as we've seen, increased overdose rates,” Klekamp said.
Between 2022 and 2023, WGLT previously reported that opioid deaths had increased from 25 to 32. In 2024, there were 14 deaths as of July, and Fentanyl makes reversing overdoses with Narcan more difficult. It can often take more than the two doses provided in a given Narcan box.
“Having Naloxone accessible to more people can only help,” Klekamp added.
Narcan is already available to people for free pickup at Chestnut or the Health Department, but the vending machines don’t require any human interaction. Health Department Administrator Jessica McKnight described it as an anonymous way to get the overdose reversal medication, which helps beat the prejudice some may have against people who use or know people who use opioids.
McKnight said the vending machines are also completely free, despite their perhaps confusing name.
“(It’s) not exactly a vending machine in the traditional sense of how that looks, (but) more of a kind of a grab and go,” she said. “So one (box of Narcan) falls and then the next comes through, kind of like at the grocery store when you pick up milk, and then the next one comes out there.”
Chestnut’s vending machine is already operational at its treatment center on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in West Bloomington. Meanwhile, the Health Department is still waiting for its machine, which McKnight said is on backorder. When it does arrive, she said the plan is to install it on the first floor of its downtown Bloomington building.
Opioid Prevention Coordinator
Outside of the Health Department, McLean County is working to spend its opioid settlement dollars in ways that fall under guidelines, such as for education and prevention.
In July, the County Board approved some money to go toward an opioid prevention coordinator, which is contracted through Chestnut. Klekamp said the nonprofit started receiving funds as of Aug. 1, and it’s already exploring ways to use them.
She said it’s unclear if an existing staff member will become the new coordinator or if they’ll hire someone new, but Chestnut already has a team dedicated to planning more trainings and education opportunities for the community at-large surrounding opioids.
“Anytime you can increase education, it removes misunderstanding,” Klekamp said.
Chestnut’s training, she added, involves teaching how to administer Narcan, what the impacts of opioids are on the human body and available resources.
Settlement Funds
Meanwhile, McLean County has multiple workgroups looking at how best to spend the remaining opioid settlement funds, which will continue rolling in over the next several years. The county is set to receive a total of over $2 million from the class-action lawsuits it joined against Johnson & Johnson and three opioid distributors.
County Administrator Cassy Taylor said $75,000 from the county’s settlement fund is budgeted for the prevention coordinator this year, and just under $30,000 went to Project Oz for youth substance use and opioid prevention education. Then, around $2,000 was spent on classes and exams for a Certified Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor [CADC].
Taylor said the county lucked out in finding other funding streams for projects that had been budgeted, including for medical and nursing supplies, as well as Medication Assisted Recovery medication.
Budgeting for next year won’t happen until October.
However, the county's Director of Behavioral Health Coordination Marita Landreth said there are already some ideas for spending, including for harm reduction. She pointed out that McLean County doesn’t currently have anywhere she knows of with sharps containers, which are sterile places for people who already use drugs to dispose of their needles.
“Even if that's not a behavioral health facility, if you've got a sharps container in the bathroom at your organization, at your gas station, that means that people who are injecting insulin or any kind of other injections that people take for immune diseases or those kinds of things, also have a safe, clean space for them to dispose of their syringes,” she said.
Landreth said the county may reintroduce the Safe Passages program, which started in 2018, but fizzled out. It was designed so people could go to their local police or fire station, and turn in any of their drug supplies without punishment, with the promise that they’d be getting clean.
“It was very specific on essentially getting you into a detox facility,” Landreth said. “And detox facilities, unfortunately, do not grow on trees, and so it was very difficult to promise that there was going to be a bed available.”
The idea is to revamp the program, Landreth said, so that when people are ready to quit, they can still go to their local public safety officials but get connected with an “emergency sponsor” who can direct them to available resources, rather go straight to detox.
She said it’s important to have Safe Passages in some capacity, because while Bloomington is resource-rich, behavioral health facilities may not always be available. In rural areas, she added, “the fire department, the police station, might be the only place where there's someone official” around to help.
Landreth said partnering further with the jail to help their population get medication or other treatments relevant to opioid addiction is also on the county’s radar, as are a host of other ideas related to opioid settlement spending.
Bloomington and Normal
While it’s true that McLean County received a much larger sum of settlement dollars than Bloomington or Normal, the city and town each have their own buckets of money to spend. Bloomington is expecting $880,000 over the next 18 years, and Normal is expecting roughly $360,000.
So far, Normal tells WGLT it hasn’t started spending. Officer Brad Park with NPD said plans are to allocate money in the 2025 and 2026 budgets.
Bloomington has spent around $47,500 of its settlement dollars, with a majority going toward tools for police to identify harmful substances, including Fentanyl.
Police departments in both city and town said they have additional trainings and practices dedicated to opioid prevention that do not use settlement funds.
