GCHD to hold Community Resource Fair Saturday

MOSES LAKE — Drug addictions — and drug overdoses — affect almost everybody at some point, whether through their own experiences or those of someone they love. The Grant County Health District will highlight Saturday at its Community Resource Fair in McCosh Park. 

“We have a lot of people coming from different sectors within the community,” said Mariah DeLeon Munoz, GCHD harm reduction coordinator. “We have a lot of Hispanic resources coming. We have HopeSource. We have Planned Parenthood. We have us at GCHD. So, it's just really a lot of community members that are coming together.” 

“There's a lot of agencies and programs that have been implemented in our county, in our area, in our region, for that matter, in the last handful of years, that have been assisting that in ways that we never have before,” said Nokey Pando, who will be at the fair representing Oxford House, a residential program for people in recovery. 

The event is timed to coincide with International Overdose Awareness Day, which is Aug. 31, and leads into National Recovery Month in September. IOAD is the world’s largest campaign to end overdose, remember without stigma those who have died and acknowledge the grief of family and friends left behind, according to the campaign’s website. Last year, more than 105,300 people — about one and a half times the seating capacity of the Seattle Seahawks’ Lumen Field died of drug overdoses, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, caused two-thirds of those deaths. Between 2018 and 2022 there were 108 overdose deaths in Grant County and 10 in Adams County, according to the Washington State Department of Health. 

About a third of those deaths occurred with someone else present, according to the CDC, which means many of them could have been prevented by using Naloxone, commonly known as Narcan. 

“We actually have over 300 lives saved from Narcan (in Grant County) from 2018 to 2022,” DeLeon Munoz said. “And that’s all self-reported; it’s just whoever has reported to the health district that they used Narcan in an overdose. So, we know that number is way bigger.” 

The health district will have Narcan available for the public as well as information on how to administer it, DeLeon Munoz said. 

This is the third year GCHD has held a community resource fair, DeLeon Munoz said. The first one was held in Ephrata outside the courthouse, but it didn’t draw much of a crowd. Last year it was moved to McCosh Park in Moses Lake and the turnout was better, but because International Overdose Awareness Day fell on a Thursday, it could have been better still. 

This year the GCHD is partnering with the Moses Lake Farmers market to hold the fair during the market. It will be set up south of the market itself, toward the picnic shelter, DeLeon Munoz said. 

“We will also have a flag representation,” DeLeon Munoz said. “We will have white flags and purple flags. The white flags will represent the lives lost, and then the purple flags will represent lives saved from Narcan. And if people are interested and/or if they've lost someone, or they think, ‘Hey, I have a friend who used Narcan and they came back,’ they're more than (welcome) to decorate a flag and put it back into the ground. It's kind of a community visualization that overdose actually affects a lot of people.” 

Community Resource Fair
McCosh Park
401 W. Fourth Ave.
Moses Lake, WA 98837
8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
granthealth.org
 

    The Grant County Health District will have doses of the life-saving drug Narcan, along with training on how to reverse an overdose with it, at the Community Resource Fair Saturday.
  

      

    Flags dot the grass at McCosh Park during last year’s Community Resource Fair. The white flags represent lives lost to overdoses, and the purple ones represent lives saved with Narcan.