Bend Police Are Now Giving Six Doses of Narcan to Revive One Person. The Supply Changed Under Them.

Bend, Oregon police officers used to carry naloxone expecting one dose, maybe two, to bring someone back. Now they’re routinely giving two to three, and reporter Emily Rogers documented one case this year where responders needed six doses of nasal naloxone, spaced two to three minutes apart, before someone started breathing on their own again.

The drug isn’t getting more dangerous in the way naloxone was built to fix. It’s getting dangerous in a different way naloxone was never built to fix.

Deschutes County’s own numbers show why this matters more than a single scary anecdote: the share of the county’s fatal overdoses attributed to fentanyl actually fell from 66% in 2024 to 35% in 2025. That’s not fentanyl loosening its grip. It’s fentanyl sharing the syringe with methamphetamine and other stimulants and sedatives that naloxone doesn’t touch, because naloxone only reverses opioids — it blocks the same receptor fentanyl and heroin use, and does nothing for a stimulant flooding the same bloodstream. CDC is explicit about this limit: in a polysubstance overdose, naloxone can restore breathing from the opioid piece while a person still needs oxygen and emergency medical support for everything else in their system. That’s a plausible piece of why one dose increasingly isn’t enough to bring a person all the way back — the opioid gets reversed, and the rest of the mixture is still working.

None of this is an argument against carrying naloxone, and it’s not a reason for anyone to hesitate before using it — more doses, spaced correctly, is exactly the right response, and it’s still working. It’s a reason the “just carry Narcan” message that harm reduction campaigns built an entire decade of public health messaging around now needs an addendum: carry more than one, know that two or three is becoming normal rather than exceptional, and don’t assume someone’s fine just because the first dose didn’t bring them all the way back. The drug supply changed the rules. The correct response changed with it. Naloxone is still free, still legal to carry in all 50 states without a prescription, and still the thing most likely to be in the room when it matters — it just might take longer than it used to.