This new nonprofit plans to flood Bonnaroo with overdose reversal drugs

The four-day Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester has experienced overdose deaths in the past. And this year brings elevated concern since powerful fentanyl is showing up in more recreational drugs that are often used by concert-goers.

There’s already a whole team of medics who work the festival, which can draw 80,000 attendees. And the medical staff is armed with the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone. But they’re reactive.

“We are actually working hand-in-hand with the EMTs,” says Ingela Travers-Hayward, who co-founded This Must Be The Place with her spouse, William Perry. “We are showing up with it in huge quantities … and proactively hand this out.”

And while it’s possible to get naloxone at a pharmacy, almost no one does.

“It’s not something somebody puts on their to-do list,” says Perry, who became a licensed counselor after addiction sent him to prison for a decade.

The Ohio-based nonprofit has already worked its first of nine concert events this summer in Pittsburgh, winding up to Burning Man Labor Day weekend.

Hikma Pharmaceuticals, which makes a double dose of naloxone nasal spray called Kloxxado, donated most of the supplies. They’ll need to distribute 10,000 doses this summer.

“We’re collecting all of this data, and what we’re learning is that all of these people know what naloxone is. They’ve even known people who have come back to life because of naloxone,” Travers-Hayward says. “But we are able to be the people who give them their actual first kit.”

At Bonnaroo, the organization plans to work 24/7 with hopes of handing out 2,000 doses. But the best-case scenario, Travers-Hayward says, is that no one needs the life-saving nasal spray. Then, it goes back to whatever zip code they came from — where it could also save a life.