The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that more than 107,000 people died from an overdose in the United States in 2023, and a 2024 review of publicized deaths at music festivals found that at least 43 people have died from an overdose worldwide since 1996.
Two of the world’s biggest music festivals are right in our backyard—and an organization dedicated to ending drug-related overdose deaths has a presence at both.
End Overdose, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading awareness and providing tools to end overdose deaths, ran a booth during both Coachella weekends and Stagecoach. You can find the booth at Stagecoach right outside of the Palomino stage.
During a recent interview with End Overdose director of operations Maddie Ward, she talked about the organization’s relationship with music festivals.
“We started doing more work in larger scale nightlife and music events in late 2021, and 2022 was our first Coachella year,” Ward said. “In previous years, we’ve actually been with the Every One activation at Coachella (the festival’s ‘community care effort to support mental health and harassment prevention at the festival’), but this year, we have our own booth and are open for the full festival hours. We’re super-excited for that.”
End Overdose provides festival attendees with training that can save lives in opioid emergencies, and gives out two free doses of naloxone—a drug that can save the life of someone suffering from an overdose—upon completion of the training.
“We have some people who come up to the booth, and they’ve never heard of naloxone before, and we’re telling them about it for the first time,” she said. “Since (Coachella and Stagecoach) are all-ages festival(s) as well, we often get to interact with families with younger children who were interested in educating everyone in their family at once. We do also have a lot of people who have heard of naloxone before, and they’ve heard of End Overdose before, and they make a plan for their festival days to stop by the booth, because they know it’s important for them to be trained and equipped on how to respond to overdoses.”
I stopped by End Overdose on the Friday of Stagecoach to take the training and get the two free doses of naloxone. The training was extremely easy and helped me understand the process of recognizing the signs of an overdose, and how to administer the naloxone. They also gave me a card which allows me to get a refill on doses anytime I need. The workers at the booth were very kind, and answered the questions I had about the process of administering naloxone.
“We know that people want to make it to different sets, and your focus might not be getting trained and picking up naloxone, so we do rapid trainings that take about five minutes” she said. “We cover how to recognize and respond to opioid overdoses, and we cover use of naloxone, rescue breathing and calling medics.”
The End Overdose booth includes other interactive items to raise awareness about the dangers of drugs.
“We’ve actually expanded our activation through a new partnership with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, and specifically their Substance Abuse Prevention and Control bureau. Through their fentanyl frontline campaign, we’re working on raising additional awareness about the dangers of illicit fentanyl and promoting the use of naloxone to reverse fentanyl-related overdoses,” she said. “We have some additional interactive features that are designed to increase engagement and empower attendees to respond to those sorts of overdoses.”
Ward said people often share personal stories at the End Overdose booth.
“It might be the loss that they’ve had in their life of family and friends who have died from overdoses,” she said. “A lot of people who go to those festivals and that sort of thing, they recognize that overdoses are such a big problem, and we love interacting with them and seeing how happy people are to know that they can be part of the solution, and they have the power to respond if they find themselves in that sort of emergency situation.”
Ward broke down the “opioid overdose triad,” the three telltale signs of opioid overdoses.
“The first one is really tiny pupils that don’t respond to light,” she said. “This is a huge context one that we point out, since a lot of substances will make people’s pupils get larger, but opioids will make them get smaller. The second thing is slowed or stopped breathing, so we advise people to look for chest rise and fall, and to count breaths. Adults are supposed to be breathing about 12 times per minute, so anything less than that is a cause for concern. The last thing is going to be a lack of consciousness or unresponsiveness. We advise doing a slightly painful stimuli, like a trapezius pinch, and also just trying to talk with the person to see if they’re awake at all. From there, if they recognize any of those signs, we always recommend getting the medic if something’s probably going on. If they see all of those signs, we recommend administering naloxone if they have it on them.”
Ward said End Overdose distributed 5,569 doses of naloxone and trained 2,785 attendees across the two Coachella weekends.
Beyond the festivals, other organizations are working to spread awareness about how to recognize overdoses, and having the tools necessary to save lives.
Inland Empire Harm Reduction, an organization serving Riverside and San Bernardino counties, is all about improving the health and well-being of people affected by drug use, and providing the tools and awareness necessary to minimize the harm of drug consumption. The group is supported by the California Department of Public Health, who placed a number of billboards along Interstate 10 urging the importance of naloxone and being informed about overdose symptoms.
During a recent interview with Edif Greenmorrow, an outreach worker and data analyst for IEHR, they said the group’s first priority is harm reduction.
“Our focus is on safety and keeping people alive, so we spread information on using drugs safely,” Greenmorrow said. “We provide naloxone and safe supplies to the community. Our goal is to ensure that everybody has a good time and does so safely.”
Greenmorrow emphasized that IEHR’s focus on harm reduction is based on science and evidence.
“(Harm reduction) has been around for quite some time and hasn’t always gone under that name,” Greenmorrow said. “It’s been part of Indigenous communities and marginalized groups who haven’t necessarily had access to our legal system. Harm reduction is a practice of keeping everybody safe. We want to make sure that we are focusing on safety rather than control, because we know that we can’t control people. If somebody wants to do something, they’re going to do it, no matter what, so let’s not try to prevent what we can’t prevent, and instead focus on keeping everybody safe. Let’s make sure you have a good time and you’re safe.”
IEHR also distributes naloxone and fentanyl test strips to the community.
“We can teach anybody how to use (naloxone),” Greenmorrow said. “It’s very easy to use, very straightforward, so it takes five minutes to walk somebody through it. If we encounter somebody (overdosing), we will administer it, but most naloxone administration happens with community members who are there at the time. It’s one of the reasons it’s really important for as many people as possible to carry naloxone, especially in settings where it might be important.”
Greenmorrow urged festival-goers—and anyone who may use drugs—to be mindful of their substances.
“Our (drug) supply is not regulated, so cross contamination can be common,” they said. “Not everybody’s going to wipe down their surface between packaging one thing and the next, or they may reuse a baggie. Fentanyl or other opioids can appear in anything because of that, so that’s one of the reasons we highly recommend those test strips and naloxone.”