Cade Reddington was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee when he took what he thought was a single Percocet.
The pill turned out to be 100 percent fentanyl. Cade told a friend he felt “yucky” and went back to his dorm room where his roommates watched him die, said his mom, Michelle Kullmann.
“They had no idea what the sign of a fentanyl poisoning or a drug overdose looked like, or had access to life-saving Narcan,” Kullmann said.
After Cade’s death, Kullmann and another mother, Erin Rachwal of Pewaukee, who also lost her son to fentanyl poising, worked with the University of Wisconsin System to get naloxone distribution boxes for people overdosing from opioids installed on 11 of the 13 campuses.
On Tuesday, Kullmann, of Waunakee, and Rachwal testified before the Senate Committee on Education about installing the boxes containing emergency kits of the overdose-reversing drug commonly referred to as Narcan in all of Wisconsin’s public and private schools.
“I’m certain if Cade and his friends had been educated in high school that any drug not prescribed could contain a lethal dosage of fentanyl, and they were educated on the signs of a drug overdose, and they knew about Narcan, they could have saved his life,” Kullmann said.
Read the full article at: https://www.wpr.org/wisconsins-public-private-schools-narcan-bill-opioid-antagonist-overdose-death