In the unforgiving summer sun of Friday, Sept. 8, 2023, a group of Wesleyan students sat outside Usdan University Center, a few dozen feet away from the official club fair. Armed with a hastily constructed poster made of cardboard scavenged from the College of the Environment, they coaxed students visiting the fair to sign up for their fledgling organization, the Wesleyan Harm Reduction Initiative (WesHRI).

Despite having neither a track record nor official club status (hence their distance from the fair), the group, headed by Nia Chetkovich ’26, ended the afternoon with their sign-up sheet filled front to back and a group chat of over 50 people. The group aims to reduce the risk of dangerous drug use on campus through info sessions, distribution of drug safety materials, and collaboration with University services. This work comes in the context of the nation’s opioid crisis; 1,476 people died of opioid overdoses in 2022 in Connecticut.

Five months later, through an anonymous request form, the group has distributed over 100 single-dose kits of naloxone, a drug that can rapidly reverse opioid overdoses, and trained campus Greek organizations on the use of naloxone. They have also handed out over 300 test strips for fentanyl, a lethal opioid that substance manufacturers sometimes lace other drugs with.

The idea of harm reduction gained popularity in the 1980s during the European and American AIDS crises.

“SAMHSA [the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration] defines harm reduction as practical and transformative approach that incorporates community-driven public health strategies—including prevention, risk reduction, and health promotion—to empower people who use drugs (and their families) with the choice to live healthy, self-directed, and purpose-filled lives,” a memo by SAMHSA reads.

Harm-reduction practices include naloxone distribution, syringe exchange programs, provision of access to safe drug supplies (either test kits or centers that supply pharmaceutical-grade drugs), and supervised injection sites. The approach acknowledges that drug use is a complex phenomenon; some drug users may benefit most from an approach that does not immediately limit their drug use. Harm reduction is meant to complement other strategies, like treatment centers and drug regulation, for a comprehensive response to drug crises.

This multifaceted approach drew Chetkovich, who lost a close friend to an overdose in high school, to harm reduction. In an interview with The Argus, she explained that she was initially unaware of the practice; only after losing her friend did she discover harm reduction. For Chetkovich, this work became both a means to cope with that loss as well as a new lens through which she could consider her friend’s substance use.

“I thought I was going to have to take off a year because I did not know how I was going to engage with people who use drugs on campus, just because I had been so deeply freaked out,” Chetkovich said. “I didn’t really know how to engage with it. But then harm reduction…presented as a really meaningful way to think about the way my peers are using substances and how it could be safer.”

During her first year at Wesleyan, Chetkovich started working with the Middletown Harm Reduction Initiative (MHRI), an organization founded in 2019 by Livia Cox ’22 and Nick Wells ’20 MA ’21, two EMTs working in Middlesex County. Through the MHRI, Chetkovich met workers from statewide harm reduction organizations such as the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance (CHRA). Towards the end of the year, Chetkovich began to develop the idea for a University-specific harm reduction group.

“I wanted a way for Middletown resources, or at least harm reduction resources in general, to be accessible to the Wesleyan population,” Chetkovich said. “But I know Wesleyan students are not going to walk down to Main Street and go engage with the community.”

Chetkovich acknowledges that she does not have a complete understanding of drug use on campus, but she is aware that the school has a history of synthetic drug consumption, from hallucinogens during the 60s and 70s to several near-fatal overdoses resulting from fake MDMA (ecstasy) in 2015.

“[Educating people on overdose prevention] is the first step to potentially saving someone’s life,” Chetkovich said. “I hope to God that none of the Narcans ever have to be used. That would be awesome.”

WesHRI focused its efforts last semester on distributing as much naloxone as possible. Through an anonymous form, students and other members of the Wesleyan community could request a Narcan kit to be distributed to them through a WesHRI member. The form ranked requesters with low, medium, or high priority depending on their position at the University; for instance, resident advisors and Greek societies were ranked as high priority due to their proximity to situations in which overdoses could occur.

Although some are concerned about liability issues arising from unofficial distribution of Narcan, Connecticut Public Act 14-61 states that a person administering Narcan to someone who overdoses is protected from civil liability and criminal prosecution. Narcan is a non-prescription drug, meaning that ordinary citizens can safely use it without training. Moreover, if naloxone is administered to someone who is not overdosing, there are no adverse effects.

This semester, WesHRI is looking to transition from a focus on Narcan and test strip distribution to broader goals. They hope to update the information the University provides about naloxone supplies, establish an anonymous communication system to share information about tainted drugs, and work with Davison Health Center and WesWell to improve access to information and resources.

“A lot of the distribution jobs don’t involve that many people,” Chetkovich said. “So we’re trying to find ways to involve more people and make this a campus-wide effort.”

The University’s opioid policy, written in 2019, states that the medical director will purchase Narcan and provide it to Public Safety. However, upon calling Davison to inquire about the availability of Narcan, WesHRI members were informed that none was available. WesWell, which does have a limited supply of Narcan, is not listed in the policy as a resource. Chetkovich emphasized the need for clear communication about where Narcan is stored and which University staff are in possession of it.

“I know a lot of people are hesitant to share information with an official organization like WesWell, as a member of the Wesleyan bureaucratic system,” Chetkovich said. “But I think it is really vital that we have some sort of collaboration with them.”

WesWell has hosted their own Narcan training sessions and attempts to maintain a supply of naloxone. There have been some difficulties; for example, many students that attended a training in Fall 2023 never actually received a Narcan kit after they provided their email addresses for this purpose. However, for the first time in recent memory, student workers for Residential Life were given a kit after their Spring 2024 training.

“WesWell utilizes and embraces harm reduction in the health and wellness field and implements harm reduction initiatives often and consistently,” WesWell Director September Dibble wrote in an email to The Argus. “In the WesWell Resource Room we offer fentanyl testing strips, safer sex supplies, safe drug disposal supplies, pregnancy tests and more, which folks are welcome to come and take as needed.”

Despite the work that WesHRI has done so far, they have not yet been granted official club status by the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA). Since WesWell serves a similar purpose to WesHRI, the application was denied on the grounds that a harm reduction organization already exists on campus. However, Chetkovich is not discouraged.

“[The WSA] has been super cooperative,” Chetkovich said. “They clarified that there were only a couple of things that we needed to change…at the end of the day, initiatives can happen with a bunch of determined people who call themselves something and don’t have official status.”

Without any school funding, WesHRI has relied on the MHRI and the CHRA, which is funded by the U.S. government, to acquire Narcan and test strips. In the future, Chetkovich hopes that University funds might be used to reimburse the CHRA, at least partially, for the supplies donated.

“They do a lot of really hard work and serve populations who need the harm reduction materials a lot more than us,” Chetkovich said. “We are always very careful about what to ask for and when to ask for it.”

As with any widespread social issue, harm reduction advocates are not under the illusion that their efforts will solve the whole problem. Lack of awareness, thinly spread resources, and bureaucratic red tape often make it frustratingly difficult to take big steps, and addiction crises tend to move faster than harm reduction efforts are able to. Chetkovich recalls a student that came up during the club fair in September, learned what they did, and left, remarking that she did not use drugs.

“It’s a very common misconception with harm reduction that you’re enabling the user or you are promoting substance use,” Chetkovich said. “It’s not an end-all be-all solution. I think harm reduction is a Band-Aid on a really big issue. And I think there are a lot more problems enveloped in substance use than harm reduction can really solve.”

When asked to envision the future of WesHRI, Chetkovich focused on the myriad of campus entities involved with drug use and harm reduction: WesWell, Public Safety, the Davison Health Center, the University administration, the student body, and WesHRI. A successful future, she said, would see close, frequent collaboration between all of these groups. Above all, students must lead the conversation.

“We’re the ones who know what the hell is happening here,” Chetkovich said.

Running WesHRI—from distributing supplies to coordinating with other harm reduction groups to advertising and administrative work—is no small task, especially given the group’s relatively small membership and still-unofficial status. As such, Chetkovich has taken a lot on.

“[Nia] is always doing everything,” Henry Ewing-Crystal ’26, a member of WesHRI, told The Argus. “She’s helped plan pretty much every little thing we’ve done, from the distributions to the different initiatives we’ve had.”

Such constant work, of course, is bound to bleed into personal and academic life, for better or for worse.

“It makes me feel weird about going out sometimes,” Chetkovich said. “Seeing people I love use substances, I’m like, ‘Uh oh, I feel like human Narcan’…. [Harm reduction] is very focal to my life.”

Does she regret that centrality?

“It’s crazy to say out loud,” Chetkovich said. “But it’s a good thing.”

Leo Bader can be reached at lbader@wesleyan.edu.