Elaine Almquist heard screams as she entered the Davis Square T station.
As she descended to the platform on the afternoon of March 2, she saw a woman sitting limply on a bench. Three riders and a T employee tried slapping her to wake her up.
The woman had no pulse.
Almquist asked the people with her if she had taken drugs. They hesitantly said no. “I assumed that that meant yes,” Almquist said. When she asked if the woman needed Narcan, which helps revive overdose victims, they said yes.
She pulled two doses of Narcan nasal spray from her bag. Almquist got the Narcan for free from a public health vending machine installed by the city outside the West Branch of the Somerville Public Library.
“If we didn’t have this, this woman would have died,” Almquist said later.
The Somerville Department of Health and Human Services installed two of these machines in November as a pilot program. The other is near the Project Soup food bank at 165 Broadway, East Somerville.
Almquist, a political consultant and president of the Davis Square Neighborhood Council as well as a protest trainer and former lifeguard, said she saw the vending machine near the library for the first time during the winter and dispensed two packages of Narcan immediately. “That was the third time I’d seen someone overdosing in the station,” Almquist said of her lifesaving actions in March.
The machines are part of a regional harm reduction effort. Somerville Health and Human Services and the Cambridge Public Health Department surveyed opioid epidemic victims from 2023 to 2024 to assess how the cities could provide better services. More than 85 percent of respondents said they wanted free public health vending machines, and nearly half said the machines should include Narcan.
The Cambridge Public Health Department announced in March that it was planning to install a similar machine as a complement to the Narcan dispensers in its city buildings. It abandoned the plan to avoid overlap with services such as the Access: Drug User Health Program, said Dawn Baxter, the department’s senior director of communications and marketing.
Crucial to residents’ lives
In Somerville, the machines have dispensed 158 boxes of Narcan, each containing two doses, said Tina Los, Somerville’s HHS director of prevention services. Many of those doses may be boxes people hold onto in case they see an overdose. As Almquist knows, it’s good to be prepared.
The machines have proven crucial to residents’ lives, even outside of drug-related emergencies. They dispense items more than 100 times a week that help with all facets of health, said Los. The machines are stocked with first aid kits, general supplies such as hats and gloves for cold weather, sexual and reproductive health products and menstrual health products.
Councilor-at-large Kristen Strezo said that the high cost of menstrual products can be a burden, and community members have told her that having access to them for free has had a positive effect on their lives, along with many of the products in the vending machines.
“These products are helping people,” Strezo said. “They are making a difference.”
Looking out for neighbors
The kiosks were paid for with part of the $528,000 received by Somerville from a National Opioid Settlement Fund. Los said HHS is working to secure more funding so the machines stay in the neighborhoods for longer. “The early results show this is a much needed and appreciated resource in our community,” Los said in an email.
Strezo hopes that these machines can help foster an environment where people look out for their neighbors, encouraging actions such as Almquist’s instead of what happened three days prior – when a man got trapped in an escalator at the T station, ignored by passersby. He later died from his injuries.
“This is a simple way that we are really showing that we are caring and loving each other and taking care of each other,” Strezo said.
Refused an ambulance
Almquist gave the woman overdosing in the T station two doses of Narcan. The people around the woman laid her on the ground so Almquist could perform CPR, but the woman’s pulse started again before Almquist could begin. The woman refused to enter the ambulance that was en route, and left the T station.
Almquist emailed Los to thank HHS for installing the vending machines. Mayor Jake Wilson commended Almquist for her actions at an April 16 meeting of the Somerville Board of Health. “I loved these vending machines even before that. Hearing that story solidified why these are such awesome things,” Wilson said.
The night of the rescue, Almquist told fellow Davis Square Neighborhood Council members to grab a box of Narcan. She hopes others will do the same.
“I hope they never need it, but if they need it, they can literally save somebody’s life,” Almquist said.
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