Paging Starbucks.
Via Chicago Tribune:
It was just before 2 a.m. when Catherine Altop, a 32-year-old woman with a history of drug problems, entered the bathroom at a south suburban White Castle restaurant, locked the door and injected herself with fentanyl-tainted heroin.
Hours passed. Employees knocked but received no response. They tried to unlock the door, but the key didn’t work. Finally, about 9:30 a.m., a maintenance man got inside and discovered Altop slumped on the floor, dead from an overdose.
Publicly accessible bathrooms like the one where Altop died last year have become a clandestine epicenter of the opioid crisis, serving as the setting for numerous fatal overdoses and close calls. Just this month, Cook County sheriff’s officers revived a man who allegedly overdosed in the bathroom of the Skokie courthouse, while another man died of a suspected overdose in the restroom of a Downers Grove Starbucks.
Experts say the seclusion afforded by these spaces makes them dangerous, especially as fentanyl has increased the potency of heroin to unpredictably strong levels.
“(Using drugs in public bathrooms) is a common occurrence because people want some kind of privacy to inject,” said Dan Bigg of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a group that provides health services to drug users. “When it comes right down to it, there are few other places as private as a bathroom.”
In response, some building managers have restricted access to their bathrooms, tried design tweaks to discourage drug use or equipped their security guards with naloxone, the overdose-reversing medication.
But Chicago activists say it’s time for a bolder step — the creation of government-sanctioned facilities where users can consume drugs under medical supervision.
“The data just go on and on about the benefits of these,” said Maya Doe-Simkins, a Chicago-based public health consultant. “There’s a reduction in overdose deaths, HIV, hepatitis C, crime, discarded syringes — all of those positive outcomes. That doesn’t just benefit people who consume drugs. It benefits everybody.”[…]
Businesses also face liability concerns. After Altop died in the White Castle bathroom, her family sued the company for negligence, and in January the restaurant chain settled the case for $120,000.
Jamie Richardson, a White Castle vice president, said the restaurants are installing keypad locks on their bathroom doors; customers will have to get the code at the front counter. That will allow employees to know when someone is inside, he said, and eliminate issues with lost or defective keys.
The company has also educated its managers about overdose awareness and worked with police to keep abreast of drug problems in areas near its restaurants, he said.
“We’ve just been hyperattentive, trying to be more vigilant about keeping an eye on things,” he said. “When you’re faced with something like this and you realize what the consequences are, it raises the stakes.”