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Eight months after the Medford Police Department began stocking an anti-overdose medication in its patrol cars, the drug is credited with reversing nine opiate overdoses. Chief Tim George says officers have used naloxone, also known as Narcan, nine times since March 9, about three months after the department first stocked the medication in its patrol cars.  George says the department has seen a rise in opiate overdoses as heroin use has surged, following pharmaceutical manufacturers' changes to commonly abused Schedule II and III narcotics. Price is also a factor, he says. "What's going on that people need to understand is that heroin costs you 4-5 times less than an opiate prescription over the long haul," he says. "I think the age of the user has dropped." Cpl. Chris Dode, a certified emergency medical technician, helped start the department's program, which he says was implemented with the help of Medford Fire-Rescue and Dr. Jim Shames, the county's chief medical officer. Dode says that prior to naloxone being issued, CPR was officers' only way to respond to an overdose patient in respiratory depression, the primary factor in fatal overdoses. Medford police officers, he says, are routinely dispatched to medical and fire calls and often arrive on scene before medical personnel.   "There was no medication that we could give them until some sort of paramedic unit arrived," he says. George says that black tar heroin, imported by drug-trafficking organizations in the Southwestern U.S., has flooded the local drug market in recent years.  "There's heroin going north on I-5 as we sit here," he says. George says the department also encounters overdoses from prescription opiates such as morphine. Dode explains that naloxone works by targeting the same receptors in the brain with which heroin binds. "It will have a stronger bond with those receptors," he says. In the event officers have misdiagnosed another medical condition as an overdose, naloxone is totally harmless. It's only going to affect you if you're going through some type of opiate overdose," he says.  Police conducted joint training with the fire department to learn to administer the drug, which is stocked in police vehicles in the form of a plastic syringe with an "atomizer" attachment that allows the drug to be administered through the nose. Each package contains two doses of naloxone. Dode says Medford firefighters have access to both the atomizer and intravenous versions of the drug. Mercy Flights ambulances also carry naloxone. Naloxone's effects usually become apparent within five minutes of the drug being administered. George says all but one of the cases required only a single dose of naloxone to counteract the overdose. In the case of the one exception, he says, firefighters administered an additional dose of naloxone as an IV when the patient wasn't responding as quickly as expected to the first. Dode says the drug has a shelf life of about a year and a half. He says that while officers were initially concerned about the drug being subjected to temperature extremes while stored in patrol vehicles, it hasn't proven to be an issue. George says that while he doesn't want to scare people away from calling 911, it is possible that an overdose victim treated by officers could face criminal charges. "We will deal with that later," he says. "As long as we get information about where we need to be ... this is a lifesaving (tool)." Reach reporter Thomas Moriarty at 541-776-4471 or [email protected] . Follow him at @ThomasDMoriarty .