To name just a few (mostly U.S.) developments ...
- The UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs endorsed take-home naloxone.
- The American Medical Association endorsed take-home naloxone, thanks to the efforts of a group of medical students.
- The US Food and Drug Administration convened a major meeting on take-home naloxone.
- The US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is including take-home naloxone guidelines in their overdose prevention kit.
- The US National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the first R01 for naloxone distribution.
- Rhode Island passed a recent Good Samaritan law that included both naloxone and protection from prosecution components.
- Connecticut passed a law intended to expand availability of take-home naloxone.
- Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, spoke in favor of take-home naloxone on June 10th 2012 at the College on Problems of Drug Dependence conference in Palm Springs. In fact, 3 of his 14 recommended action items involved naloxone availability.
It seems that overdose death, like fatality from motor vehicle accidents, is finally being recognized as preventable, and naloxone as the seatbelt.
This is not remotely a comprehensive list of what's happening. Please post other developments, by commenting here or by contacting an editor to publish a more detailed story.
I think you need to start distinguishing between those naloxone initiatives directed primarily toward drug-addicted persons and the relatively few that might also apply to the general public who are taking opioids for pain. It seems that government officials and agencies are not yet accepting that naloxone is a potentially life-saving measure for ALL persons taking opioids for any reason, and should be made more readily available via multiple distribution streams.
ReplyDeleteThere actually is growing recognition of the potential for naloxone to save lives among people who are prescribed opioids. That's certainly reflected in some of the discussions that happened recently around the FDA workshop, some things CDC has put out, etc. But you're right, there's much less action compared to what's happened around heroin and harm reduction programs. I think that's due to there being very different constituencies (at least on the health provider side), and the doctors, hospital bureaucracies, etc who need to push naloxone access for prescription opioids are naturally going to be more conservative. Not to mention basic administrative problems like how is naloxone paid for through insurance.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, there are good demonstration projects, like Project Lazarus in NC, that have been around a while, and there's been a huge shift in federal and state government attention to the subject over the last year or two, so I'm hopeful we'll see some positive movement sooner than later.
Of course there is nothing to stop people who take prescription opiods from using existing naloxone training programs that are geared towards IV drug users, since the training and administration is exactly the same. Some programs give kits to people trained to administer it. Of course this means people who are taking prescription opiods need to be made aware of naloxone and where to go to obtain it.
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