NPR Exclusive: U.S. overdose deaths plummet, saving thousands of lives
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https://www.npr.org/2024/09/18/nx-s1-5107417/overdose-fatal-fentanyl-death-opioid
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/18/nx-s1-5107417/overdose-fatal-fentanyl-death-opioid
Yeah! I always keep Narcan in my desk. And it seems a lot of people know how to use it (literally just plug & push). It's widely available, given out for free, distributed to broad populations regardless of drug use.
Narcan is one of the biggest revolutions in medical care since the invention of fentanyl.
Find out where you can get one.
Is it coincidence that more and more states are legalizing pot?
Maybe. Who's to say? Oh, you mean besides basic cause and effect? Yeah maybe.
Emt for the past like 16 years, here.
The answer is no.
Everyone gets handed out nasal narcan, it's easy to administer, you can buy it at target, pretty much all police, ems, and fire carry some, and after the past 5 years most addicts know what it is and how it's used. Tons of ems districts will leave addicts that overdosed with doses of narcan to keep with family/friends for when they do it again. That way they get saved without 911 even getting called half the time, since most addicts don't want to have cops show up and get in trouble.
It's not the weed. It's just narcan and awareness.
There's been a retail explosion with the thca loophole through the 2018 farm bill. It's really only picked up the last couple of years with both price plummeting and access skyrocketing this year.
Technical legality has meant many of these sellers are using regular billing systems (Card payments, not cash only) are shipping via usps, and using square space to build retail sites.
They'll know this is as least partially part of the cause is they numbers go up once congress closes the farm bill loophole.
That coupled with the drastic reduction in opiate scripts helps. The hardcore have died or are finding treatment, the interested are finding little supply to start the habit, it's all around a good thing to have fewer opiate painkillers in use. They absolutely have a place in society but that place should be "everywhere".
I'm pretty damned sore (heh) about the tightening of opiates. It's gone so far as to be ludicrous.
Sliced a good chunk off my thumb couple of years back. It was late so my wife bandaged me up best she could, the bottom layer being gauze. By the time I got to the ER the next day, that gauge was embedded in the wound. Jesus, it was hell just getting the edges a little loose and you could see where the wound was perfectly flat. That bad.
We soaked it in H2O2, didn't do much. I was all but begging for a shot of lidocaine and they treated me like I was "seeking", refused and refused. Finally got a little, not nearly enough. Ended up bent over the table while the doctor ripped it off. Jesus Christ, blood came pouring. And FFS, this was wound was in a major nerve concentration! Again, this wasn't a scratch, doctor even said I'd be deformed for life. (Modern wound care grew almost all of it back with very little pain!)
And don't start me on Xanax. Because of the addicts I can no longer have the one drug that ever worked for my depression.
And the increased availability of naloxone to emergency responders, opioid users, and the general public.
Its worse than that, the prescription model for opiates for quite a while was to maximize two things:
And this was because those two things going up meant profits went up.
When health is for profit, this is what happens.
Sort of. Its very expensive if someone else doesnt pay for it. CVS quoted me 350$ for a single dose inhaler.
It is true that its not hard to get if you go to places that offer help, but if I'm hiding an addiction from my family, I'm not stopping by the local methadone clinic for a box of naloxone.
As for marijuana legalization, its made a huge difference. Its one of the best comfort medications for handling minor opiate withdrawal, as it takes the place of maybe 5 or so other comfort medications that are often prescribed together.
It can't be abused the same way opiates can be, it has a ceiling affect and is not dangerous to the user immediately. On top of that, before it was legal, methadone clinics would either restrict their patients who used, or kick them out. Now, they see the drug test show marijuana and just don't care.
Thats mainly from the perspective of a drug addict. A drug naive person maybe is more likely to go to a dispensary and be happy with that rather than chase street highs.
Not sure what's with the situation at your CVS, or when you tried to get it (there have been some big changes to the regulations and policies around narcan over the last year or two that might have made a big difference if you tried to get it before then) but FYI, you can get a 2 pack of name-brand narcan on Amazon for like $45, no prescription, prime eligible, shipped to your door or an Amazon locker. Looks like they also have generic for slightly cheaper, and through Amazon pharmacy with a prescription you can allegedly get it down to $11 with insurance.
Not that I particularly want to support Amazon, but it's pretty hard to beat that convenience, especially if other ways of getting your hands on it are proving difficult.
You probably don't need to hear this, but for anyone else reading it, a little PSA: I'm a 911 dispatcher, narcan/naloxone is a wonder drug. It has no significant side effects worth mentioning, so in the event you come across someone you think there's even a snowballs chance in hell might be overdosing, go ahead and squirt some narcan up their nose. You're not going to hurt them, barring some really rare allergic reactions and medication interactions, it's not going to have any meaningful effects on someone who's not on opioids, maybe their nose gets irritated and they have some nausea and dizziness, and if they are in fact overdosing you might just save their life. I get a lot of callers who are nervous to use narcan when they have it available, but it really is that safe and easy to use (there's some generics out there that have kind of a fiddly syringe-looking device that you have to put together, they're becoming pretty rare I think most have switched over to the narcan-style pre-assembled spray)
And the effect is pretty dramatic. In the space of just a couple minutes someone can go from being, for all practical purposes, dead- unconscious, not breathing/agonal breathing, CPR being performed, etc. to up and talking (but feeling like grim death since they're often going to go into full-blown withdrawal immediately.)
There's stories of patients getting up being really agitated and aggressive. I've been on the phone with a lot of narcan cases, but I can't say I've heard that exactly, usually they're just very angry but not aggressive, more often they just try to leave before the cops or ambulance get there (which is a bad idea, because depending on how much they used, the narcan might clear their system before the drugs do, and when that happens they could fall right back into an overdose, and then there's no one around with narcan to bring them back again) still, you probably don't necessarily want to be crowding around someone you just narcan'd if you can avoid it.
