Addiction Treatment Forum reports on substance abuse news of interest to opioid treatment programs and patients in methadone maintenance treatment.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has for the first time advocated considering the distribution of the naloxone, an overdose antidote, as a way to curb the rising toll of overdose deaths in America.
The director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Nora Volkow, has said that the drug should be available without a prescription.
Source: Healthland.Time.com – April 27, 2012
Naloxone Debate: FDA Hears Testimony About Making an Overdose Antidote Nonprescription
Parents testified at an open meeting called by the FDA to consider whether the lifesaving antidote to opioid overdose — a non-addictive, non-toxic drug called
naloxone (Narcan) — should be made available over-the-counter, so that everyone can keep it in their first aid kit, just in case.
The meeting was sponsored by the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, whose director, Dr. Nora Volkow, has said that she supports making the drug available without a prescription.
Source: Time Healthland.com – April 13, 2012
Antidote (Naloxone) Hard To Find As Heroin Death Toll Rises
In the face of the rising death toll, the state of Washington in 2010 made the lifesaving opiate antidote Naloxone available by prescription. The drug, also known by several brand names, has long been used by paramedics and emergency-room doctors to pull overdose victims back from the brink of death.
It’s legal, but it’s not widely available, said Caleb Banta-Green, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute. “It’s an issue of needing enough demand. People don’t know to ask for it,” he said.
http://www.yakima-herald.com/stories/2012/04/06/antidote-hard-to-find-as-heroin-death-toll-rises
Source: Yakima-Herald.com – April 6, 2012
Since the mid-1990s, community-based programs have offered opioid overdose prevention services to persons who use drugs, their families and friends, and service providers. Since 1996, an increasing number of these programs have provided the opioid antagonist naloxone hydrochloride, the treatment of choice to reverse the potentially fatal respiratory depression caused by overdose of heroin and other opioids.
In October 2010, the Harm Reduction Coalition, a national advocacy and capacity-building organization, surveyed 50 programs known to distribute naloxone in the United States, to collect data on local program locations, naloxone distribution, and overdose reversals. This report summarizes the findings for the 48 programs that completed the survey and the 188 local programs represented by the responses. Since the first opioid overdose prevention program began distributing naloxone in 1996, the respondent programs reported training and distributing naloxone to 53,032 persons and receiving reports of 10,171 overdose reversals.
Nineteen (76.0%) of the 25 states with 2008 drug overdose death rates higher than the median and nine (69.2%) of the 13 states in the highest quartile did not have a community-based opioid overdose prevention program that distributed naloxone.
Twenty-one (43.7%) responding programs reported problems obtaining naloxone in the “past few months” before the survey. The most frequently reported reasons for difficulties obtaining naloxone were the cost of naloxone relative to available funding and the inability of suppliers to fill orders.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6106a1.htm?s_cid=mm6106a1_w
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) – February 17, 2012
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), in collaboration with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, National Institutes of Drug
Abuse, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is announcing a scientific workshop to initiate a public discussion about the potential value of making naloxone more widely available outside of conventional medical settings to reduce the incidence of opioid overdose fatalities.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-11-17/pdf/2011-29703.pdf
Source: Federal Register / Vol. 76, No. 222 / Thursday, November 17, 2011 / Notices
Site last updated May 15, 2012 @ 3:33 am