Tag: opioid epidemic

Dr. Drew and Dave Discuss Overdose Death of "Dopey Podcast" Host

Chris from Dopey Podcast had been clean for almost five years before his fatal relapse.

Dopey Podcast co-host, Chris, 33, passed away from an overdose on July 24.

The Fix spoke with Dave, his friend and Dopey co-host, about the sudden loss. The two met eight years ago at Chris’s 14th rehab. They stayed in touch and became close friends.

Chris had a year and a half sober and Dave was three months sober when they started the Dopey Podcast.

“I loved Chris and I will always miss him,” Dave told The Fix, his voice cracking with emotion. Dave is unsure of the exact date that Chris’s relapse began.

Board-certified internist and addiction specialist “Dr. Drew” Pinsky is a big fan of Dopey. Back in March, he sat down with the guys to discuss addiction, rehab and romance for their 124th episode.

The Fix spoke with Dr. Drew about Dopey after his appearance on the show. “If you’re an addict,” he said, “and you listen to Dopey, you will find your people, and your story here. Listen to it and you’ll see what I mean.”

During the episode, it was revealed that Pinsky had treated Chris years ago after one of his relapses. Dr. Drew joked with Chris about what a difficult case he’d been.

After finding out about Chris’s death, Pinsky offered his condolences to Dave, “Chris’s death is such a huge loss. His was a great success story—especially after so many years of chronic relapses. This is a real tragedy.”

“Chris loved being sober and he loved Dopey,” Dave said. “He drove to New York every week—10 to 12 hours roundtrip—just to record each episode of Dopey with me. But the last month he became really unreliable.”

Annie Giron, Chris’s girlfriend, told The Fix that she was the one who found his body in the bedroom of their Boston apartment. Giron has extensive training in the medical field of addiction.

“Chris had just finished his MA and was working towards a PhD in Clinical Psychology,” said Giron, fighting back tears. “I’m studying to be a psychiatrist. I know his death was not intentional. He was not suicidal at all. We were very much in love and excited about the future.”

“I’ve never been an addict and there are no addicts in my family but I have always been passionate about the field of addiction,” she said. “Over the years, I have administered Narcan to so many patients in the ER. I treated one patient 17 times and Narcan saved his life. That’s why the minute I saw Chris, I knew that he was dead. I tried to revive him with Narcan anyway even though I knew it was too late.”

Dave said, “Over the past month Chris had started acting really weird. I asked him what was going on. He blamed it on exhaustion. I believed him. He was really busy as a manager in a sober living facility and always studying.

Chris had a long history of drug abuse but had been clean for almost five years before his final relapse. Dave, Annie and friends were concerned that Chris was close to relapsing. Annie said he wasn’t depressed but had been anxious and agitated. He’d spent a week helping a patient and he may have confiscated medication.

“Chris tore a ligament in his leg that was extremely painful. He couldn’t sleep and I’d hear him moaning in agony. A doctor said it would take 4-6 months before Chris would feel any better. He needed to do physical therapy which the doctor warned would be painful. He hadn’t wanted to take painkillers but the injury was excruciating.”

Dave said he’d talked with Dr. Drew and Annie about how far Chris had come in his life and how shocked and heartbroken they are at this unexpected loss.

Dr. Drew’s next Dopey episode will go live on Saturday, August 11. He and Dave will discuss addiction, recovery, and the frightening reality of America’s spike in fatal relapses.

View the original article at thefix.com

4 August 2018
After Losing 2 Sons To Overdose, Mom Shares Their Story To Help Others

Becky Savage is on a mission to help parents understand the dangers of prescription pills.

Losing a child is a parent’s worst nightmare. For Becky Savage, that nightmare became a reality twice within the same day, when her teenage sons Nick and Jack were both pronounced dead in her home after overdosing on prescription opioids.

On the evening of June 13, 2015, the boys attended a graduation party, and came home to check in with their mom just after midnight. On June 14, Savage noticed that Jack wasn’t breathing. She called 911 and frantically yelled for Nick, who was sleeping in the basement.

The paramedics arrived and tried to resuscitate Jack, before heading downstairs.

“I had no idea at that point what they were doing in our basement,” Savage said to CNN. “And then I remember one of them coming up and asking for a coroner. That’s the last thing that I remember that day.”

The night before, Jack and Nick had combined hydrocodone and alcohol, “a bad choice that unfortunately cost them their lives,” Savage said.

At first, Savage, her husband and her two younger sons were just focused on surviving their grief. “Everything just kind of seemed like a blur that day,” Savage said. “Your mind is not really meant to process something that extreme.”

However, more than a year later Savage was asked to speak about underage drinking. She thought she would be talking to about 20 people, but 200 showed up.

“It was just overwhelming,” she said. That’s when Savage realized that sharing her story and speaking openly about Jack and Nick’s deaths could potentially save other families from tragedy.

The Savage family started the 525 Foundation, named after the boys’ hockey numbers (Jack’s 5 and Nick’s 25). Now, Savage focuses on sharing her story with as many people as possible, and helping parents understand the dangers of prescription pills.

“We’ve talked to our kids about drinking, but we had never talked to them about prescription drugs, because it wasn’t even on our radar,” she said. “In different communities, there are still people who are unaware of the dangers. After I get done talking to them, the first thing they say is they’re going to go home and clean out their medicine cabinets.”

Since 2016, Savage estimates that she has spoken to more than 23,000 students. She has also testified in front of a Congressional committee, and the 525 Foundation has started organizing events to collect unused prescription pills. At just three events they’ve collected 1,500 pounds of pills.

“If you think about how much one pill weighs, that’s a lot of pills collected,” Savage said. “And when you think that one of those pills could take a life, that could potentially be a lot of lives saved.”

For Savage, this is a small silver lining to the unimaginable heartbreak of losing her sons.

“By me telling their story, they’re still able to make a difference in the lives of others,” she said. “There can’t be a better goal than that.”

View the original article at thefix.com

31 July 2018
Americans Not As Aware Of Opioid Crisis In Their Own Backyards, Study Finds

Americans are three times more likely to be informed about the opioid epidemic as a national problem rather than one in their own area.

Despite the opioid epidemic dominating headlines, a new study has found that most Americans are not aware of the extent of the epidemic in their own areas of residence.

The study, conducted by Laguna Treatment Hospital in Aliso Viejo, California, found that Americans are three times more likely to be informed about the opioid epidemic as a national problem rather than one in their own areas, The Guardian states.

The study found that a mere 13% of participants in the southern part of the country and 10% of those in the northeastern region felt that “drugs posed a crisis in their own communities.” But based on past data, states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Vermont have been among the states most affected by the crisis.

Dr. Lawrence Tucker, medical director of Laguna, tells the Guardian that the results of the study were surprising due to the prevalence of the epidemic “despite regional differences.”

“You can see those differences in not just the prescriptions of opioids but the amount of heroin that is available—China White, for example, is prevalent along the east coast as is fentanyl,” he stated. “There is oxycodone in the midwest and Black Tar heroin on the west coast.”

Tucker played a large role in the recent study, called “Perceptions of Addiction.” The study surveyed 999 participants, 45% of which were male and 55% of which were female, from all parts of the country. The participants were between the ages of 18 and 76, and about 33% stated that they had dealt with substance use disorder at some point.

In 2014, a Pew Research study found that very few Americans had knowledge of the growing opioid epidemic. Tucker and others involved in the study wanted to find out if four years later, in light of the growing spotlight on the epidemic, the perceptions had changed.

“The survey’s verbiage attempted to achieve admittance of, versus just awareness of, addiction across the United States,” Taylor Bloom, the survey’s project manager, told the Guardian. “We would ask questions using the word ‘perceive’ instead of ‘aware.’ For example: ‘Do you perceive an addiction crisis in your community?’”

According to the Guardian, Bloom and other researchers did discover some improvements when compared to the 2014 study.

“We saw increased awareness among Hispanic and African American demographics,” said Bloom. “But then we saw that Americans are 79% less likely to perceive an addiction crisis in their communities today as they were four years ago… which is kind of crazy.”

According to Tucker, race plays a large part in awareness.

“Some races, particularly white young adults, are being hit harder than others,” he told the Guardian. “Which is why the neighborhoods that are affected the most are certainly aware of the epidemic, because they have lost loved ones and friends. But the communities that aren’t really aware of the opioid epidemic is because it’s just not affecting them as much due to the racial makeup of their neighborhoods.”

View the original article at thefix.com

31 July 2018
Man Sues Prison For Addiction Medication Access

The 30-year-old at the center of the suit started using painkillers as a teen and was prescribed Suboxone five years ago.

Last week, the ACLU sued Maine’s prisons and one county jail over their continued refusal to give addiction medication to inmates.

Zachary Smith, who is scheduled to go to prison in September, filed a federal lawsuit targeting the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office and Maine Department of Corrections, claiming violations of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and also of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“Denying needed medication to people with opioid use disorders serves absolutely no good purpose, and actually undermines the important goal of keeping people off of opiates,” ACLU of Maine legal director Zachary Heiden said in a statement. “Going to prison shouldn’t be an automatic death sentence, but that is the chance we take when we cut prisoners off from adequate medical care.”

Failure to provide medication can lead to painful forced withdrawal and increase the risk of overdose.

The 30-year-old at the center of the suit started using painkillers as a teen and was prescribed Suboxone five years ago. “If I did not get on buprenorphine I’d probably be dead,” he told the Bangor Daily News.

He was denied access to his medication last year during a short stint in the county jail. So, once he knew he had prison time in his future—a nine-month sentence for domestic assault—Smith and the ACLU wrote a letter to the state’s correctional system requesting that he continue to receive his medication behind bars.

When they got no response, they filed suit.

Although medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is considered the standard of care on the outside, many county jails and state prisons refuse to provide it. In Maine, according to the Bangor paper, only Knox County Jail provides Suboxone, though the Penobscot County Jail offers another alternative, the injectable treatment Vivitrol.

Prison officials declined to comment.

“If we’re being sued, I can’t speak about that,” Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Joseph Fitzpatrick told the Press Herald. “Once they’ve filed, I’m not able to comment.”

Though the legal action could be ground-breaking for Maine prisoners, it’s not the first of its kind. In June, the ACLU of Washington launched a class-action suit against a jail there for denying inmates access to methadone and Suboxone as part of a policy the organization called “harmful, unwise and illegal.”

“The ADA prohibits singling out a group of people because of their disability and denying them access to medical services to which they would otherwise be entitled,” the organization wrote at the time. “The Whatcom County Jail has a policy of denying people with (opioid use disorder) the medication they need while providing necessary medication to everyone else, which is discrimination.”

Two months earlier, advocates in Massachusetts publicly pondered a lawsuit there, even as federal prosecutors announced an investigation into whether failure to provide addiction medications is a violation of the ADA.

View the original article at thefix.com

30 July 2018
Opioid Prescribing Varies Widely By Region, Study Shows

In some states, patients were up to three times more likely to be prescribed opioids.

Whether or not patients are prescribed opioids in the emergency room and how many of the pills they get varies widely by region, according to a new study, suggesting that despite increased awareness about the dangers of opioids there is still plenty of room to cut down on unnecessary prescribing.

According to Science Daily, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine examined insurance claims to see how patients presenting with sprained ankles were treated for pain.

In some states, patients were up to three times more likely to be prescribed opioids. Researchers also found that people who received more opioid pills were five times more likely to fill an additional opioid prescription over the following six months.

“Although opioids are not—and should not—be the first-line of treatment for an ankle sprain, our study shows that opioid prescribing for these minor injuries is still common and far too variable,” said M. Kit Delgado, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology at Penn who led the study.

“Given that we cannot explain this variation after adjusting for differences in patient characteristics, this study highlights opportunities to reduce the number of people exposed to prescription opioids for the first time and also to reduce the exposure to riskier high-intensity prescriptions,” Delgado said.

The study examined more than 30,000 patient records and found that 25% were given opioids.

“Although prescribing is decreasing overall, in 2015 nearly [25%] of patients who presented with an ankle sprain were still given an opioid, a modest decrease from 28% in 2011,” Delgado said. “By drilling down on specific common indications as we did with ankle sprains, we can better develop indicators to monitor efforts to reduce excessive prescribing for acute pain.”

Researchers found that there was a huge variation between states in the percentage of patients given opioids. For example, only 3% of patients received an opioid prescription in North Dakota, compared to 40% in Arkansas. If states with above-average prescribing were reduced to the average amount, 18,000 fewer opioids pills would be prescribed each year.

In addition, if all patients were given the smallest supply of opioids, usually 10-12 pills, there would be a significant reduction in the number of pills distributed.

“Simply making these amounts the default setting electronic medical record orders could go a long way in reducing excessive prescribing as our previous work has shown,” Delgado said, noting that the concept could be expanded to other areas of care.

“It would be great to see analyses such as ours replicated in other settings, such as post-operative prescribing, where prescriptions are higher intensity. In these settings there may be greater opportunities to decrease transitions to prolonged opioid use by reducing excessive prescribing.”

View the original article at thefix.com

27 July 2018
Could Ketamine Replace Opioids In The ER?

A new study examined whether ketamine could work as an alternative to opioids for pain relief in an emergency room setting.

Ketamine could be a viable option for acute pain relief, working at least as well as morphine, according to a new medical review.

“Ketamine appears to be a legitimate and safe alternative to opioids for treating acute pain in the emergency department. Emergency physicians can feel comfortable using it instead of opioids,” Dr. Evan Schwarz, senior study author, said according to Medical News Today.

Schwarz led a team of researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who reviewed the experience of 261 patients who were given only ketamine to treat their pain in the emergency room.

The researchers found that ketamine was as effective as morphine for pain relief. There were no severe adverse affects reported, although ketamine did have a higher instance of minor adverse affects. Overall, however, the study authors concluded that ketamine is an effective pain relief tool.

“Ketamine is noninferior to morphine for the control of acute pain, indicating that ketamine can be considered as an alternative to opioids for ED short‐term pain control,” study authors wrote.

Ketamine, which is a well-known party drug, was approved for medical use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1970. Since then it has been used as an anesthetic. It is also sometimes used in conjunction with opioids for pain relief. However, the new study indicates that low-dose ketamine can provide pain relief even when it is used alone.

With more healthcare providers looking for alternative pain treatments that do not involve opioids, this is a promising finding. Ketamine is not addictive and does not cause respiratory depression, two conditions that are the main risk factors when using opioids to treat pain, particularly in older patients.

The study looked at a relatively small number of patients. However, authors said that its findings indicate that more research is needed into using ketamine as a potentially safer pain-relief option for acute pain.

“Opioids are commonly prescribed in the emergency department (ED) for the treatment of acute pain,” study authors wrote. “Analgesic alternatives are being explored in response to an epidemic of opioid misuse. Low‐dose ketamine (LDK) is one opioid alternative for the treatment of acute pain in the ED.”

Ketamine has been showing promise for treating a variety of conditions. Earlier this year, ketamine nasal spray was shown to quickly reduce suicidal ideation in patients being treated in the emergency room.

View the original article at thefix.com

27 July 2018
DEA Agents Who Helped Bring Down Escobar To Tackle Opioids In New Series

The docu-series will reportedly give viewers unprecedented access to how the DEA plans and executes drug busts.

Steve Murphy and Javier Peña are the former DEA agents who brought down cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. The Netflix show Narcos is based on their true experiences fighting the drug trade.

Now Murphy and Peña are behind a new show about the opioid crisis and the DEA’s efforts to fight it.

As The Wrap reports, this new docu-series will cover several different angles of the current drug war including what happened to the international drug cartels after the fall of Escobar.

The show hopes to capture “controlled busts,” where smaller dealers can still continue their deliveries in exchange for giving up bigger dealers.

The show will also feature doctors getting arrested for overprescribing opioids and pharmacists who are making fentanyl with their own pill presses.

Murphy and Peña plan to film in China, where you can buy opioids off the web and get them delivered through U.S. mail. Murphy and Peña also plan to travel with DEA agents through Europe on drug busts.

“What we want to do is show people what’s being done and what could be done,” Murphy says. “[The opioid epidemic] is now the leading cause of overdose deaths in the country.”

Murphy says the DEA is “onboard” with this series, and it promises to give viewers unprecedented access to how the DEA plans and executes drug busts.

“The DEA sees the seriousness of this epidemic,” says Murphy. “One of the things they agreed to do is take us to their Chinese counterparts and show us where fentanyl comes from, how it’s produced and how the pill press works.”

The timing couldn’t be better for a series that will tackle the opioid crisis head on.

Murphy told Fox Business, “The one thing that we’re finding out is that these new traffickers, like the ones we chased in the 1980s 1990s, are getting smarter at hiding their drugs. Now, most of them are coming through as counterfeit medications, and they are getting people sick, and they are dying.”

Peña added, “Today’s [drug crisis] is worse than it was in the 1980s because of how smart these drug dealers are getting in smuggling these drugs into the country in the most modern and efficient ways possible.”

The new Murphy and Peña show is currently being shopped around by powerhouse talent agency UTA.

View the original article at thefix.com

27 July 2018
Recovery Advocates Respond To Trump's Opioid PSAs With New Video

Two recovery advocates made a personal video about their addiction struggles in hopes of getting a meeting with the president to discuss opioid policies.

The Trump Administration’s quartet of “Know the Truth” public service announcements about the dangers of opioid use and abuse have garnered mixed reviews from the recovery community for their shocking tone.

They have also spurred a response from an Ohio-based recovery advocate, who has created his own video that details a more personal take on dependency and recovery.

Richie Webber, who recovered from heroin dependency to found Fight for Recovery, and his friend Chanda Lynn, of Jamestown, New York, talk openly about their struggles with dependency in the video in hopes of not only encouraging viewers to do the same, but also garnering a meeting with President Trump to discuss more compassionate opioid policies. The video has been submitted to a White House site for review.

Webber has been sober for four years from a dependency on heroin that he developed in high school after suffering a sports injury. He currently operates Fight for Recovery, which offers support for those with dependency issues and their families and friends. He said that he was encouraged by Trump’s initial statements about dependency, which hinged on his brother, Fred, who struggled with alcoholism before his death in 1981.

But when he saw the “Know the Truth” videos, Webber said, “Wow, this isn’t going to work.” The strident tone reminded him of previous efforts, which he viewed as failed attempts. “We did the DARE commercials in the ’80s, and that clearly didn’t work,” he said.

So with Lynn, whose previous videos about recovery have generated more than 8 million views, and Zach Yoney of Sandusky, Ohio, he created a message that talked directly to viewers—and Trump—about their paths to recovery.

In the video, Webber discusses his “all-American” teen years, when he was a track star at Clyde High School, as well as the multiple overdoses, jail time and friends he lost to dependency. The piece concludes with a direct address to Trump: “Let us help you help America.”

Since its release on Facebook in early July 2018, the video has been viewed more than 163,000 times. Webber and Lynn have plans to release additional videos, and hope to start filming a new effort in September 2018.

He also remains active with Ohio-area events to raise awareness about dependency and recovery. “We’re just trying to cover as many bases as possible,” said Webber.

View the original article at thefix.com

26 July 2018
Man Sets Out On Legal Mission After Seeing Opioids Destroy His Hometown

A West Virginia lawyer is working to hold major opioid manufacturers legally responsible for their role in the epidemic that has ravaged his home state.

With record-high rates of overdose deaths and babies born with opioid dependence, Huntington, West Virginia is at the heart of the nation’s overdose crisis.

It’s also home to Paul Farrell, a lawyer working to sue major opioid manufacturers, who doesn’t want his town to be grouped into the usual picture of downtrodden rural America.

“People have been underestimating me for a very long time,” Farrell told MSN. “I’m accustomed to being stereotyped as the Appalachia, redneck hillbilly.”

Farrell is leading the lawsuits for many West Virginia towns, who are suing big names like Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, Endo Pharmaceuticals, Teva, and drug distributors.

He says that he has personally seen the toll that opioids have taken on the region. “I have people my age that I know that are addicted to opioids,” Farrell said. “I know people that have children in their early 20s that they have lost.”

And yet Farrell isn’t overly sentimental about the crisis—he’s out for revenge. “We eat what we kill,” Farrell said. “I’m stalking. I’m stalking the herd.”

Many of Farrell’s lawsuits hang on public nuisance laws, with his argument essentially being that drug manufacturers and distributors created a massive and costly public nuisance throughout the state.

“If you drop a nuclear bomb right there—boom!—this is the fallout,” Farrell said of the region.

Paul Hanly, a lawyer who has sued Big Tobacco and is working with Farrell on his suits, said that Farrell is tenacious in defending his region.

“He’s a gladiator,” Hanly said. “He feels he’s on a mission to correct some wrongs that have adversely affected his state worse than any other state in the nation.”

Farrell is also unapologetic about the potential money that he could make from the lawsuits. The firms filing the suits stand to make up to 25% of their client’s portions of any settlement. With settlements that could reach $50 billion, the payout for lawyers could be significant.

“Sometimes it’s a feast. Sometimes it’s a famine,” Farrell said.

Farrell started his career in family law, before moving on to the more lucrative role of a plaintiff’s attorney, representing people who had been harmed. “I was writing very large checks to dumbass lawyers, and I thought to myself, ‘I’d like to be one of those dumbasses that gets one of these checks,’” Farrell said.

This time, he’s aiming for a significant payout for the communities that have been impacted. Farrell believes that past settlements between West Virginia and opioid manufacturers have been too small.

“It pissed me off that we got handled like that,” he said.

View the original article at thefix.com

25 July 2018
Elizabeth Warren Questions Trump's Response To Opioid Crisis

“You pledged that ‘we will be spending the most money ever on the opioid crisis.’ Yet your claim appears to have no basis in reality.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren is not impressed with President Donald Trump’s lack of action when it comes to the opioid crisis—and she is making that known.

According to Vox, the senator (D-MA) wrote a letter to Trump recently, expressing her concern.

“Experts and observers have concluded that your efforts to address the opioid crisis are ‘pathetic’ and ‘ambiguous promises’ that are ‘falling far short of what is needed’ and are ‘not… addressing the epidemic with the urgency it demands,’” she wrote. “I agree, and I urge you to move quickly to address these problems.”

In her letter, Warren highlights the fact that while campaigning and while in office, Trump has made promises to take action. In October, he declared the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency—a declaration that has been renewed twice since, according to Vox.

Next week, it’s due to be renewed for a third time.

“Six months after you first declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, you pledged that ‘we will be spending the most money ever on the opioid crisis,’” Warren wrote. “Yet your claim appears to have no basis in reality. While the U.S. Senate reached a budget agreement earlier this year to spend an additional $6 billion over two years to address the opioid crisis, your Administration’s own proposals to address the opioid crisis, including your most recent opioid initiative policies released on March 19th, lack commitments of federal funds.”

Warren goes on to ask Trump to expand on how his administration is taking action and whether the public health emergency declaration will be extended.

“Despite multiple calls to action from public health advocates and families whose loved ones have been devastated by the ongoing opioid crisis, your Administration is failing to implement aggressive and necessary measures to combat this epidemic,” she wrote. “Efforts by state and local governments and communities to address this crisis require support, meaningful action, and resources from the federal government.”

Warren concluded by asking Trump to respond to her letter, as well as a number of questions, by July 23, 2018.

Warren isn’t the only one taking action and voicing concern, Vox notes. In fact, Warren teamed up with Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) to introduce a bill that would allocate $100 billion to the opioid epidemic over the next decade.

Other senators are also questioning the president’s lack of action. In January, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and other democrats in the senate requested a Government Accountability Office investigation into Trump’s actions when it comes to the crisis.

In April, they sent an additional letter.

According to Vox, Warren says her letter and questions have not yet been addressed.

View the original article at thefix.com

25 July 2018