Answer Addiction

Tag: synthetic opioids

  • Narcan Administered At Record Pace In Boston

    Narcan Administered At Record Pace In Boston

    New city stats reveal that there were over 3,000 “narcotic-related illness” ambulance trips in 2017.

    In 2017, Boston’s first responders ran thousands of ambulance trips and administered Narcan for opioid overdoses in record numbers.

    New statistics revealed that Boston not only has a rising opioid epidemic in its own population, but that opioid use in the visiting population has risen alarmingly.

    According to the Boston Herald, Boston Emergency Medical Statistics revealed 3,557 “narcotic-related illness” ambulance trips to city hospitals in 2017—up from 2,848 in 2016.

    Twenty-nine percent of Boston’s narcotic-related ambulance trips were for patients who reported living outside Boston, EMS numbers show; this is a staggering 58% jump over 2016.

    Police and medical experts warn that 2018 could be just as bad with no signs that the drug epidemic is letting up. Boston police think it could be cheap heroin luring people with addiction to use in Boston.

    State police spokesman Dave Procopio told The Boston Herald that the drug fentanyl is increasingly laced into heroin to increase dealers’ profits.

    “Some users are actually seeking out fentanyl because it’s more potent,” said Procopio. He noted that the State Police Detective Unit for Suffolk County reported that a majority of current overdoses involved fentanyl.

    The Fix reported that some medical experts are seeking another avenue for reviving patients who have ingested fentanyl. The drug is so powerful that Narcan often does not work effectively.

    “Compounds like fentanyl, carfentanil, and other synthetic opioids act for longer periods of time,” said Dr. Roger Crystal, CEO of Opiant. “The concern is that naloxone’s half-life doesn’t provide sufficient cover to prevailing amounts of fentanyl in the blood.”

    Patients who overdosed with fentanyl in their system often have to receive multiple injections of Narcan over a period of time to be revived.

    Dr. Paul Biddinger, director of the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told The Boston Herald of the increasing number of Boston overdoses. “We don’t know what the cause is. The cost? Fentanyl? Unfortunately, it’s not going away for a while,” he said.

    The city of Boston reported that funds acquired to address the opioid epidemic are going to be put to use in the Boston Post-Overdose Response Team, or PORT. The program will be expanded and its hours increased.

    Paul Biddinger encourages “families, loved ones, even bystanders” to obtain and learn to use Narcan to save overdose victims.

    Of course treatment is necessary for recovery, but Narcan saves the person’s life so that they are here to participate in that recovery, he says.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Fentanyl Use Rising Across The US

    Fentanyl Use Rising Across The US

    The potent synthetic opioid has been showing up more on its own, rather than mixed with other drugs.

    The use of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid said to be 50 times as potent as heroin, is growing on both a local and national level, according to new research.

    A new analysis, conducted by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) researchers, found that fentanyl was present in nearly 50% of overdose deaths in Marion County, Indiana in 2017. This is a significant increase compared to less than a decade prior, when fentanyl was present in fewer than 15% of overdose deaths.

    “We found fentanyl present in 47% of cases,” said Brad Ray, assistant professor at IUPUI’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. “That’s nearly half of every single person that dies of a drug overdose. That’s far outpaced heroin.”

    These numbers mirror national statistics. In May, the Journal of the American Medical Association published research that showed that of the 42,249 opioid-related deaths in the United States in 2016, almost 46% involved fentanyl. Six years prior—similar to the IUPUI research—fentanyl was involved in just 14% of opioid-related deaths.

    The IUPUI research also found that over time, the potent opioid has been showing up more on its own, rather than mixed with other drugs, according to the Indy Star. When fentanyl first emerged as a threat to public health, it was said primarily to be used to boost the potency of heroin and other drugs.

    A previous study by IUPUI’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs from 2017 reported an association between tighter opioid restrictions and an increase in opioid-related deaths.

    Researchers looked at prescription data from Indiana’s prescription drug monitoring program and analyzed that alongside toxicology data from the Marion County Coroner’s office, which tracks the specific substances involved in each drug-related death. With that, they found an “alarming trend”: the prescription drug crackdown occurred alongside a “considerable” rise in heroin and fentanyl overdoses.

    “As people move away from pills, they do move on to heroin,” explained Ray, who was the lead author of that study. “It’s a cheaper substance to purchase but it’s much more dangerous because you don’t know what’s in it, you don’t know how much to take.”

    Ray went on to say that a lack of treatment options in Indiana exacerbates the issue.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Searching For The Next Naloxone

    Searching For The Next Naloxone

    Experts are concerned that naloxone may not be strong enough for synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and carfentanil.

    Naloxone is—at times—a seemingly miraculous drug. Within minutes of naloxone being administered, someone who was unresponsive because of an opioid overdose can start breathing on their own and regain consciousness.

    However, despite its strengths, there are issues with the drug that have left healthcare professionals and policy makers pushing for alternatives. 

    One of the biggest issues with naloxone today is that it is reportedly not as effective at reversing overdoses from powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil.

    In these cases, a person might need multiple doses of the opioid reversal drug in order to see a benefit. This isn’t just expensive, but can also cost someone their life if there aren’t enough doses immediately available. 

    Another issue is that opioids remain active in the body for longer than naloxone does. Because of this, someone can be revived using the opioid reversal drug, but later slip back into an overdose when the effects of naloxone have worn off. 

    Both of these concerns have led to the search for alternatives to naloxone. 

    “The strategies we’ve done in the past for reversing overdoses may not be sufficient,” Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), recently said in a speech at the 2018 National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit, according to STAT News. “We need to develop alternative solutions to reversing overdoses.”

    Dr. Jay Kuchera, a Florida-based addiction medicine specialist for Resolute Pain Solutions, said that “naloxone is being outgunned” by synthetic opioids that have largely replaced heroin in many areas of the country. 

    “Naloxone seemed to be great for the older opioids,” Kuchera said. “But now that we’re encountering these nonmedical, ungodly [opioids] like carfentanil… we need to get with the times.”

    In 2016, one report found that the market for opioid reversal drugs was valued at nearly $1 billion, so there are good economic incentives for companies to find alternatives to naloxone.

    Opiant Pharmaceuticals, which developed Narcan (the nasal spray version of naloxone), has had early success with a drug that works the same way as naloxone but lasts longer, so that the victim would be less likely to slip into another overdose after administration. 

    “Compounds like fentanyl, carfentanil, and other synthetic opioids act for longer periods of time,” said Dr. Roger Crystal, CEO of Opiant. “The concern is that naloxone’s half-life doesn’t provide sufficient cover to prevailing amounts of fentanyl in the blood.”

    Because many overdose deaths occur when a person stops breathing, scientists are also examining whether they can use drugs to keep a person breathing even while not reversing the overdose itself. For this, researchers are looking at ampakines, a class of drugs that can counteract respiratory depression. 

    Some people argue that funds would be better used to address the causes of addiction or to further study naloxone to see if it is indeed less effective against synthetic opioids, but Volkow said that having new and potentially better options for saving people from overdose is critical.  

    “There are so many people dying that we have to recognize the urgency,” Volkow said. “We obviously value basic science, but at the same time we have to recognize because of the current situation, the development of medication the can help address the crisis has become our top priority.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • China Presses US To Reduce Opioid Demands

    China Presses US To Reduce Opioid Demands

    “When fewer and fewer Americans use fentanyl, there would be no market for it,” said one Chinese official.

    China’s drug control agency has challenged the U.S. to sharply reduce its demand for opioids, The Hill reported. The agency specifically called out the United States’ role in driving demand for drugs like fentanyl.

    “It’s common knowledge that most new psychoactive substances (NPS) have been designed in laboratories in the United States and Europe, and their deep-processing and consumption also mostly take place there,” said Liu Yuejin, deputy chair of China’s National Narcotics Control Commission. “The U.S. should adopt a comprehensive and balanced strategy to reduce and suppress the huge demand in the country for fentanyl and other similar drugs as soon as possible. When fewer and fewer Americans use fentanyl, there would be no market for it.”

    While the U.S. doesn’t deny the situation, a congressional report from 2017 singled out China as the “top source” of all fentanyl in the U.S. The year-long probe found that fentanyl could be easily purchased online from Chinese labs and mailed to buyers in the U.S.

    Last November, on a state visit to Beijing, President Trump said that China and the U.S. would work together to curb the “flood of cheap and deadly” Chinese-made fentanyl from making it stateside. China quickly disputed the claim that it was responsible for the “flood” of fentanyl into the U.S.

    A recent Bloomberg feature called fentanyl “an Internet-era plague,” though fentanyl has been around since 1960.

    At the time, it was the world’s “strongest opioid approved for human medical use,” and intended to treat extreme pain and to help put surgical patients to sleep. Fentanyl is said to be 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.

    In 2014, Bloomberg noted, fentanyl killed 5,000 people in the U.S. By September 2017, the drug was responsible for more than 26,000 deaths, accounting for more than half of all opioid-related deaths that year.

    “China’s drug control agencies, now and in the years to come, will place greater emphasis on drug control cooperation between China and the United States,” Liu insisted. “But I believe that to resolve this the more important issue is for the United States to strive to reduce and compress the great demand and drug consumption markets of opioids.”

    China doesn’t deny that some of the NPS in America were manufactured on Chinese soil, but said that “the substances are not yet readily abused and trafficked in China itself,” The Hill noted.

    Liu contends that Beijing has already taken steps to curb the production and export of synthetic drugs like fentanyl. They have even gone so far as to place fentanyl and 22 other compounds on a controlled-substances list. Liu also said that current political tensions between China and the U.S. wouldn’t affect China’s resolve in putting an end to the manufacture and trafficking of those drugs.

    “The U.S. should strengthen its crackdown on distributors, traffickers and drug-related criminal rings,” Liu argued, adding that it should “investigate and arrest more lawbreakers.”

    Last year, Trump labeled the opioid crisis as a public health emergency (stopping short of calling it a full-scale national emergency), and promised a comprehensive awareness campaign to help deter people from abusing drugs. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Cocaine Safety Tips Rolled Out As Part Of NYC Awareness Campaign

    Cocaine Safety Tips Rolled Out As Part Of NYC Awareness Campaign

    Though critics feel the safety tips are promoting drug use, the health department counters, “We can’t connect New Yorkers to treatment if they are dead.”

    New York City is trying to get the word out about cocaine laced with fentanyl with a new harm reduction effort: issuing cocaine safety tips.

    As CBS New York reports, this effort has been spearheaded by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene because in 2016, fentanyl was found in 37% of overdose deaths involving cocaine—an 11% jump from the previous year.

    The Department of Health also told Forbes, “In New York City, someone dies of a drug overdose every seven hours. In 2017, there were 1,441 overdose deaths confirmed to date; opioids were involved in over 80% of those deaths.”

    To help make the public aware, warnings against cocaine that could be laced with fentanyl have been printed up on coasters, and health officials have been handing out them out at bars and nightclubs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

    The coasters being passed around the city ask in bold pink letters, “Using Cocaine?” and they warn the reader that “fentanyl, a drug stronger than heroin, is being mixed into cocaine and is causing a spike in drug overdose deaths.”

    Several of the safety tips on these coasters include using cocaine with other people so they can help you in case of an overdose. These coasters also recommend you have naloxone (Narcan) at the ready in case you’ve accidentally ingested fentanyl.

    The coasters inform the public where to access naloxone, and they recommend downloading the Stop OD NYC app, which has important information on the dangers of fentanyl. (These coasters also list the helpline 888-NYC-WELL, where you can talk to counselors and link up with a number of resources.)

    New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told CBS New York, “When the health department tries to figure out a public health campaign, they are very mindful of not wanting to have unintended consequences. But, let’s be blunt, tragically there’s a lot of people using cocaine and thinking it’s safe… Any way to tell people it’s not safe anymore and could be laced with an extraordinarily lethal drug—that’s our obligation to get that information out.”

    Officials from the health department also told the network, “The city is not encouraging drug usage—we are encouraging safety. We can’t connect New Yorkers to treatment if they are dead.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Fentanyl-Related Deaths Skyrocket In Ohio

    Fentanyl-Related Deaths Skyrocket In Ohio

    “There is nothing that worries me more than synthetic opiates—and what will be the next, more powerful synthetic that hits the street,” said one police official.

    Fentanyl is taking over the illicit drug market in the greater Cincinnati area, sparking a 1,000% increase in overdose deaths in Hamilton County. 

    In 2013, authorities there logged 24 fentanyl-related deaths. Last year, they counted 324, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. 

    The drug’s popularity has grown so explosively it’s overshadowed heroin deaths. Last year, the Hamilton County coroner found fentanyl involved in 85% of overdose deaths the office examined, while the county’s crime lab detected the substance in more than 90% of the drugs tested in the first five months of this year.  

    “Fentanyl and similar synthetic opiates have produced overdoses and deaths in not only unprecedented numbers but previously unimaginable,” Newtown Police Chief Tom Synan told the Ohio paper. “It is no longer a heroin epidemic but a synthetic-opiate epidemic.”

    The problem in Ohio mirrors the issue nationwide, Synan said. In 2016, according to a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, fentanyl was involved in roughly half of opioid-related deaths.

    “It’s the small amounts of the extremely deadly substances that are killing people,” Hamilton County coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco told the paper.

    Just days after the Cincinnati paper published its report, the Billings Gazette in Montana detailed an apparent uptick in fentanyl-related deaths in the county that houses Fort Peck Indian Reservation. There, officials are bumping up naloxone training efforts and considering reactivating a regional drug task force. 

    And in May, the Minneapolis Star Tribune detailed a spike in fentanyl-related overdoses in Minnesota, where officials are pushing to treat fatal overdoses as homicides. 

    Even as the epidemic spreads, officials in Ohio are warning it could get worse as underground chemists start pumping out new analogues of the dangerous drug, some of which could be more potent. 

    And, as officials elsewhere have warned, fentanyl is starting to pop up in cocaine and meth supplies. 

    “The introduction of synthetic opiates like fentanyl has killed tens of thousands of Americans and should be seen as the country’s most pressing health, national security issue and social crisis we face right now,” Synan said. “There is nothing that worries me more than synthetic opiates—and what will be the next, more powerful synthetic that hits the street.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Catching Fentanyl Shipments Is "Death By A Thousand Cuts"

    Catching Fentanyl Shipments Is "Death By A Thousand Cuts"

    “You used to have the tractor-trailer running up the interstate, that had to be met by someone and distributed. Now, you have an individual sitting somewhere in middle America ordering this thing, and it arrives as a parcel at their house.”

    Despite knowing that fentanyl is being shipped into the United States using the U.S. Postal Service, UPS and FedEx, law enforcement officials are largely unable to stop trafficking of the deadly synthetic opioid. 

    “The sheer logistical nature of trying to pick out which packages contain opioids makes it much more challenging,” Robert E. Perez, an acting executive assistant commissioner at United States Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security, told The New York Times. “It’s unlike anything we’ve encountered.”

    Fentanyl shipments are difficult to detect because they are so small. A dose of fentanyl the size of a grain of sand can be deadly, and since it is powerful in such small amounts drug dealers can turn a huge profit shipping tiny packages.

    “When you’re dealing with very small, minute quantities, it’s kind of like death by a thousand cuts,” said Patrick J. Lechleitner, the special agent in charge of the Washington office of Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

    A kilogram of cut fentanyl costs about $80,000, and can be sold on the street for a profit of $1.6 million, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), making it about 20 times as profitable as heroin. 

    “This is what makes the opioid crisis so unique and dangerous,” said Peter Vincent, who led ICE’s international operations during the Obama administration. “Traditionally, law enforcement has focused on large quantities of drugs like marijuana and cocaine. But very small amounts of opioids can bring tremendous profits.”

    In addition, the fact that fentanyl can be shipped directly to residential addresses after it is bought online makes it even more difficult to intercept. 

    “You used to have the tractor-trailer running up the interstate, with its contraband, that had to be met by someone and distributed,” Lechleitner said. “Now, you have an individual sitting somewhere in middle America ordering this thing, and it arrives as a parcel at their house.”

    Authorities have made some progress in stopping fentanyl shipments, most of which are said to come from China and Mexico. Last year, border security seized 1,485 pounds of fentanyl, and this year they have already seized 1,060 pounds of the drug. People have been arrested and charged after receiving mail-order fentanyl shipments. 

    This year, President Trump and Congress have approved more than $80 million to aid in the detection of opioids. Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said that the funding is key to making a difference in the amount of deadly opioids reaching Americans.  

    “There’s no doubt that more funding is an important component if we’re going to make real progress,” said Portman. 

    Despite that, many border officials continue to feel like they’re looking for a needle in a haystack when it comes to detecting fentanyl shipments. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Police Seize Enough Fentanyl To Kill 26 Million People

    The record-breaking seizure was one of the biggest fentanyl busts in US history.

    Nebraska State Patrol managed to seize 118 pounds of fentanyl during a routine traffic stop.

    According to estimates by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, this was enough fentanyl to kill 26 million people. This estimate is based on the fact, according to the DEA, that just two milligrams of the drug is enough to kill a person.

    On April 26, state troopers became aware of a suspicious semi-truck driving on the shoulder of Interstate 80. After pulling the truck over, troopers searched the vehicle and found the record-breaking stash in a hidden compartment. 

    At first glance, the troopers thought they had found a formidable mound of what was probably mostly cocaine. Testing of the drug was delayed because of the “dangerous nature of the substance,” as some drugs, including fentanyl, are dangerous if touched and absorbed into the skin or accidentally breathed in.

    It was fortunate they took such precautions, because testing revealed that all 118 pounds were fentanyl. This bust was the largest the state of Nebraska had ever seen, and is among the largest in the country, announced Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts.

    The driver and passenger of the truck, 46-year-old Felipe Genao-Minaya and 52-year-old Nelson Nunez, were arrested for possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver. Authorities estimate the product they were hauling was worth more than $20 million.

    Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is anywhere between 50 and 100 times stronger than morphine and 30 to 50 times stronger than heroin.

    The drug has exacerbated the opioid crisis and has been involved in a few high-profile deaths, including Prince and Tom Petty. Petty was found unconscious in his home and was rushed to the hospital in full cardiac arrest. An autopsy revealed that among the drugs in his system, fentanyl featured prominently.

    In Prince’s case, neither he nor those close to him knew he was taking fentanyl. Everyone involved thought the pills were Vicodin, but they were actually fentanyl-laced counterfeits, according to an investigation.

    Kellyanne Conway, who was entrusted by the Trump administration with the task of tackling the opioid crisis, suggested that fentanyl addiction and deaths could be avoided if people opted for junk food as their vice instead.

    “I guess my short advice is, as somebody double your age, eat the ice cream, have the french fry, don’t buy the street drug,” Conway said. “Believe me, it all works out.”

    View the original article at thefix.com