"Nasal spray gives families the power to reverse overdose" by Chelsea Conaboy | Globe Staff, March 02, 2013
The Foxborough woman could tell that her son had been using again. On that November day in 2011, he was hyper and overly affectionate. “Dear mother,” he called her.
She knew that he was at risk of an overdose. The weeks the 21-year-old had gone without heroin, as the family worked to get him into a treatment program, weakened his tolerance for the drug. When she awoke that night to screams, she was ready, as ready as she could be.
That and cocaine are for more important and dangerous than marijuana, and yet the government hates the weed. It makes $en$e: heroin and cocaine garner a better profit and are easier for intelligence agencies to smuggle; marijuana is a bulky, stinky, low-profit, health-enhancing, pain killer of a drug that chemical companies don't like.
Her husband had checked on their son and found that he was not breathing. As he dragged the young man’s limp body from the bed to begin rescue breathing, their daughter dialed 911, and the mother sprayed a heroin antidote called naloxone into each nostril. Then the family waited, as precious moments passed, for a breath or a groan, a sign that the drug was working.
Since 2006, health officials in Massachusetts have been distributing intranasal naloxone to those most likely to witness an overdose: outreach workers, homeless shelter operators, drug users themselves, and, most recently, family members. The program, started in Boston and expanded by the state Department of Public Health, is credited with reversing more than 1,800 overdoses from heroin, prescription painkillers, and other opiates.
A recent study found that the rate of overdose deaths slowed in communities where the program was active.
Yet, in much of the country, access to naloxone, also known as Narcan, is limited. Few doctors prescribe the drug, which typically must be administered by syringe. Some communities and, in the past, federal officials have resisted, worried that people would perceive naloxone as a safety valve and use drugs without fear of an overdose.
But attitudes are changing, and leaders in addiction medicine have pointed to the Massachusetts pilot program as a model....
Oh, no another Massachushitts model.
--more--"
The new methadone, which was just as addictive as heroin.
But hey, I know $ome pharmaceutical made profits so I'm happy about that.
