Seeing an unconscious opioid overdose victim being revived from the brink of death by the application of naloxone has a miraculous quality. Tens of thousands of people are now being revived with naloxone every year. Yet, a recent paper by Jennifer L. Doleac and Anita Mukherjee challenges the idea that expanding the availability of naloxone will produce positive net benefits to society. We are concerned that fundamental limitations in that research produce misleading results, which if acted upon could produce real harm in the form of loss of life. Specifically, we are concerned that the results obtained reflect a combination of measurement limitations in the key variables, serious potential biases from confounding factors, and a failure to capture what has been driving naloxone use in the United States.
Read more here: https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20180316.599095/full/#.Wq_oPlJaD2c.twitter