NAS and Opioid Policy in the News

“I’m detoxing.” This is the sort of news that delights the families of patients who are addicted to heroin. The promise of a seven-day detox solution is seductive. But detoxification is actually extremely dangerous. Nearly every addict who successfully completes a week-long detox program without further treatment relapses, and in a world with increasingly powerful synthetic drugs on the market, the risk of overdosing and dying during a relapse has become ever more threatening.

n 2015, state officials reported at least 1,451 men, women and children died from drug overdoses in Tennessee - but that's far from an accurate count. There are likely hundreds more. No one knows the true number.  Read more here: http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/investigations/2017/08/25/opioid-heroin-tennessee-autopsy-oxycodone-opioid-crisis/590149001/

When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.  

What looks like a radical shift to a more enlightened drug policy — one that favors treatment over incarceration — has encouraged many to hope that there will be far fewer drug-related arrests than there were in previous decades. I don’t count myself among the optimists. Read more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/opioids-drugs-race-treatment.html?smid=tw-share

There’s perhaps no more important mandate that we have at the FDA than safeguarding the health and safety of children. For that reason, I believe it’s important that parents and health care providers have the best information available to inform the decisions they make about a child’s health. There are few more common decisions that parents and providers are asked to make than the question of how to appropriately treat a child’s cough and cold symptoms.

Hospices have largely been exempt from the national crackdown on opioid prescriptions because dying people may need high doses of opioids. But as the nation’s opioid epidemic continues, some experts say hospices aren’t doing enough to identify families and staff who might be stealing pills. And now, amid urgent cries for action over rising overdose deaths, several states have passed laws giving hospice staff the power to destroy leftover pills after patients die.

The opioid epidemic in the United States is painfully evident in hospital newborn units across the country. In 2012 nearly 22,000 babies were born drug dependent, one every 25 minutes, according to the most recent federal data. As the opioid crisis has escalated dramatically over the past five years, those numbers have surely climbed. Read more here: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/science-of-addiction-babies-opioids/

As the nation’s opioid crisis has deepened, the number of drug treatment centers for pregnant women has grown. But experts and advocates say there aren’t enough services for pregnant women to meet the demand, and many don’t offer the drugs doctors would normally use to treat addiction because they are concerned about the effects they might have on a fetus. And some laws requiring that babies going through withdrawal be removed from their mother’s care can be a deterrent to seeking help, they said.

President Trump last week called the opioid epidemic a national emergency. Declaring an emergency on the opioid epidemic will send an important message and may help address some of the stigma that prevents people from seeking help. Read More here: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/healthcare/346501-steps-the-federal-government-can-take-for-combatting-opioids#.WZH0X2_V7ls.twitter

In this data brief, we compare trends in synthetic opioid overdose deaths in five PBSS states to trends in law enforcement drug reports for fentanyl in those states, as well to trends in the number of prescriptions of pharmaceutical fentanyl. Read more here: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/pdf/pbss/PBSS-Report-072017.pdf