From The New York Times
Overdose now kills more people in the United States than car accidents, making it the leading cause of injury-related mortality according to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of deaths — 37,485 in 2009 — could be cut dramatically if Naloxone
were available over-the-counter and placed in every first aid kit.
But that’s not likely to happen until the Food and Drug Administration takes some action. Naloxone is currently available only by prescription. Although dozens of needle exchange programs, rehab centers and pain specialists in at least 16 states distribute it, the prescription requirement severely limits its availability to those organizations that can afford to have doctors on staff.
Naloxone (its brand name is Narcan) can be administered either nasally or by injection. It can rapidly reverse the potentially deadly effects of opioid drugs, which include heroin and prescription pain relievers like OxyContin and Vicodin. It does not produce a high — quite the opposite, in fact, because it blocks the effects of opioids.
Naloxone is much safer than some drugs currently available without a prescription. Both insulin and Tylenol (acetaminophen) can be deadly if misused, but it is impossible to overdose on Naloxone and it has few side effects.
Overdose deaths linked to prescription opioids more than tripled between 1999 and 2006. The majority of fatal overdoses involve either prescription opioids or heroin in combination with alcohol and/or another depressant drug, such as Valium or Xanax.
Some cases do occur when pain patients mistakenly take too much or drink alcohol with their medications, however, most seem to involve people with histories of addiction who get the drugs from non-medical sources. For example, a study of prescription-drug-related deaths in one heavily affected state found that fewer than half of overdose victims had been prescribed the drug(s) that killed them and that 95 percent showed signs of addiction, such as injecting drugs meant for oral use.
But while people with addiction seem to have little trouble getting unprescribed opioids, Naloxone is tougher to get because there is no black market for it and few people even know that they should seek a prescription for it. And many pharmacies do not even carry it, as it is typically only used by ambulance crews and in hospitals.
Naloxone is highly effective because it displaces opioids from the receptors in the brain that depress breathing. Slowed and eventually stopped respiration is what causes opioid overdose death — because this happens over the course of an hour or more, there is often time to intervene.
Unfortunately, many family members and friends of drug users are unaware of the signs of overdose and believe that, as with drunkenness, the best thing to do is let the person “sleep it off.” Such ignorance can be fatal.
The rare cases that have been reported where Naloxone didn’t help have overwhelmingly been either overdoses of other drugs, like cocaine, or situations where the person was dead before the Naloxone was administered.