Kits combat ODs
Naloxone take-home antidote soon available
Dawne Smallwood’s eyes filled with tears as she contemplated how a Wednesday announcement could have saved her son, Nathan.
“He just had a demon he could not beat,” the St. John’s woman said as she stood on the steps of Confederation Building at a rally associated with international overdose awareness day.
Smallwood said her son, 23, died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in April 2015.
“He was the most beautiful person,” she said.
Five people in total died from a fentanyl-related death in 2015. Fentanyl is said to be about 100 times more toxic than morphine, heroin or oxycodone.
Those deaths might have been helped by a drug that Health Minister John Haggie announced Wednesday — naloxone, an antidote for opioid overdose. The take-home kits will be made available provincewide through outreach workers and the regional health authorities.
Smallwood urged opioid drug users to get one when they become available and she said parents should take note that her son was from a good family and it could happen to anyone.
“If he had this, and the friends he was doing drugs with instead of leaving him there to die … He would be with us today.”
Dawne Smallwood, mother of son who died of fentanyl overdose
“He was battling addictions for six years. Nothing seemed to work. Finally drugs took his life,” she said.
“If he had this, and the friends he was doing drugs with instead of leaving him there to die … He would be with us today.”
Haggie said Wednesday the five fentanyl-related deaths in 2015 are equal to what previously occurred over a 16-year period. And because of flaws in data collection, there’s no accessible data on how many people have been hospitalized or permanently disabled because of fentanyl. “Deaths are just the tip of the iceberg, the very tip,” he told The Telegram.
“Five in a year compared to five in the previous 16 years,” Haggie said. “I don’t want to be caught napping in a year’s time when that comes 10 or 15 if by something simple and relatively inexpensive we can flatten that out. I think it was the right thing to do in my time.
“If it saves one or two lives I think it’s an investment.”
Naloxone is crucial as an on-hand drug to combat opioid overdose where a patient stops breathing — even with an ambulance response time benchmark in the urban area of nine minutes.
“In a rural area where 15-29 minutes is acceptable, you would be dead long before then,” Haggie said.
There are other measures at play to try to combat the opioid epidemic.
One is with PharmaNet coming Jan. 1, a mandatory online connection of all pharmacies in the province. That online access should cut down the number of prescribed opioids as doctors will see how they compare to their peers. It should also prevent patients from obtaining duplicate prescriptions, Haggie said.
Such prescription-monitoring measures could reduce the amount of opioids on the street by 30-50 per cent, he said.
The province is also looking at legislation to establish secure detox for minors.
And it’s considering adopting a replacement for the opioid addiction treatment drug methadone with suboxone, which among its benefits, is not addictive. That requires regulatory change.
When OxyContin came on the market years ago it was touted to doctors as a miracle pain reliever. But it swiftly became recognized as highly addictive, and subsequently highly lucrative when obtained and sold on the street by drug dealers and users.
“The physicians were sold a bill of goods,” Haggie said of the marketing by the drug manufacturer.
Now OxyContin is available as neoOxys, a form less desirable in the drug culture. But even if the prescription drug overuse is cut down, it’s not the end of the problem, Haggie said.
Fake oxys are manufactured in illegal drug labs around the country as little green monsters.
“Because people are making these things in sheds by the thousands and they look like Oxys. They have the right colour and everything. They could have anything in them — you just don’t know,” Haggie said.
He noted in other jurisdictions that have controlled the widespread overuse of prescription opioids, drug dealers have stepped up the manufacture and distribution of Fentanyl, heroin and W-18, a designer opioid said to be even more powerful than Fentanyl.
With $180,000, about 1,200 naloxone kits will be distributed to target populations by the regional health authorities and the Safe Works Access Program (SWAP), Haggie announced early Wednesday.
SWAP is operated by the AIDS Committee of Newfoundland and Labrador. Kits will be provided free of charge. They will include naloxone, single-use syringes, a pair of latex gloves, alcohol swabs, a one-way rescue breathing barrier mask and a step-by-step instruction pamphlet. It is anticipated that kits will be ready for distribution early this fall.
NDP St. John’s Centre MHA Gerry Rogers said Haggie’s announcement was good news.
“It’s so rare we have a good-news story in Newfoundland and Labrador right now around addictions,” Rogers said.
“I am really supportive of this great move.”
Rogers said doctors and activists who called for the naloxone to be made available should be praised.
Naloxone was deregulated by the federal government in July, meaning it could be made available without a prescription. Haggie said the holdup for this province was availability of the right form of the drug.