Tag: opioid epidemic

Vermont House Passes Bill To Legalize And Fund Safe Drug Consumption Sites Over Governor’s Objection

Vermont’s House of Representatives has passed a bill to create and fund overdose prevention centers in the state, part of a pilot program aimed at quelling the ongoing epidemic of drug-related deaths. It’s another attempt by lawmakers to allow the facilities following Gov. Phil Scott’s (R) veto of a 2022 measure that would have established a task force to create a plan to open the sites.

If the measure, H.72, is enacted into law, Vermont would join Rhode Island and Minnesota in authorizing the facilities, where people can use illicit drugs in a supervised environment and be connected to various support services, including treatment.

Led by Rep. Taylor Small (D) and 28 other co-sponsors, the bill in its current form would earmark $2 million to support the creation of two overdose prevention centers along with $300,000 to study the impacts of the program.

After adopting a number of amendments, the full House passed the measure on Thursday, advancing the proposal to the Senate.

“People around the country are acknowledging that old, stigmatizing approaches aren’t working, while evidence is clear overdose prevention centers save lives,” said Grey Gardner, senior policy council for the advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), which supports the legislation.

Since 2010, Gardner noted, overdose fatalities in Vermont have climbed by nearly 500 percent.

“The priority needs to be saving lives, improving connections to care, and benefiting communities,” he said, “and that’s exactly what overdose prevention centers are proven to do.”

Among the more notable recent changes ahead of House passage, an amendment offered by Rep. Eric Maguire (R) added a local opt-in provision that would allow sites to open “only upon an affirmative vote of the legislative body of the municipality.”

Earlier House amendments to the bill doubled the funding for the sites—from $1 million to $2 million—and directed that funding to study the pilot program should come from the a state opioid abatement fund.

Even if the overdose prevention center legislation passes the Senate, where it has been referred to the Health and Welfare Committee, it still faces a possible veto from Scott.

“I just don’t think that a government entity should be in the business of enabling those who are addicted to these drugs that are illegal,” the governor said of the measure, according to WCAX.

Scott wrote in his 2022 veto message on the earlier legislation that “it seems counterintuitive to divert resources from proven harm reduction strategies to plan injection sites without clear data on the effectiveness of this approach.”

Though Rhode Island and Minnesota have state laws on the books allowing safe consumption sites, New York City became the first U.S. jurisdiction to open locally sanctioned harm reduction centers in November 2021, and officials have reported positive results saving lives.

Keep reading

West Virginia Senate President Says Marijuana Could Be Legalized To Help Curb Fentanyl Epidemic, ‘Sooner Than Later’

West Virginia’s Republican Senate president says that legalizing marijuana could help ease the state’s crush of fatal fentanyl overdoses, predicting that the policy change will come “sooner than later” but probably not in the new legislative session.

“My gut tells me it might not happen this year,” Senate President Craig Blair (R) said at a media event last week, according to West Virginia Public Broadcasting. “But you’re going to see it sooner than later, because that is a way to combat the issue.”

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that West Virginia had more fatal fentanyl overdoses per capital in 2022 than any other state in the nation.

The Senate president also noted that he sees a lot of West Virginia license plates at marijuana dispensaries when he’s visiting other states, according to West Virginia watch.

Speaking to the fentanyl problem, Blair also claimed at the event that “there is a problem in the state of West Virginia when marijuana, over 70 percent of it that gets tested, has fentanyl on it.” He is supporting legislaiton that would apply the death penalty to people who sell fentanyl.

It’s not clear what data, if any, Blair was referencing with that assertion. The organization Partnership to End Addiction says there’s “no solid evidence that marijuana is being laced with fentanyl.”

House Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle (D) also discussed his own party’s support for legalization in West Virginia.

“We’re a believer in adult-use cannabis,” he said, pointing out that policy change “polls well into the 60s” in terms of percent of voter support.

“That is something that we can have in our toolkit that can help pay for items,” he told the event’s attendees.

Keep reading

Could magic mushrooms replace oxycodone?  Ingredient found in psychedelic helps treat chronic pain by reshaping the brain, study suggests

An injection of psilocybin, the key ingredient in so-called ‘magic mushrooms,’ could offer lasting relief from chronic pain, according to new research.

A team of scientists at the University of Michigan found that rats given the psychedelic drug were significantly less sensitive to pain for weeks compared to animals who did not receive it. 

These results suggest that the drug is altering pathways in the brain, the study authors wrote.

Scientists suspect many chronic pain conditions are the result of changes to the brain and spinal cord, not just the body part that’s in pain. 

Psilocybin may modify these pathways rather than just treating the symptoms of pain.

In the new study, rats were given a small injection of formaldehyde in their foot to simulate chronic pain. 

Injections like this can lead to a month or more of hypersensitivity, even in the feet that haven’t been injected.

So, while this pain isn’t the same as a person with a back injury or other chronic pain experiences, it is one way for scientists to study long-lasting pain.

The lab animals were then given either a low-dose injection of psilocybin, a high-dose injection, or an injection of harmless salt water – a placebo to ensure the drug was responsible for the observed effects. 

The low-dose group received 1mg per kilogram of body weight, the equivalent of a microdose, while the high-dose group received 10mg per kilogram, a hallucinogenic dose. 

Keep reading

A DEFENSE-LINKED CONTRACTOR TOOK OVER A SUCCESSFUL CDC ANTI-OVERDOSE INITIATIVE. IT IMPLODED IN A DAY.

A GROUNDBREAKING Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiative to support harm-reduction groups across the country fell apart this month after the program came under the control of a federal contractor that has done no public health work for the government.

The National Harm Reduction Technical Assistance Center, or TA Center, was founded in 2019 as a coalition of harm-reduction groups partnered with the CDC to offer training, funding, and guidance to those working to reduce overdose deaths. Its success rested on the deep experience and the trust community members had for the three main partner organizations, which included the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, or NASTAD; the National Harm Reduction Coalition, or NHRC; the University of Washington’s Supporting Harm Reduction Programs; and a handful of other groups.

This month, the TA Center ceased functioning as it had for more than three years: Instead of a partnership, the project would be administered as a federal contract. And the CDC gave the sole-source contract to the Florida-based firm H2 PCI, a relatively new federal contractor with close links to the defense industry and the murky world of military special operations.

H2 PCI entered negotiations with the primary partners in the center to make them subcontractors but did not send proposed subcontracts to the groups until early November. Rushed by deadlines, those talks broke down in late November, according to Laura Guzman, executive director of NHRC.

As the H2 PCI contract went into effect on December 1, the primary partner organizations that had made the TA Center a success parted ways with the project, Guzman told The Intercept.

“From the beginning, it was clear that they had zero experience in the public health field and absolutely zero experience in harm reduction,” Guzman said. “It would be really challenging to work with a contractor who has zero understanding of our world.”

Advocates fear the takeover could wash away the years of painstaking work of building up the TA Center and sever its vital connection to on-the-ground harm reduction providers, making it harder for them to serve the people who rely on them for clean needles, naloxone, and other services, according to Maya Doe-Simkins, a veteran harm reductionist who has worked closely with the program.

Keep reading

OxyContin’s Reformulation Linked to Rising Suicides by Children

In 2010, Purdue Pharma replaced the original version of OxyContin, an extended-release oxycodone pill, with a reformulated product that was much harder to crush for snorting or injection. The idea was to deter nonmedical use, and the hope was that the reformulation would reduce addiction and opioid-related deaths. That is not how things worked out.

The reformulation of OxyContin was instead associated with an increase in deaths involving illicit opioids and, ultimately, an overall increase in fatal drug overdoses. Researchers identified that pattern by looking at the relationship between pre-2010 rates of OxyContin misuse, as measured by surveys, and subsequent overdose trends. They found that death rates rose fastest in states where reformulation would have had the biggest impact. A new study by RAND Corporation senior economist David Powell extends those findings by showing that the reformulation of OxyContin also was associated with rising suicides among children and teenagers.

The root cause of such perverse effects was the substitution that occurred after the old version of OxyContin was retired. Nonmedical users turned to black-market alternatives that were more dangerous because their potency was highly variable and unpredictable—a hazard that was compounded by the emergence of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute. The fallout from the reformulation of OxyContin is one example of a broader tendency: Interventions aimed at reducing the harm caused by substance abuse frequently have the opposite effect.

From 1988 to 2010, Powell notes in the journal Demography, the suicide rate among 10-to-17-year-olds fell by 36 percent. That drop was “followed by eight consecutive years of increases—resulting in an 83% increase in child suicide rates.” Based on interstate differences in nonmedical use of OxyContin prior to 2010, Powell estimates that “the reformulation of OxyContin can explain 49% of the rise in child suicides.”

Since “the evidence suggests that children’s illicit opioid use did not increase,” Powell says, it looks like “the illicit opioid crisis engendered higher suicide propensities by increasing suicidal risk factors for children,” such as child neglect and “alter[ed] household living arrangements.” He notes a prior study that found “states more
affected by reformulation experienced faster growth in rates of child physical abuse
and neglect starting in 2011.” And he suggests the suicide rate may also have been boosted by “parental death and incarceration” associated with the shift from legally produced pharmaceuticals to illicit drugs.

Keep reading

LSD And Psilocybin Could Be Powerful Treatments For Pain—Without Opioids’ Dwindling Effects Over Time, Study Says

LSD and psilocybin could offer promising therapeutic potential for the treatment of chronic pain “on a mechanistic and experiential level,” according to a newly published literature review that highlights scientific findings happening as part of the “psychedelic renaissance”—a recent thawing of stigma and opposition into psychedelics research after decades of prohibition.

What’s more, authors note, the pain-relieving effects of LSD and psilocybin seem to increase with repeated treatment, unlike opioids, which display “decreased therapeutic effect” over time.

The narrative review, published last month in the South African Medical Journal, charts both the history of the two substances as well as scientists’ emerging understanding of their methods of action. It notes that the drugs seem not just to reduce pain but also better manage the experience of pain.

“Recent neuroimaging studies combined with small sample interventions with classic psychedelic agents,” authors wrote, “may point towards a possible means of improving the treatment of chronic pain on a mechanistic and experiential level.”

Classic psychedelics, the literature review explains, are those that bind to the central nervous system’s 5-HT2A receptors. They include both LSD and psilocybin.

The way psilocybin binds to receptors in the central nervous system “has similar effects to LSD on cognition, emotional processing, self-awareness and the perception of pain,” says the literature review, “which underpins its potential therapeutic benefit in treating people suffering with pain. Numerous small trials of LSD and psilocybin for chronic pain have already shown a good safety profile, with minimal physical dependence, withdrawal syndrome, or compulsive drug seeking compared with other analgesic agents.”

While the two drugs are part of the same family of alkaloids, their history is, of course, much different. The review describes explains that LSD was first synthesized in 1938, meaning humans have used it for less than a century. Psilocybin’s use stretches back thousands of years. In the modern U.S., psilocybin use was popularized in the late 1950s, while LSD grew to prominence in the ’60s and ’70s.

While there have been no reports of direct mortality from either substance and no withdrawal following chronic use, the study says, “the use of psilocybin in clinical research ended at the same time as LSD research as the Controlled Substances Act was enforced.”

Associations with counterculture and anti-government sentiment meant LSD and psilocybin research was abandoned, authors wrote. “From 1977 until the early 2000s, no more LSD research was published, despite overwhelming evidence pointing towards therapeutic benefit.”

Prior research had indicated LSD might be useful in treating depression, pain, and physical suffering in cancer patients and others. Among seven patients with phantom limb pain, participants treated with LSD reduced their analgesic requirements, and two patients’ pain was resolved.

During what the review refers to as the modern “psychedelic renaissance” or “the new wave of psychedelic research,” studies have found that psilocybin or LSD may help reduce cluster headaches, end-of-life depression in cancer patients and chronic pain.

In a pain study, a small sample of patients who self-medicate with the psychedelics “revealed a decrease in the experience of pain during the psychedelic session and for up to 5 days after treatment, before their pain returned to baseline.”

“The most exciting revelation from these interviews relates to the lasting psychological and emotional effect the psychedelics had on those interviewed,” the review says. “They describe increased resilience, body-self-awareness and psychological flexibility and psychological flexibility, which led to feelings of acceptance, agency and hope.”

Keep reading

US States With Medical Cannabis Access See Decline in Nonmedical Opioid Prescriptions

Medical cannabis legalization is associated with a decrease in the frequency of nonmedical prescription opioid use, according to a Rutgers study.

The study, published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, examined data from a nationally representative survey of adults who reported nonmedical prescription opioid use – or using prescription medications without a prescription or in a manner other than prescribed.

According to the study, when states implement medical cannabis laws, there is a 0.5 to 1.5 percentage point decrease in regular to frequent (up to or greater than once per week on average) nonmedical prescription opioid use among people who reported using opioids in the previous year. However, these reductions were concentrated in people who met diagnostic criteria for cannabis addiction.

Still, the pros of legalizing marijuana to address risky opioid use should be considered alongside the cons, according to Hillary Samples, faculty member at the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology and Treatment Science in the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and lead author of the study.

“There might be some benefits to allowing legal access to medical cannabis in the context of opioid-related harms, ”Samples said. “However, from a policy perspective, there are much more effective interventions to address the ongoing overdose crisis, such as increasing access to treatment for opioid addiction.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of drug overdose deaths rose more than 14 percent from 2020 to 2021 in the United States. To understand approaches to mitigate this crisis, researchers have examined whether cannabis serves as an alternative to opioid use as cannabis might help with pain and symptoms of opioid withdrawal.

Keep reading

After Xi Jinping visit to San Francisco, city falling back into drug use and homelessness: business owner

With the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference over and done with in San Francisco, some business owners are complaining that the city is reverting into a den for homelessness and drug use. 

Restaurant owner Tony Pankaew said in a local media interview.that San Francisco rushed to clean up the city for Chinese President Xi Jinping and other foreign dignitaries for APEC.

“They cleaned up the people, they cleaned up the streets,” he told CBS News Bay Area. “They made the city look good and look impressive for the foreigners, for the politicians.”

“Now they have started to come back,” Pankaew said. “Slowly but surely. [In] a couple weeks [the city] will be back to where [it was] before.” 

Pankaew said he was hopeful that things will turn around in San Francisco, adding that a new skating rink near his business might attract more people, and therefore more business. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., was criticized on social media after admitting that San Francisco timed a massive cleanup effort ahead of the summit.

Keep reading

Marijuana And Opioids Are ‘Equally Efficacious’ In Reducing Pain, With Cannabis Offering Additional ‘Holistic’ Benefits, Study Shows

Medical marijuana and opioids are “equally efficacious” at mitigating pain intensity in patients with chronic pain, according to a new study in the Journal of Cannabis Research—but cannabis also provided more “holistic” relief, such as by improving sleep, focus and emotional wellbeing.

Researchers said their findings support the hypothesis that medical cannabis (MC) “alleviates pain through holistically altering the pain experience” rather than “only targeting pain intensity.”

“The results of the present study support the hypothesis that the effects of MC on pain experience are more holistic than those of opioids,” their report says. “MC may alleviate pain through affecting a broad range of pain-related experience experiential factors such as relaxation, improved sleep and mood, being able not to react to the pain, as well as a sense of control.”

The nine-person Finnish team, led by Åbo Akademi University psychology professor Jussi Jylkkä, looked at a sample of 201 chronic pain patients, 40 of whom used medical marijuana and 161 of whom used opioids to treat pain. There was some crossover, with about 45 percent of medical marijuana patients reporting also using opioids for their pain and about 4.3 percent of opioid users having used medical cannabis.

Subjects completed retrospective surveys on the “positive and negative phenomenological effects of the medicine,” and researchers then compared scores from the two groups.

Keep reading

Medical Marijuana Legalization Led To Reduction In Frequent Use Of Nonmedical Prescription Opioids, Study Finds

Legalizing medical marijuana is associated with a “lower frequency” of nonprescribed pharmaceutical opioid use, according to a study published this month in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction.

While the decrease was rather small—between about 0.6 percent and 1.5 percent for regular to frequent opioid use—and was concentrated in people who met diagnostic criteria for cannabis use disorder, the researchers said it could signal “substitution effects with partial replacement of opioids by cannabis.”

The research team, from the schools of public health at Rutgers and Columbia universities as well as the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy, said the results highlight “the importance of identifying tradeoffs of cannabis legalization as an intervention to reduce opioid-related harms.”

The study used national survey data from 2004 to 2014 to examine nonmedical prescription opioid (NMPO) use—specifically, prescription opioids used without a prescription or in a manner other than prescribed.

Despite the decrease in regular and frequent opioid use, the study also found that medical cannabis legalization (MCL) was associated with a 2.1 percent increase in the occasional use of nonmedical prescription opioids, defined as between once and 12 times per year.

Keep reading