Narcan can be used to sell over the counter

Second-hand Effects of Pentanyl on Cops, First Responders, and Teens: A Case Study from a Florida Highway Patrol Officer

A Florida police officer, who had discovered what she believed to be fentanyl during a routine traffic stop last week, is seen lying on the ground and struggling to breathe. After a fellow officer gives a colleague medication to help her cope with the effects of drugs, paramedics arrive and rush the officer to the hospital where she will make a recovery.

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But news organizations repeating the reports without scrutiny are fueling a stigma about the second-hand dangers of the drug, potentially harming or delaying help for those in need of immediate assistance and creating a feedback loop for anxious first responders.

Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician with CNN, said that it’s very unlikely that law enforcement officials or other first responders will end up with an overdose after accidentally exposing themselves to opioids.

Wen explained that opioids “are not well-absorbed through the skin except through prolonged exposure” and, outside biowarfare situations, are “not aerosolized and inhaled through the air.”

There is a danger to media accounts that have false claims of first responders overdosing after brief exposure. It could make people hesitant to help those in need.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Scott Hadland is a pediatrician and expert on adolescent substance use. He is the chief of adolescent medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. The views that he expresses here are his own. You can read more on CNN.

Third, address any underlying risk factors your teen has. At least two out of every five teens who overdose have struggled with their mental health. Depression and anxiety have become alarmingly common in the wake of Covid-19, reaching rates of 25% and 20%, respectively, among teens. To prevent teens from self-treating with illegal pills that are likely to be fake, parents should talk to their child’s doctor who can connect them to counseling and prescribe medication. Drugs that are prescribed to a doctor by a pharmacy are safe and effective for teens.

Stick to licensed pharmacies. Fentanyl is a drug that can be found in prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers. Only take pills you are prescribed by your doctor.

Talk to your loved ones. The best way to prevent fentanyl use is to educate your loved ones, including teens, about it. Explain how it can be found in pills bought online or from friends. Aim to establish an ongoing dialogue in short spurts rather than one long, formal conversation.

You can learn how to spot an overdose. When someone overdoses on the drug, breathing and skin turns a bluish hue. If you think someone is overdosing, call 911 right away.

Know what to do if you overdose. If you have it, call the police immediately. Naloxone is an easy-to-administer spray that quickly reverses overdoses from fentanyl and other opioids. Like a fire extinguisher, naloxone is something to have on-hand, even if you hope to never have to use it. Your health care provider can prescribe naloxone, and many local health departments distribute it for free. Increasingly, schools have it on their premises, too.

Getting these services is not easy, but it is possible. You should talk to your teen’s doctor, whose job is to help navigate the treatment system. The US government has a list of mental health and addiction treatment programs that are accessible in a database. Many states have hotlines. There is a national suicide and crisis hotline in the US. A wealth of education for parents and high-quality tools are available through the Partnership to End Addiction.

Understanding Fentanyl’s Effects and Implications for Treatment of Overdoses in Infants: A Panel Discussion on Naloxone as an Overdose Reversal Injection

The spray is readily available at home, and many public health experts believe that more people could be saved if it was accessible in their pockets.

Understand Fentanyl’s effects. Fentanyl is a highly addictive drug because of its fast-acting and potent qualities. A small quantity goes a long way, so it’s easy to suffer an overdose. The window for intervention and saving a life during an overdose with Fentanyl is very short.

In recommending that the spray become as easily available as ibuprofen, the 19 voting panelists determined that naloxone, which was approved as an overdose-reversal injection in 1971, is abundantly safe and effective even in infants, with almost no potential for misuse or abuse. Although medical training is required to use naloxone, the panels concluded that it does not require that training.

Side effects, typically symptoms associated with withdrawal, were relatively negligible compared with the medicine’s far greater lifesaving benefit, panel members said. Naloxone, which comes in a nasal spray, a vial and preloaded syringes, is believed to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Patients can be discovered with needles still in their arms, a rarity that is a sign that they are dying from an overdose. Family members sometimes say they didn’t know to intervene, because they mistook the labored breathing of an overdose for snoring.

Why drug overdose has become so deadly: The case of Justine Pardi, head forensic toxicologist at LEP in Green’s Bay

Justine Pardi, one of the lab’s toxicologists, said she copes by focusing on the work and “not thinking about the case behind every single sample you’re doing, because that would just be overwhelming.”

Her boss, Gail Cooper, the head forensic toxicologist, reminds her staff that their work brings closure to families. It also helps police decipher what is in the drug supply, shapes health policy and provides information to the public about why street drugs have become so deadly, even for people who just use them occasionally.

To keep up morale, staff members decorate their meeting room with cotton snowballs in the winter and flowers in the spring. The sign on their walk-in refrigerator door displayed the face of the actor Christopher Walken.

But the decorations cannot mask the smell of formaldehyde, or the rows of jars and vials connected to a person who died of a suspected drug overdose. There are thousands of people in the fridge and freezer, their bodily fluids in close proximity to what’s in their stomachs and brains.

Forensic scientists by necessity must have a hard shell, but the scale of death they have faced in the last few years has sometimes astonished them. Dr. Cooper said that he had never seen anything like this before.