#WTFentanyl Part Two: Legal Fentanyl
Hello! Welcome to Overdosed a weekly newsletter on drug policy and people who use drugs by me, Diane Roznowski.
Last Saturday was International Overdose Awareness Day and I wanted to share here what I shared on my Facebook.
Every overdose death is a policy failure. 192 people will die today because our government refuses to implement harm reduction strategies that will save lives. Sterile syringe programs, fentanyl test strips, and overdose prevention sites save lives but many are still illegal or underfunded. It’s unacceptable.
Nothing I do will ever bring my sister back, but I hope we all get our act together in order to save other people’s sisters, brothers, children and friends.
Overdoses are preventable and treatable. Today we remember those we have lost but we also acknowledge the countless survivors and revivers. Naloxone saves lives. It should be accessible and affordable and it should be next to every AED device.
The day after I sent out #WTFentanyl Part One - Fentanyl Panic my hometown newspaper shared this:
The article told a story of a Harrisburg police officer “overdosing” on fentanyl thrown from a car window despite the fact that none of his symptoms matched those of an overdose. There was only one sentence in the article about touching fentanyl not being enough to cause an overdose. It took two days for them to issue an accurate follow-up story and for them to update the original.
It genuinely scares me how common these stories are. Misinformation and widespread fentanyl panic will only make bystanders and first responders less likely to revive those experiencing an overdose.
For part two of this series, we’ll be talking about legal fentanyl that is intended to be prescribed medically.
Fentanyl can be used as pain medication or in combination with other drugs for anesthesia. Fentanyl comes in many forms including pills, injections, skin patches, nasal sprays, lollipops, and sprays that are used under the tongue. Many of these forms of fentanyl were created with patients in the most pain in mind, most often late-stage, terminal patients. That’s why fentanyl comes in easy to use forms.
Unfortunately, today it being misprescribed often to much less severe forms of pain. This is largely because the FDA outsourced the checks they had in place to pharmaceutical companies who hired McKesson, a drug distributor, to run the program that insures only patients with late stage cancer get the drug. McKesson was in control of both the supply of fentanyl and determining if the right patients were the only ones getting it.
Legal fentanyl being prescribed more frequently is a huge problem because when it’s prescribed to people who may not need it, it is more likely that it will be diverted into the drug supply in other ways.
Legal fentanyl has positive uses but we should look more critically at when it’s appropriate to use it and stop allowing drug distributors and big pharma to check themselves.
Further Reading
Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj - America's Deadliest Drug: Fentanyl
Current Reading
Lost lives and long odds: Inside STAT’s decision to take on Purdue
Some D.C. Pharmacies Will Give Out Free Naloxone As Part Of A New Pilot Program
The opioid epidemic killed my brother. Here's how to stop it.
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Until next time,
