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Drug Addicts Can Learn How to Save Lives, Yale Researchers Find
New Haven, Conn. - Drug users can be taught to identify and quickly respond to overdoses of heroin or other opioids as effectively as medical experts, a Yale University study suggests.
The study supports efforts of some drug counselors, physicians and public health experts who have started community-based programs to train addicts and supply them with the opioid antagonist drug naloxone in order to respond to potentially fatal drug overdoses.
Naxolone, a medication lacking in abuse potential and routinely used by emergency medical personnel to treat heroin and other opioid overdoses, can be administered by a simple muscular injection. The drug temporarily combats effects of an overdose until medical help can arrive. Critics of such a harm-reduction strategy, however, have questioned whether drug users have the ability to recognize an overdose and can properly administer the drug. This study, recently published in the early online edition of the journal Addiction, suggests this concern is unwarranted.
"You have to keep people alive long enough to get access to drug treatment for their addiction," said Traci Craig Green, a doctoral candidate in the Yale School of Public Health and lead author of the research "You can’t treat a dead person."
Read more, Yale University Office of Public Affairs, May, 2008
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