Strategies for preventing heroin overdose

doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7386.442

BMJ 2003;326:442-444 ( 22 February )

Education and debate

Strategies for preventing heroin overdose

Karl A Sporer, associate clinical professor.

Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA

Correspondence to: K Sporer, Emergency Services, San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco, CA 94110 ksporer@itsa.ucsf.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Making naloxone available in addicts' homes is one of several official or unofficial ways that are being tried out to reducethe rising toll of fatalities from heroin overdose.

Dead addicts don't recover.

Anonymous

The recent "heroin epidemic" has led to a dramatic increase in the incidence of fatal and non-fatal heroin overdose in manycountries.^1-3 Deaths from opioid overdose increased 55-fold inAustralia between 1964 and 1997,⁴ and heroin overdose was theleading cause of death among men aged 25-54 in Portland, Oregon,in 1999.¹

In 1999, the Drug Abuse Warning Network recorded 4820 heroin related deaths in the United States, as well as 16 646 non-fatalcases of heroin overdose in patients presenting to emergency departments.Every year about 2% of people who inject heroin die, which issix to 20 times the rate expected in peer controls who do notuse drugs.⁵ This epidemic of deaths among injecting heroinusers has led many . . . [Full text of this article]

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