No drug has fueled the current spike in overdose deaths more than fentanyl. The synthetic opioid claimed two thirds of the record 64,000 such fatalities in the U.S. in 2016.
Up to 100 times more potent than morphine, this compound has played a significant role in reducing Americans’ life expectancy for the second straight year. In three states—Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Massachusetts—the drug was found responsible for at least 70 percent of opioid-related deaths, in what drug-harm reduction specialists have described as “slow-motion slaughter.”
Jess Tilley, a harm-reduction veteran in Northampton, Mass., deploys several outreach teams to rural areas. They pass out clean syringes and the overdose-reversal drug naloxone—and refer people to detox programs. But Tilley’s most in-demand item is a $1 testing strip that accurately detects the presence of fentanyl, which dealers sometimes add to boost the strength of illicit drugs.
In 2016, when the overdose rate in western Massachusetts doubled in a year, Tilley bought a thousand fentanyl testing strips—a low-tech device that resembles a pregnancy test—from a Canadian company, and began distributing them to drug users. She says the response was immediate. As demand skyrocketed, she also began asking low-level drug dealers to test their supplies for fentanyl. Tilley says they began regularly pulling tainted supplies from the market. “When people get a tangible result, it changes behavior,” says Tilley, executive director of the nonprofit New England User's Union. “I’ve been able to track behavior trends. People say when they get results [from the strips], they’re cutting back half of what they’re doing, or they’re making sure they have someone with them when they get high.”
A study released in February reinforces Tilley’s anecdotal accounts. Conducted by Johns Hopkins and Brown universities, the study examined three technologies for testing fentanyl in street drug supplies, and looked at how such testing influenced fentanyl use behavior. The strips (based on an immunoassay, which uses the bonding of an antibody with an antigen to detect the presence of fentanyl) proved most reliable according to the study, detecting fentanyl with 100 percent accuracy in drug samples from Baltimore and 96 percent accuracy in those from Rhode Island. (...)
“It’s an important study, and it shows that the fentanyl test can be really used as a point-of-care test within harm-reduction programs,” says Jon Zibbell, a public health scientist at nonprofit research organization RTI International. “The one limitation of the test strips is that they are not quantitative—they don't tell you how much product is there.”
Zibbell, a former health scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was not involved in the new study, says he is working on his own fentanyl-testing research. He believes the logical next step for opioid-deluged communities would be to set up local facilities where users can have their drugs subjected to a more quantitative and qualitative analysis. “If we really want to deal with the myriad of drugs that are in these products,” he says, “we need to have labs where people can drop their stuff off and have a result in real time. That would increase knowledge, increase safety and, at the end of the day, reduce overdose fatalities.”
by Alfonso Serrano, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: wonderferret Flickr
Up to 100 times more potent than morphine, this compound has played a significant role in reducing Americans’ life expectancy for the second straight year. In three states—Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Massachusetts—the drug was found responsible for at least 70 percent of opioid-related deaths, in what drug-harm reduction specialists have described as “slow-motion slaughter.”
Jess Tilley, a harm-reduction veteran in Northampton, Mass., deploys several outreach teams to rural areas. They pass out clean syringes and the overdose-reversal drug naloxone—and refer people to detox programs. But Tilley’s most in-demand item is a $1 testing strip that accurately detects the presence of fentanyl, which dealers sometimes add to boost the strength of illicit drugs.In 2016, when the overdose rate in western Massachusetts doubled in a year, Tilley bought a thousand fentanyl testing strips—a low-tech device that resembles a pregnancy test—from a Canadian company, and began distributing them to drug users. She says the response was immediate. As demand skyrocketed, she also began asking low-level drug dealers to test their supplies for fentanyl. Tilley says they began regularly pulling tainted supplies from the market. “When people get a tangible result, it changes behavior,” says Tilley, executive director of the nonprofit New England User's Union. “I’ve been able to track behavior trends. People say when they get results [from the strips], they’re cutting back half of what they’re doing, or they’re making sure they have someone with them when they get high.”
A study released in February reinforces Tilley’s anecdotal accounts. Conducted by Johns Hopkins and Brown universities, the study examined three technologies for testing fentanyl in street drug supplies, and looked at how such testing influenced fentanyl use behavior. The strips (based on an immunoassay, which uses the bonding of an antibody with an antigen to detect the presence of fentanyl) proved most reliable according to the study, detecting fentanyl with 100 percent accuracy in drug samples from Baltimore and 96 percent accuracy in those from Rhode Island. (...)
“It’s an important study, and it shows that the fentanyl test can be really used as a point-of-care test within harm-reduction programs,” says Jon Zibbell, a public health scientist at nonprofit research organization RTI International. “The one limitation of the test strips is that they are not quantitative—they don't tell you how much product is there.”
Zibbell, a former health scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was not involved in the new study, says he is working on his own fentanyl-testing research. He believes the logical next step for opioid-deluged communities would be to set up local facilities where users can have their drugs subjected to a more quantitative and qualitative analysis. “If we really want to deal with the myriad of drugs that are in these products,” he says, “we need to have labs where people can drop their stuff off and have a result in real time. That would increase knowledge, increase safety and, at the end of the day, reduce overdose fatalities.”
by Alfonso Serrano, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: wonderferret Flickr
