Baker Institute expert: Heroin-assisted treatment programs can help in fight against opioid deaths

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Baker Institute expert: Heroin-assisted treatment programs can help in fight against opioid deaths
HOUSTON — (July 25, 2017) — Establishing heroin-assisted treatment programs, which provide severely addicted individuals with controlled access to pharmaceutical-grade heroin, could make a significant dent in the number of U.S. deaths from opioid use, according to an expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
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Katharine Neill Harris, the Alfred C. Glassell III Fellow in Drug Policy, outlined her insights and recommendations in a new Baker Institute blog, “Want Fewer People To Die From an Opioid Overdose? Give Them Heroin (Assisted Treatment).” She is available to discuss the issue with media.
Of the 52,404 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2015, roughly 63 percent involved an opioid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Prescription painkillers, the most widely used opioids, still accounted for the largest share of opioid overdose deaths — nearly half — in 2015. But over the last few years, the rise in overdose deaths has been driven primarily by a spike in deaths related to heroin and synthetic opioids. From 2014 to 2015, there was a 20.6 percent increase in deaths involving heroin and a 72.2 percent increase in deaths from synthetic opioids other than methadone, particularly fentanyl and its analogues, according to the CDC.
“If current trends continue, we will see an increase in the share of the heroin supply that is not heroin at all but much more powerful opioids like fentanyl,” Neill Harris wrote. “This poses a life-threatening risk to users who, unable to determine the content of drugs they purchase off the street or the internet, are more likely to consume a lethal dose, incorrectly assuming that they are taking an appropriate amount.”
Neill Harris said heroin-assisted treatment, or HAT, is a well-established ...

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