When the opioid crisis was first designated a public health emergency back in 2017, it marked the beginning of a concentrated effort to reduce the number of opioid overdose fatalities and the overall rate of usage for opioids in general. Seven years have passed since then, and it seems as if the declaration of a public health emergency was little more than an empty gesture.
A cursory glance at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) statistics would show that immediately following the declaration of a public health emergency, overdose deaths related to opioids, both natural and synthetic, fell between the years 2017 and 2019. Then, starting in 2020 the rate of overdose fatalities related to opioids began to rise again until it hit an all-time high in 2022 of nearly 82,000 fatalities. Yet looking at the data reveals an interesting, if not entirely shocking, scenario: overdoses related to prescription opioids have continued to decrease since 2017, and overdoses related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl have soared.
Of the nearly 82,000 overdose fatalities reported in 2022, nearly 74,000 of them were directly linked to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. That is a rate of roughly 90%. The rates of synthetic opioid-related overdoses are just as distressing when looking at the statistics on adolescent fatalities, in which roughly 77% of all adolescent opioid overdose deaths were attributed to synthetics in 2021.
So how do we counter these alarming rates of overdose fatalities? Currently, the best weapons we have to combat overdoses are drugs referred to as “opioid antagonists”. The most updated law in the state of Missouri defines opioid antagonists as any drug or device approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that blocks the effect of an opioid overdose. That same law allows for the state Department of Health and Senior Services to issue a standing order for the purchase of opioid antagonists to be given to first responders and law enforcement to utilize in the field.
The issue is that the current standing order in the state of Missouri only allows for the purchase of one specific opioid antagonist for use by law enforcement and first responders. It’s all well and good that we have access to any form of overdose medication at all, but when the law allows for all FDA-approved medications it makes no sense for the standing order to place arbitrary limits on the amount and type of medication made available.
Make no mistake, the opioid epidemic is still a crisis in the state of Missouri. The rates of overdose fatality are higher today than they were in 2017 when the public health emergency was declared. With the lives of our neighbors, friends, and children at risk, we deserve for our first responders and law enforcement officers to have every resource made available to them to save lives.
More lives are lost to overdose than ever before, and more treatments are available to reverse these overdoses than ever before. We need to put as many treatment options as we can in the hands of our life-saving professionals. Our legislators need to put pressure on the Department of Health and Senior Services to change the current standing order to reflect the wide variety of available, FDA approved treatments for opioid overdose.
State Representative, representing Douglas, Ozark Stone, and Taney Counties (District 155) in the Missouri House of Representatives.
