Addiction Expert Discusses Statewide Surge in Heroin Overdoses
BU medical school professor stresses importance of talking to patients about overdose risks
Massachusetts State Police are trying to understand a surge in heroin and opioid overdoses. In January 2015, authorities told the Boston Globe that 114 people died of suspected opioid overdoses in December 2014 across the state—double the number in November.
That number also doesn’t include the state’s three biggest cities: Boston, Worcester, and Springfield.
Daniel Alford, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine who also oversees the clinical addiction research and education unit at Boston Medical Center, joined WBUR’s Morning Edition to discuss this statewide rise in suspected heroin deaths.
Interview Highlights:
On why the heroin is so deadly:
Alford: I think we’re learning a lot from our patients who are seeking addiction treatment. They certainly have talked about a difference in appearance of the heroin that they’re seeing—there seem to be more crystals. It’s being cut with something, and whether it’s fentanyl or, some people have talked about methamphetamine, it seems that it’s being cut with things that are potentially very lethal.
I saw a patient just the other day who talked about the heroin now causing them to pass out within minutes of taking it, so they’re very nervous about using dealers that they’ve never dealt with before. And it’s really an opportunity to start talking to patients about overdose risk and making sure they have Narcan available and that they are not using alone.
On whether restrictions on prescriptions are causing people to turn to heroin:
As you make one drug less available, there is a tendency to start using other drugs, and heroin is certainly readily available, cheap, and quite pure.
On how doctors aim to scale back on issuing pain prescriptions:
As we start to decrease the amount of prescribing that’s being done, we clearly don’t want to decrease access to these medications to those who benefit from them because of their chronic pain, but clearly we need to be more careful and safer and there are a lot of educational programs that are ongoing to train prescribers how to prescribe these more safely.
To hear the full interview, click on the audio player above.
A version of this article was originally published by WBUR.