Hospitals, Pharma

Handling heroin overdoses is tough when the price is “on average about the cost of a large pizza”

Drugs that reverse the effects of a heroin or opioid painkiller overdose will be put […]

Drugs that reverse the effects of a heroin or opioid painkiller overdose will be put in the hands of police departments this year, which could lead to more recovery at the scene as opposed to more arrests. Good news right?

But this new approach comes with a price.

Police and public health officials from New York to San Francisco are seeing the damage to their pocket books because these drugs, namely naloxone, has now increased in price by 50 percent or more.

“It’s not an incremental increase,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a proponent of putting the lifesaving drug into officers’ hands. “There’s clearly something going on.”

By putting this increasingly expensive drug in the hands of the police, it could decrease access to those in need. Not only that, it could decrease the amount of extensive, long-term care these people receive.

Long used in emergency rooms and by paramedics, naloxone is increasingly being distributed by state health departments and local community groups, who train users and their relatives to administer the drug, also known by the brand name Narcan. It can be administered using a needle injection or with an atomizer that creates a nasal spray.

Indeed, part of the appeal for law enforcement officials has been the ability to deliver the drug through a nostril of an overdosing person using an atomizer attachment. After a successful pilot program on Staten Island, the New York Police Department said this spring it would outfit its roughly 19,500 patrol officers with the drug.

These kind of programs seem to increase prices significantly, and it’s not going unnoticed by those involved.

“We’ve had a pretty steady price for several years now,” said Matt Curtis, the policy director of VOCAL-New York, an advocacy group. “Then these big government programs come in and now all of a sudden we’re seeing a big price spike. The timing is pretty noticeable.”

To put things into perspective, a spokeswoman for Hospira, a manufacturer of the drug, said its form of naloxone is “on average about the cost of a large pizza.”

Is this about saving money or actually saving people from heroin overdoses, and who calls the shots as to when and who this drug should be used for?

This could get messy.

Shares0
Shares0