A study found there's a 37% decrease in accidental overdose deaths involving opioids with non-cocaine stimulants in places with community intervention programs.
The HEALing (Helping to End Addiction Long-Term) Communities Study tested how the implementation of evidence-based tactics has impacted the overdose death epidemic in Ohio, Kentucky, Massachusetts and New York.
The National Institutes of Health launched the HEALing Communities Study in 2019, according to a news release from OSU. The community coalitions in the study used more than 600 strategies to address opioid-related overdose deaths in communities, health care, justice and behavioral health settings.
Researchers reported in June on the main outcome of HCS – that the intervention did not result in a statistically significant reduction in opioid overdose death rates during the evaluation period. In this study, the authors found that intervention communities had an 8% lower rate of all drug overdoses compared to control communities, which was estimated to represent 525 fewer drug overdose deaths.
It found adding treatment options, increasing access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone and education campaigns likely decreased the number of deaths.
Fewer people died with an opioid and a non-cocaine stimulant in their system — like methamphetamine — in areas with the programs. The rate of death fell from 14.1 deaths per 100,000 to 8.9 per 100,000 people in areas with targeted interventions.
The researchers state the finding is statistically significant, and that interventions did not reduce opioid overdose deaths when opioids were mixed with other drugs like cocaine.
"With the prescription medications that started the opioid crisis harder to obtain by the time the trial began, fentanyl was rapidly entering the illicit drug market in combination with methamphetamine, cocaine, counterfeit pills and other stimulants," states Bridget Freisthler, lead author of the new study and a professor at Ohio State University, in a news release.
“Now we have a whole new group of people developing addiction to opioids,” said Freisthler, Ohio’s principal investigator for the HEALing Communities Study. “It was nice to see that we were able to achieve reductions in overdose deaths involving this combination of opioids, primarily fentanyl and psychostimulants, not including cocaine, because that’s the most recent wave in the epidemic that we’re seeing.”
