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When people receive methadone treatment for opioid use disorder, their use of the dangerous drugs heroin and fentanyl significantly declines, a new study shows.

But decreases in cocaine or methamphetamine use were not seen in a year of treatment, researchers report.

“Methadone treatment can have tremendous success reducing fentanyl and heroin use in individuals, but this study sh...

Contrary to concerns, wider availability of naloxone treatment is not increasing heroin use among U.S. teens, new research finds.

Naloxone (Narcan) quickly reverses an overdose from opioids like heroin, fentanyl, morphine and oxycodone (OxyContin). There had been some worry that expanding access to naloxone might inadvertently promote high-risk substance use among young people. However, t...

Deaths from methamphetamine among Americans increased 50-fold between 1999 and 2021, a chilling new study reports.

Most of these deaths also involved heroin or fentanyl, according to researchers.

"The staggering increase in methamphetamine-related deaths in the United States is largely now driven by the co-involvement of street opioids," said lead researcher

  • Steven Reinberg HealthDay Reporter
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  • February 21, 2023
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  • Full Page
  • There are indications the U.S. Justice Department may be open to the idea of allowing safe injection sites, a year after it won a court battle against them.

    The department told the Associated Press that it is "evaluating" safe injection sites and speaking with regulators about "appropriate guardrails."

    The aim: To help stem overdose deaths among users of opioids. According ...

    No magic bullet exists for ending the U.S. opioid crisis, but there's hopeful news for one high-risk population: Providing addiction medication in jails reduces the odds of addicts being re-arrested after their release, new research shows.

    "Studies like this provide much-needed evidence and momentum for jails and prisons to better enable the treatment, education and support systems that i...

    The Biden administration has eased guidelines for prescribing a crucial addiction treatment drug, just as a new study reveals one in five U.S. pharmacies refuses to dispense the medication, called buprenorphine.

    "Buprenorphine is a vital, lifesaving medication for people with opioid use disorder, but improving access has been a problem for a variety of reasons," said the study's senior au...

    Illegal drug sales on the dark web are common, hard to detect and are fueling America's opioid epidemic, a University of Texas study reveals.

    Opioids include prescription painkillers (such as oxycodone) and illegal drugs (such as heroin and fentanyl).

    "People are struggling from the effects of addiction," said Tiffany Champagne-Langabeer, senior author of a new investigation of ille...

    Seizures of illegal drugs fell sharply in the United States during early COVID-19 lockdowns, but spiked once stay-at-home orders eased.

    Researchers studied seizures of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl in five locations between March 2019 (a year before the pandemic began in the United States) through September 2020, six months into the pandemic.

    During that t...

    Philadelphia is seeing a surge in overdose fatalities involving heroin and/or fentanyl plus an animal tranquilizer not approved for human use, according to a new study.

    The tranquilizer -- called xylazine -- is a non-opioid sedative and painkiller approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration solely as a veterinary drug. In Philadelphia, it goes by the street name "tranq."

    Tranq...

    Among high school seniors, nearly a third of those who misuse prescription opioids use heroin by age 35, a new study shows.

    "It is a very timely study given the number of adolescents and young adults who were overprescribed opioids and who are now aging into adulthood," said study author Sean Esteban McCabe, director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health at the...

    Among high school seniors, nearly a third of those who misuse prescription opioids use heroin by age 35, a new study shows.

    "It is a very timely study given the number of adolescents and young adults who were overprescribed opioids and who are now aging into adulthood," said study author Sean Esteban McCabe, director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health a...

    Overall, opioid-related deaths in the United States fell 2% between 2017 and 2018, according to newly released data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The CDC said deaths involving prescription opioids were down 13.5%, while heroin-related deaths fell 4%. But fatal overdoses involving synthetic opioids (excluding methadone) were up 10%.

    Nearly twice as many people in the United States used heroin in 2018 as did in 2002, a new government study shows.

    "I think the rise in heroin use is probably precipitated by prescription opioid abuse. People tend to move from prescription opioids to heroin because it's cheaper and easier to obtain," said Dr. Lawrence Brown Jr., an addiction treatment specialist. He's CEO of START Tr...

    The Medicaid expansion brought in by Obamacare may have prevented thousands of deaths from opioid overdoses, a new study suggests.

    Researchers found that in U.S. states that expanded their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act, fatal opioid overdoses dipped by 6%, compared to states that opted out. That included an 11% lower death rate from heroin overdoses, and a 10...

    Teenagers who've experimented with opioid painkillers are likely to be taking other health risks, a new study finds.

    In a national survey of U.S. high school students, 14% said they had ever "misused" a prescription opioid such as Vicodin, OxyContin or Percocet. And those teenagers were much more likely than their peers to admit to taking a range of risks -- from abusing other dru...

    More people die from drug overdoses in the northeastern U.S. than other regions, making it a major hotbed of the nation's opioid epidemic, a new federal report says.

    Fueled mainly by fentanyl and heroin, overdose (OD) deaths are soaring in an area that runs east from Minnesota and Illinois and north from West Virginia and Virginia, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and...

    Methadone is often used in the fight against opioid addiction, but long travel times in rural areas may be hampering efforts to get more people treated, a new study finds.

    If methadone for opioid addiction was available in primary care clinics, more people would have better access to treatment, researchers suggest.

    In the United States, methadone is only available at clinic...

    Teens who take prescription opioid painkillers to get high could be taking a step toward heroin use, researchers say.

    "Prescription opioids and heroin activate the brain's pleasure circuit in similar ways," said senior author Adam Leventhal. He's director of the Institute for Addiction Science at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.

    "Teens who enjoy...

    When people who are addicted to opioids make the difficult decision to quit, the last thing they need to face are barriers to treatment.

    Yet, a new "secret shopper" study suggests most addicts seeking a prescription for buprenorphine -- which helps people stop using opioids -- would have trouble even getting an appointment with a doctor qualified to dispense the drug.

    When r...

    Cannabidiol (CBD) has been receiving a lot of attention lately as a potential treatment for everything from epilepsy to anxiety. Now, researchers report it might also help curb the cravings that come with opioid addiction.

    Like marijuana, CBD comes from the cannabis plant. Unlike pot, it does not produce a high.

    The study included 42 men and women with a history of heroin a...

    After years of steady increases, the number of Americans showing up in emergency departments with heroin overdoses is on a downswing, at least in some states.

    Between 2017 and 2018, many states saw a dramatic drop in the number of people being rushed to hospitals as a result of a heroin overdose, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    ...

    THURSDAY, April 25, 2019 (HealthDay News) -- The cost of America's opioid epidemic just keeps rising, with new research showing that overdose deaths among teens and young adults are soaring.

    The death rate from drug overdoses rose from eight in every 100,000 people aged 15 to 24 in 2006 to nearly 10 per 100,000 in 2015, researchers found.

    "Drug poisoning deaths affect famil...

    The number of Americans dying from overdoses of the powerful narcotic fentanyl rose 12-fold in recent years, health officials reported Thursday.

    Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that's hundreds of times more potent than heroin or cocaine. But sometimes drug users don't know they're buying it, because fentanyl is often mixed with other opioids or misrepresented as heroin.

    "We s...

    Though they know that nearly all heroin is laced with the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl, many Baltimore users aren't prepared to prevent or treat fentanyl-related overdoses, a new study finds.

    Baltimore has a thriving heroin trade and 1,000 opioid overdose deaths a year.

    The study, by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, included...

    New research uncovers more damage wrought by the opioid epidemic: Cases of a dangerous heart infection linked to injection drug use have spiked in recent years at an Ohio medical center.

    Researchers found that admissions for infective endocarditis at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center doubled between 2012 and 2017, and that a 436 percent increase in drug-related infection...

    An effort to make the opioid painkiller OxyContin harder to abuse drove addicted patients to heroin and caused a dramatic increase in hepatitis C, a new study suggests.

    In a classic case of unintended consequences, Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma reformulated its powerful and popular drug OxyContin for the right reasons. It became harder to crush or dissolve, thus making it harder to...

    The rate at which middle-aged American women die from overdoses involving opioids and other drugs nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2017, new government data shows.

    In 1999, about seven out of every 100,000 deaths among U.S. women aged 30 to 64 was caused by a drug overdose, but by 2017 that rate had risen to about 24 women per 100,000 -- a 260 percent increase, the U.S. Centers for ...