Drug advisers offer remedy to heroin deaths

But plans to make the drug more widely available are being hampered by laws that say that, as an injectable medicine, it must be prescribed to particular individuals.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is lobbying the regulatory authorities and wants a situation akin to diabetes drugs, where other people can administer them if those who have collapsed cannot do so.

“If you make a prescription (to) a person, and that person keels over, they’re not in any position to inject themselves,” he said.

“They’re going to have to be injected by someone who’s a friend or a family member who’s been trained in the use of the rescue medication. Getting it as widely available as possible is the name of the game.”

The drug is not new, having been used as an antidote to overdosing since the 1960s, but doctors and health chiefs still disagree over its use outside clinics.

Prof Iversen said: “A heroin overdose person could keel over and go into a coma and a single injection of naloxone can bring them back to life again. It is really a magic medicine.”

He added: “It’s been around for many many years, we know how to use it, it’s safe, it’s got a very good safety profile and it’s very unlikely to be misused by anyone because it has the opposite effect to the opiates they use.

“The issue here is whether or not naloxone could or should be made available more widely so that we can rescue more people from heroin overdose - issuing naloxone kits to heroin addicts as they leave prison as a way of trying to save some of their lives.”

The most vulnerable period in a heroin addict’s life is in the week or two weeks after they leave prison, and research has shown that one in eight succumb to an overdose and, among those who inject heroin, one in 200 die.

“In Scotland, and a pilot scheme in this country, there are moves afoot to issue naloxone to all prisoners as they leave prison with instructions about its use,” he said..

“This is still prescribed to an individual person and we would like to see naloxone available more widely to any of the people who are in contact with heroin addicts in hostels or in prisons or in the home even, to train some of the family members to use naloxone.

Last August, the Scottish Government announced a £500,000 two-year national programme for naloxone in which all prisons supply the drug and training to prisoners “vulnerable” to overdoses before release.

But Conservative deputy leader Murdo Fraser MSP questioned the decision to use the “magic medicine”, saying: “This sends out completely the wrong message and won’t do anything to move a prisoner towards abstinence, which must be the long-term goal of any drugs strategy. We need to be prioritising drug-free wings in prison and this is the complete opposite of that aim.”

Speaking at an ACMD meeting in London, David Liddell, of the Scottish Drugs Forum, said some 10,000 units of naloxone were being used within existing laws.

In one needle-exchange programme in Inverness, nearly half the users had been given the drug, he said.

“I think that’s the key point. It needs to be given to sufficient numbers to make an impact, if you like, a population dose that we need to get to so there are sufficient supplies of naloxone so that in most overdose situations there is someone nearby that has naloxone that can administer it.

“I would certainly urge other parts of the UK to look at the Scottish situation and how things have been progressed already within the existing arrangements.

“‘You can’t recover if you’re dead’, is the line we’re backing on this. Over 500 drug-related deaths could be prevented through naloxone and other methods.”

cocaine comes under official review

Cocaine’s reputation as a safe drug at middle-class dinner parties is to be examined by the Government’s drugs advisers.

Professor Les Iversen said the year-long review would look at the harms posed by the growing popularity of cocaine but added there were no plans to change its illegal class A status.

The review follows concerns over a three-fold rise in the number of cocaine users over the last 10 years and “a popular misconception, at least as far as powder cocaine is concerned at middle-class dinner parties, (that) it’s a safe drug”, Prof Iversen said.

“We want to examine the pharmacology in detail and see whether or not powder cocaine really is safe,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is expected to publish the results of the review next spring.