Barriers for life-saving antidote questioned as opioids kill as many people as synthetic cannabis

During the discussion of how to reduce the death of a person, just one of many people, every year.

Around 35 people die annually accidentally overdosing on opioids – the group which includes prescription drugs such as morphine, codeine, tramadol and fentanyl, as well as their illicit analog, heroin.

The legal ones are used as bread relievers, and usually shared in hospital after surgeries or injuries.

They are working as well, but they're also addictive, at varying levels, and at high enough doses, deadly. Effects include a feeling of relaxation, and endorphins are released. There's a small black market for opioids.

The Drug Foundation says it's about this overdoses while a life-saving antidote is stuck behind Government bureaucracy and excuses.

Naloxone, known by its brand name Narcan, quickly reverses an opioid overdose. It buys people to get to a hospital for more treatment.

"It's essentially a miracle drug," said Ross Bell, executive director of the Drug Foundation.

Opioids are the center of a crisis in the United States. In 2017, they killed 50,000 people in 1999. President Trump's declared it a national public health emergency.

About half of US opioid overdoses involve fentanyl, which was involved in the deaths of Prince, Tom Petty, Heath Ledger, and recently Mac Miller.

Here, the victims of opioid overdoses are most commonly seen between the ages of 40 and 60.

New Zealand does not have the same rates – 353 known, accidental deaths between 2006 and 2015 – but we have the same reversal agent available in Naloxone to stop some overdoses, wihch St John's paramedics.

About 50 people in the past 18 months.

Bell said while we're grappling with that, tragically, which is far less attention.

The Ministry of Health's Medicines Classification Committee recommended in 2016 that naloxone be made available at Needle Exchange Program rentals without a prescription.

This is where people who inject drugs – often opioids – get clean and safe needles, and have done so since the 1980s – exactly the place an antidote for those drugs would be worthwhile to have on hand.

But it has not happened, two years on.

In a letter to Bell, the David Clark Minister of Health said there are legal obstacles to doing so, and that the Ministry was trying to work through these.

"I agree that the availability of naloxone through Needle Exchanges and OST (Opioid Substitution Treatment) services would be advantageous," Clark wrote in the letter.

"The barrier to supply by this method is they can not hold, repack or dispensing prescription drugs under the current Medicines Act 1981."

To make it happen, who can offer a naloxone in a different form, so it can be reclassified more easily.

"However, for commercial reasons, companies may still decide to supply to New Zealand's very small market size."

The Ministry is trying to attract private offers, but two years on, no company has taken up the offer.

Peter Dunne, former associate health minister, worked on removing the restrictions before he left office and the Labor-led Government took power last year. He was hopeful, with more time, than he would have been successful.

"I think these obstacles could be overcome, and should have been overcome," he said. "I did not see that as a problem.

Police Minister Stuart Nash has warned that we must prepare for the high-potency fentanyl, here in greater, illicit quantities. He's taken it seriously to Mexico and the US to learn about it.

"It's cheap, it's nasty, it's highly addictive, it's synthetic, and it will kill people." "We've got to make sure we're ready," he said.

Dunne says making naloxone available.

What could have been a reasonable excuse for the beginning of the future?

The executive director of the Needle Exchange Program, Kathryn Leafe, has been crying out for naloxone to be available for a long time.

"Every overdose death is preventable," she said.

"We have been arguing and advocating for a long time that we should be in New Zealand.

"It needs to be in the hands of people who use drugs, and their families and friends."

Bell said in the two years, there have been "many, many deaths".

"More than we've had with synthetic cannabinoids.

"There's been a real bureaucratic problem … Why is it not urgent?