investigators reported.
By contrast, state laws that stopped short of allowing pharmacists to directly dispense the opioid antagonist did not appear to impact mortality, according to the report, which appears in JAMA Internal Medicine (2019 May 6. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0272).
The report, based on state-level trends tracked from 2005 to 2016, indicates that fatal opioid overdoses fell by nearly one-third in states that adopted direct dispensing laws as compared with states that adopted other naloxone laws.
That finding suggests that the policy type determines whether a naloxone law is useful in combating fatal opioid overdoses, said Rahi Abouk, PhD, of William Paterson University, Wayne, N.J. and co-authors of the paper.
“Enabling distribution through various sources, or requiring gatekeepers, will not be as beneficial,” Dr. Abouk and co-authors said in their report.
The current rate of deaths from fentanyl, heroin, and prescription analgesic overdose has outpaced all previous drug epidemics on record, and even surpasses the number of deaths in the peak year of the HIV epidemic of the 1980s, Dr. Abouk and colleagues wrote in their paper.
The number of states with naloxone access laws grew from just 2 in 2005 to 47 by 2016, including 9 states that granted direct authority to pharmacists and 38 that granted indirect authority, according to the researchers.
The analysis of overdose trends from 2005 to 2016 was based on naloxone distribution data from state Medicaid agencies and opioid-related mortality data from a national statistics system. Forty percent of nonelderly adults with an opioid addiction are covered by Medicaid, the researchers said.
They found that naloxone laws granting pharmacists direct dispensing authority were linked to a drop in opioid deaths that increased in magnitude over time, according to researchers. The mean number of opioid deaths dropped by 27% in the second year after adoption of direct authority laws, relative to opioid deaths in states with indirect access laws, while in subsequent years, deaths dropped by 34%.
Emergency department visits related to opioids increased by 15% in direct authority states 3 or more years after adoption, as compared to states that did not adopt direct authority laws. According to investigators, that translated into 15 additional opioid-related emergency department visits each month.
That increase suggests that, alongside direct dispensing laws, “useful interventions” and connections to treatment are needed for the emergency department, according to Dr. Abouk and colleagues.
“This is the location where such programs may be the most effective,” they said in their report.
Future research should be done to determine whether removing gatekeepers increases the value of naloxone distribution policies, they concluded in the report.
Dr. Abouk had no disclosures. Co-authors on the study reported funding and conflict of interest disclosures related to the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
SOURCE: Abouk R, et al. JAMA Intern Med. 2019 May 6. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.0272.