Biden Administration Urges Schools to Carry Naloxone

TUESDAY, Oct. 31, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The Biden administration is encouraging schools throughout the United States to carry naloxone (Narcan) to help prevent fatal drug overdoses in students. The medication was approved earlier this year as an over-the-counter nasal spray.

Faculty and students should be prepared to use it to help others, Rahul Gupta, M.D., director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, and Miguel Cardona, secretary of education, said in a joint letter to educators. "We want to share resources that could help your school and community prevent drug use before it begins and keep students alive long enough to get the help they need in the event of an overdose or poisoning," Gupta and Cardona wrote.

More than 5,000 children and teens have died of drug overdoses involving fentanyl in the past two decades, according to data published recently in JAMA Pediatrics. More than half of those deaths occurred during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. About 1,500 children and teens died from fentanyl in 2021. That was 30 times higher than in 2013, when opioid deaths in the United States began to rise. Most pediatric deaths from fentanyl are in 15- to 19-year-olds.

"A teenager today can log onto social media with a smartphone and buy what they think is an opioid pain medicine or a prescription stimulant to help them study -- and instead die from one pill that actually has fentanyl in it," Gupta and Cardona emphasized in their letter.

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