It's International Overdose Awareness Day

Overdose Awareness Day ribbon logo

Pete Guither at Drug WarRant sums up our main take on drug overdoses:

Accidental overdoses have quadrupled since 1990, and more than 26,000 Americans die every year.

Prohibition has done absolutely nothing to address this problem, and, in fact, has been a significant contributor to these deaths. Almost all accidental overdoses for heroin, for example, are directly attributable to the lack of certainty of purity/dosage of the drug, which stems from the government letting criminals supervise heroin's manufacture and distribution.

As Pete points out, though, we don't just want to talk about the harms of prohibition (which might take more than a few months to get rid of), we are also about taking steps to make prohibition less destructive of life in the meanwhile. Music industry executive and drug policy reformer Jason Flom pointed out some much-needed steps in the New York Post this week:

Most of these deaths are easily preventable. The solutions are no mystery, and two stand out as no-brainers.

The first is expanding access to naloxone -- a cheap, non-narcotic, generic drug proven to reverse the effects of opiate overdose and restore breathing. If we can make it easier to get, we’ll prevent thousands of deaths each year.

The other is passing "911 Good Samaritan" laws. New York last month became the fourth state to allow people to call 911 when witnessing an overdose without fear of prosecution.

Drug Policy Alliance has a web site section devoted to International Overdose Awareness Day, including event listings and links to resources.

On our site you can find our category archives on Overdose Prevention, Harm Reduction and Overdoses, and a listing of state bills in 2011 related to harm reduction. (We are still working on our bills list -- let us know of anything not there yet.)