beyond the past Two weeks later, Minnesota and Vermont took steps to explicitly legalize, fund, and expand drug testing resources. These are major developments in pharmaceutical policy. Tools such as mass spectrometers and fentanyl test strips provide people with real-time information about the ingredients in drugs so they can make more informed decisions and reduce the likelihood of overdose. increase. In addition, it helps public health and harm reduction practitioners understand the supply of medicines. This is a necessary prerequisite for responding to crises and mitigating risks. More legislators and local organizations need to follow in the footsteps of Minnesota and Vermont, implement policies that emphasize drug testing as a means of harm reduction, and expand its use as a community-based tool.
In addition to drug testing, drug supply monitoring can be used to know the status of the drug supply. Most of this surveillance data is collected through drug seizures by law enforcement, clinical or postmortem drug screening, and urine-based drug screening of people participating in drug treatment programs. That is, this information is often collected through punitive means. A positive urine drug test can lead to loss of custody of children, denial or loss of employment, and imprisonment. We legislated this discrimination through laws such as the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988, which requires employers under federal contracts to test their employees for drugs. Some lawmakers have gone even further, pushing drug tests for people on government aid such as food stamps and housing. And the choices regarding who to test are often discriminatory. For example, a study published earlier this year found that pregnant black women were more likely to be drug-tested by hospitals than white women, despite no difference in positive test rates.
Knowing what medicines may contain will help you be better prepared to mitigate harm. You can also choose to use smaller amounts, avoid mixing drugs, or not use them alone. May start carrying naloxone. But enabling this requires timely and accurate communication about local drug supplies, which requires a non-punitive or non-discriminatory approach.
We run a pilot drug surveillance project called testRI, along with other staff members at the Brown University School of Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital. The project will take donated drug samples and used equipment samples from people across the state and test them using a comprehensive set of machines in the hospital’s toxicology lab. This will give you a detailed list of all the substances that were in your sample, allowing you to understand what is in your local pharmaceutical supply. Our test data is then compiled, posted online and distributed to the community, along with information on what substances were detected and how to mitigate the risks. For example, in March, someone told us he might be buying fentanyl, but testing the samples also detected xylazine, a potent animal tranquilizer. The drug can cause severe scarring, cause prolonged sedation, and can complicate reactions to overdose. After documenting the presence of xylazine, we will explore what the drug is, how it occurs in the community, and how people care for skin blemishes caused by xylazine and deal with overdoses. We created a zine with information about what we can do and distributed it to people in the community.
We are not the only ones taking this approach. A lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill runs a mail-based drug-testing program that allows people across the country to mail in substances to be tested. And the New York City Department of Health and Mental Health, he offers a drug-testing program at three facilities, where people can see what’s in the drugs on hand and learn how to reduce their risk. We offer advice.
Combining a drug testing program with a comprehensive drug supply surveillance effort is critical to quickly understanding and responding to changes in drug supply. But to be effective, these efforts need to be community-driven, with the goal of reaching where people are already. When I posted on Instagram in collaboration with a local partner, twitter Distributing gin and other printed materials has led to funding for wound care kits distributed by state harm reduction agencies and additions to state overdose dashboards.
