Colorado Health Advocates Want Citizens to ‘Bring Naloxone Home’ during state’s first Naloxone Awareness Month
The Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention has a simple but important message for all Coloradans: Bring naloxone home.
The message is straightforward, but it packs an important punch. In Colorado in 2018, an opioid overdose occurred every 16 hours - many of which could have been prevented by administering naloxone, an easy-to-use medication available without a prescription to anyone at most pharmacies across the state.
State leaders recognize the scope of the crisis and the importance of naloxone. Gov. Jared Polis has declared August to be Colorado Naloxone Awareness Month. The proclamation recognizes that “prescription opioid misuse and abuse is a public health crisis in Colorado, with long-term health consequences, including addiction, overdose, and death, and has a profound impact...
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To combat addiction, several Colorado hospitals tried a new approach to treating pain
Colorado hospitals that were part of a groundbreaking pilot project were able to dramatically reduce the amount of opioids they administered by simply focusing on alternative, safer pain treatments, according to a new study released Thursday.
When the Colorado Hospital Association launched the project last summer, it set a goal of reducing opioid administration in emergency departments by…
Colorado Legislature Tackling Opioid Epidemic in 2018 Session
In 2018, a bi-partisan group of lawmakers plan to submit several bills to combat Colorado’s growing opioid addiction crisis. Hundreds of people in the state have died, and the bills aim to reverse that trend, coving a range of solutions from prevention to intervention to treatment.
3 Things That Started the Opioid Crisis
The U.S. makes up five percent of the world’s population, but we consume 80 percent of the world’s supply of prescription opioid painkillers.
How did that happen?
“Between 1999 and 2010 in the U.S., there was a 300-percent increase in the number of prescriptions written for opioid…