News updates: Oregon policy shows no effect on overdose rates
And a new non-addictive painkiller could be approved by January.
Two news items for you:
Study debunks link between Oregon drug decriminalization and overdose deaths.
Great post from Jeremy Faust on this study which finds no effect on overdose deaths from Oregon’s decriminalization and re-criminalization of opiods and other drugs. Faust writes:
“Now we know that neither drug decriminalization nor drug recriminalization was responsible for increases in drug overdose deaths in Oregon and Washington. Fentanyl was (and is) the problem.”
One of our core beliefs at CASPR.org is that policy approaches to addiction on both the left and the right have failed. Interventions that may have helped 10 years ago have been steamrolled by fentanyl (see our post on why Canadian and American overdose rates are converging for more).
The only realistic solution to the crisis is better medications for addiction and we need a national effort to make progress, beginning with large scale studies on GLP-1s for AUD and OUD.
Non-addictive painkiller suzetrigine may be approved by January
Jul. 30, 2024-- Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated (Nasdaq: VRTX) today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted its New Drug Application (NDA) submission for suzetrigine, an investigational, oral, selective NaV1.8 pain signal inhibitor to treat moderate-to-severe acute pain. Suzetrigine has the potential to be the first new class of medicine to treat acute pain in over twenty years.
The FDA has granted suzetrigine priority review and assigned a Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) target action date of January 30, 2025. Suzetrigine has already been granted FDA Fast Track and Breakthrough Therapy designations for the treatment of moderate-to-severe acute pain.
Suzetrigine is roughly equivalent in efficacy to Vicodin (which is hydrocodone + acetaminophen). Broad adoption of suzetrigine could replace a huge number of opioid prescriptions after medical and dental procedures, an important step in removing opiods from outpatient care. This would prevent millions of new opioids addictions from forming. Unfortunately, suzetrigine will be expensive when it comes to market and unavailable to most patients. Instead of sitting on a shelf as a second-line option until the patent expires, we should solve this market failure and make it available as a first-line treatment.