White House Calls for Stakeholder Action on Overdose Deaths

In March the Biden-Harris administration announced the White House Challenge to Save Lives From Overdose. The challenge is billed as a nationwide call-to-action to stakeholders across all sectors to save lives by committing to increase training on and access to opioid overdose reversal medications such as naloxone.

“An overdose can happen anywhere, to anyone. That’s why the Biden-Harris administration has made historic investments and taken historic action to expand access to opioid overdose reversal medications,” the administration said in its announcement. “But we need stakeholders in every community across the country to help ensure preventable deaths are avoided. Organizations and businesses—big or small, public or private—should be ready to help keep their employees, customers, and communities safe.”

The initiative calls for organizations to formally commit to taking the following measures:

• Training employees on opioid overdose reversal medications.

• Keeping opioid overdose reversal medications in first aid kits.

• Distributing opioid overdose reversal medications to employees and customers so they may save a life at home, at work, or in their communities.

“This call to action is welcome. Naloxone is truly a life-saving medication that needs to be readily available in public spaces,” said APA President Petros Levounis, M.D., M.A.

Levounis noted that one of his priorities as director of the Northern New Jersey Medications for Addiction Treatment Center of Excellence has been to expand easy access to naloxone to both medical clinics and addiction treatment facilities under his purview.

“Reversing an overdose is great but not sufficient by itself,” Levounis said. “We need to provide low-barrier, long-term treatment for opioid use disorder primarily with medications such as buprenorphine.”

In November 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during the 12-month period ending in April 2021 (including more than 75,000 opioid overdose deaths), an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before. (Provisional 2023 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest the number of drug overdose deaths has continued to rise.)

At that time, APA released a statement reiterating that effective treatments for substance use disorders are available and renewed its calls for the following:

• Improved access to mental health and substance use services through early identification in evidence-based models that integrate behavioral health treatment into primary care services.

• The development and implementation of science-based policies and programs to end the opioid epidemic and provide effective substance use disorder treatment for all patients, based on a thorough review and discussion with Congress, federal policymakers, and experts in the field of substance use disorder treatment.

• Policies and programs to support accredited medical schools and residency programs in training clinicians to treat people with substance use disorders and incentivize more educators, consultants, and physician leaders to be in roles to develop an addiction workforce.

Organizations may make a formal commitment to the efforts suggested by the White House Challenge to Save Lives from Overdose by filling out a form here . Individuals may share written or video stories of how their efforts at reversing an opioid overdose has saved a life here. ■