ANTI-OVERDOSE DRUG PRESCRIPTIONS DEBATED

PHILADELPHIA -- After more than 400 deaths nationwide from heroin
laced with the painkiller fentanyl, some needle exchange programs are
giving addicts prescriptions for a drug to keep on hand to halt an overdose.

The antidote - naloxone, which is sold under the brand name Narcan -
can save the life of someone who might not call 911 for fear of
prosecution, treatment providers say.

Even if a user does call, help can arrive too late.

"If people have to rely on paramedics, more often than not, the
overdose is going to be fatal, just because of the amount of time for
people to get there," said Casey Cook, executive director of
Prevention Point Philadelphia, a nonprofit that runs the city's
needle exchange program. The group recently began distributing
naloxone prescriptions through a physician.

But others say that naloxone is best administered by trained
paramedics and that the prescription approach might appear to condone drug use.

"We don't want to send the message out that there is a safe way to
use heroin," said Jennifer DeVallance, a spokeswoman for the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which sponsored a
symposium Friday on the fentanyl problem in Philadelphia.

Fentanyl - an opiate used legally in anesthesia and for some cancer
patients - is cheaper than heroin and 80 times more potent than
morphine. That makes it an appealing additive for heroin distributors.

At least 150 fentanyl deaths have been recorded in the Philadelphia
area, 130 in Chicago and 130 in Detroit.

John P. Walters, the director of the White House drug policy office,
said investigators hope to learn whether a clandestine laboratory
raided in Mexico last month was the source of much of the illegal
fentanyl reaching the United States.

Fentanyl can lead to respiratory failure so quickly that one addict
in Philadelphia apparently died before he finished shooting up. A
syringe with some heroin still in it was in his arm when paramedics
found his body, according to Capt. Richard Bossert of Philadelphia's
Emergency Medical Services Administration.

The case underscores the difficulty the medical community has faced
in responding to the fentanyl situation. Bossert said his unit has
answered dozens of calls but has saved only two people.

"In other years, we were getting them [non-fentanyl heroin overdoses]
to the hospital and they survived," Bossert said.