by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of drug overdoses caused by the opioid methadone, so much so that methadone overdose has surpassed firearms as a cause of death among adults in America.
That reality is also hitting home in North Florida, said Shands Jacksonville Emergency Medicine Pharmacy Practitioner Mark Schreiber at Monday’s meeting of the Rotary Club of Jacksonville.
Schreiber added that methadone poisoning can be difficult to diagnose and even more challenging to treat.
“Methadone is a different kind of drug,” he said. “It’s completely synthetic, and it doesn’t show up on common toxicology screening tests. It can also take the drug two hours for the user to fully realize its effects and can remain in the blood stream for as long as 10 hours.”
The drug was first used more than 50 years ago as a pain reliever, then became popular as a way to rehabilitate heroin addicts. In recent years it has come back into vogue for pain management and is often used in conjunction with other drugs like Xanax and Valium, and that’s what’s leading to overdoses, said Schreiber.
Education is the key to stemming the current epidemic of methadone overdoses, he added, both for patients who are prescribed the drug by their physician and for parents, who must not let methadone get into the hands of their children. Of the 300 methadone overdoses that were reported to the Florida Poison Control Center in 2009, 9 percent involved children under four years of age.
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