Bits and Bites > Narcan saves raccoon from probable fentanyl poisoning

 

I have done many stories on my other blog on the dangers (read - madness) of drugs and kids. Apparently, drugs and animals is now a thing.

Maple Ridge raccoon revived with Narcan

after suspected fentanyl poisoning

Ashley Bennett is used to seeing raccoons in her Maple Ridge, B.C., yard.

However, a recent incident has left her shaken.

Bennett moved into the home with her family in 2020 and found the raccoons when they dismantled a deck.

She said they have co-existed since then, with a rule for every family member not to touch or feed the animals.

They’ll actually sit on the tree and the dogs will be in the backyard,” Bennett said.

“There’s no growling, there’s no snarling, there’s no nothing… If I don’t see them for 24 hours, that’s suspicious. They are always around.”

Bennett had just returned from the school run last week when she found the mom and a baby raccoon unconscious, with one of the babies sleeping on the furniture.

She came outside and said the little raccoon didn’t stir at all.

“Its ears didn’t flutter, not anything, which is beyond uncommon,” Bennett said.

“So I sort of tiptoed up to it and nothing. And I began sort of poking it and scratching it on the head a little bit and it was completely silent.”

She called Critter Care Wildlife Society but they were not open so she called Dr. Adrian Walton at the Dewdney Animal Hospital.

He said she could bring the raccoon in.

“I took my cat out of its banana box that it sleeps in and picked up this raccoon, which was completely lifeless, flopped it into my arms and back into the box,” Bennett said.

“And I just carried the box out. I couldn’t find a cat carry case. I couldn’t find a kennel, anything.”

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The baby raccoon was sleeping on the patio furniture and could not be roused. Ashley Bennett

When she arrived at the vet, Walton took the baby into an examination room and Bennett said that what happened next was wild.

“I wasn’t in the room but starting from the outside, it was 30 seconds of silence to full chaos,” she said.

“There was glass breaking, food falling on the floor, what sounded like shelves being cleared off. People were not yelling, but you could hear the panic in the room.”

Walton said when the baby arrived at the clinic it was comatose.

“It was super cold. His heart rate was super low. Its pupils were dilated. We were significantly worried that this thing was dying as we spoke.”

Walton said he didn’t know what had happened to the raccoon but he was quickly able to rule out poison and other toxins due to the animal’s lack of symptoms.

“So one of the things we started thinking of was fentanyl,” he said.

“We decided to do a reversing agent, a.k.a. the veterinary version of Narcan.”

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Walton said that created a reaction he was not expecting.

“The next thing we know, we have this raccoon rampaging around the clinic and all of us are trying to herd it into an exam room so that we could actually get it confined,” he said.

Walton and his staff scrambled to find a case in which to put the animal.

“By the time we got back to the exam room, it had basically knocked down every glass container we had and was trying to climb up our computer screen into this little nook that is in our exam rooms,” Walton said.

“And if we had gotten in there, we were not going to get it out easily.”

Donning protective gear, the staff were able to catch the little guy and start to put it into the cage.

“At which point it walked right in, turned around, grabbed the door by his hand and shut it,” Walton said.

“It’s like, ‘I’ve had enough of this’.”

They gave the raccoon Narcan again, sent him home with Bennett and Walton said they were prepared to go to Bennett’s house at the end of the day to administer Narcan to the rest but luckily that was not needed.

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While this is the first raccoon they have revived with Narcan, Walton said over the last 18 years they have dealt with an increase in the number of animals, mostly pets, that have consumed narcotics.

But in this case, he said they believe it was fentanyl due to the response to Narcan.

“There are other drugs that it could have gone into that they would also recover with stimulation, but we had an animal that went from really lethargic to wide awake after Narcan application,” Walton said.

Bennett said the baby continued to sleep in her backyard for about 48 hours after she brought it home.

“I’m blown away that it is this close to home out where we are,” she said. “I never thought so. My kids walk to school. We have dogs we walk. This is devastating.”

She said all the raccoons have been back since and are accounted for and she hopes there are no further incidents.

“I’ve grown so fond of these guys, and I think that anybody who knows me knows how much I actually adore them,” Bennett said.

“So it was really sad. I was really panicked about it.”

Big Pharma Spent $880mn on Keeping Opioids Available – Report

If there is anyone alive out there who thinks for one second that the pharmaceutical industry is in any way interested in your health, give your head a shake. Big pharma is interested in one thing only - your money. They don't even care if you kill yourself on prescription drugs, as long as you do it on their drugs. 

When did good corporate citizenship give way to nearly maniacal greed? When did responsibility give way to 'profits - no matter how many people we kill' mentality? And the Senators and Congressmen who sell their souls for a few campaign dollars are the most pathetic of all. They are supposed to represent us, but they are of the same mentality as big pharma. What a sick world!



© Gretchen Ertl / Reuters

In the midst of one of the worst drug epidemics in the US, a report found that the money spent on keeping painkillers regularly prescribed has overshadowed even anti-gun lobbying efforts and may be behind the opioid epidemic ravaging the nation.

The opioid crisis has reached a point where police officers carry Narcan when responding to calls due to the risk of accidental fentanyl exposure. But it may not have had to be like this, as multiple bills that would have limited opioid prescriptions were put in front of state governments.

However, very few of those bills passed, due to aggressive lobbying efforts from the drugmakers that rivaled in size those of anti-gun control groups. In fact, pharmaceutical companies spent more money lobbying against opioid restrictions than tobacco groups in 1998 when they were facing litigation from 40 states.

"The opioid lobby has been doing everything it can to preserve the status quo of aggressive prescribing," Dr. Andrew Kolodny, an opioid reform advocate, told the Associated Press. "They are reaping enormous profits from aggressive prescribing."

The opioid industry and its allied groups, such as the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACSCAN), spent $880 million on lobbying across the country and contributing to political campaigns. An average 1,350 lobbyists were employed by the drugmakers and their groups to maintain a presence in state capitals and be prepared to act quickly when faced with opposing political activity, according to the report.

In 2012, lawmakers received reports on a “crisis of epidemic proportions” that was wreaking havoc on 40 percent of Americans: chronic pain. Some researchers doubt the validity of the study that claims over 100 million Americans suffer from the condition. The study made no mention of the rising numbers of overdoses from OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet that had quadrupled from 1999 until 2012.

That same year, Senator Bernadette Sanchez (D-New Mexico) sponsored a bill that would have limited initial opioid prescriptions for acute pain to seven-day doses. The purpose of this measure was to make addiction less likely and provide fewer pills that could be resold on the black market.

The measure did not make it past the House Judiciary Committee.

“The lobbyists behind the scenes were killing it,” Sanchez told the AP.

The report found that in 2012, drug companies and their affiliates contributed about $40,000 to various New Mexico campaigns.

In 2014, New Mexico would be home to the second highest death rate from drug overdoses.

“Here in New Mexico we are facing an epidemic,” US Attorney Damon Martinez told the New York Times.

New Mexico is home to the second highest American Indian population in the US and the Native population has been hit particularly hard by opioid addiction. American Indian students had rates of using heroin and OxyContin two to three times higher than the national averages from 2009 to 2012, the New York Times reported.

In 2007, OxyContin manufacturer Purdue paid $600 million in fines after pleading guilty to “misbranding” the drug, which misled doctors, patients and regulators about OxyContin’s high rates of addiction and risk of abuse.

In 2014, the pain study that senators received gained more attention. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cited it as a reason to keep painkillers accessible, but Michael Von Korff, a contributing researcher to the study, did not believe that the conclusion lawmakers and pharmaceutical companies were drawing from his work was correct.

Korff told the AP that the study represented “people with run-of-the-mill pain problems who are already managing them pretty well.” Korff is also a member of the Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, but found the figure of 100 million people with pain to be the centerpiece for lobbying efforts that cost the Pain Care Forum nearly $19 million.

An investigation found that nine out of 19 experts involved in the report had served as leaders in various groups that received funding from the painkiller industry, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In July, a bill meant to tackle the drug addiction epidemic was stripped of its $920 million funding by Republican senators. Meanwhile, the report found that opioid sales topped $9.6 billion last year – more than 10 times what the US government would have allocated to expand treatment options. In the last decade alone, Purdue has generated over $22 billion from opioid sales.

Pharmaceutical companies are not solely trying to crush any potential limitation on their products. They’ve been long pushing bills that are meant to combat the opioid abuse. But those bills also involve a new cash cow for the drugmakers: patent-protected abuse-deterrent opioids with extended release.

Some experts are hesitant to believe that abuse-deterrent opioids will be the remedy for the opioid crisis, however.

“The FDA shouldn’t be allowing these drugs to be labeled as ‘abuse-deterrent’ because they don’t really deter abuse–they deter misuse by specific routes,” Andrew Kolodny, the executive director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing and senior scientist at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, told Forbes.

“If a pill has been made difficult to crush, it should be labeled ‘crush resistant,” or “One of the main problems with calling them ‘abuse deterrent’ is that the terms ‘abuse’ and ‘addiction’ are often used interchangeably.”

In simple terms, making these drugs more difficult to abuse does not mean they aren’t addictive. According to Kolodny, they are “every bit as addictive and patients can become addicted taking pills exactly as prescribed.”

“If doctors make the mistake of thinking ADF opioids are less addictive, they may continue to over prescribe,” he added.

The other issue with the abuse-deterrent pills is that they are no deterrent of profits for pharmaceutical companies. Pennsylvania’s state senate will hear a bill that requires health insurance plans to cover abuse-deterrent painkillers with a patented formulation and cost three to five times more than standard painkillers, according to New Castle News.

The bill was lobbied by Purdue Pharma and written from recommendations of an opioid task force that met in private, held no public hearings and included pharmaceutical industry representatives. Its wording is nearly identical to at least 21 other bills in the country.

The FDA has held back on making bold stances on the opioid epidemic. Some limitations have been placed on prescribers, such as adding new warnings to immediate-release opioids but the federal agency has refused to require training doctors in writing safer prescriptions.

In fact, the first federal guidelines on reducing opioid prescriptions came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The recommendations advise that chronic pain sufferers look into non-opioid pain relievers and work with physical therapy. The resistance to these suggestions included threats of congressional investigation and legal action.