Opioid overdose drug will soon be available without a prescription

Dr. Shawn Ryan, a doctor at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, has written a community prescription for Naloxone to make it widely available to the general public, with some restrictions.

A life-saving opioid overdose reversal medication should soon be available without a prescription thanks to a statewide prescription written by a Kentucky physician.

Dr. Shawn Ryan, an Assistant Professor and a Physician of Emergency and Addiction Medicine at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, signed the prescription for Walgreens’.

Walgreens’ pharmacies across the state recently agreed to cooperate with the effort to make the drug widely available.

“There’re a few more steps that have to happen. It may not be immediately available at all sites,” Ryan said in an interview with the News Journal. “There’s kind of a roll out period in Kentucky.”

There are multiple naloxone products available that are intended for us in the community setting, including NARCAN® Nasal Spray, the first and only FDA-approved naloxone nasal spray that requires no training or assembly and can be administered easily by any layperson.

Ryan said naloxone has no side effects, no potential for abuse, and has been proven in clinical studies to be “safer than Tylenol or Advil.”

“It’s especially easy and safe in this new nasal spray format,” he said. “If it’s delivered in a timely fashion, even with the most powerful opioids, it’s been proven to be very effective.”

“If I had a truckload of it I could hand out without rules, I would. I know that it’s safe and I know that it is needed.”

The effort to make the drug widely available comes at a crucial time when opioid-related overdoses are at their highest rate in Kentucky, which saw 885 opioid-related overdose deaths in 2015, an increase of 21 percent since 2014.

A pharmacist with Walgreens’ in Corbin said Tuesday that naloxone is not yet available without a prescription at that particular store, but it should be at some point in the future.

Ryan said the idea is for family members of known drug abusers to have the drug on hand so they can administer it in case of an overdose. Typically, family and close friends are the first on the scene of any overdose and would be able to give the drug in a timely fashion.

Ryan said Kroger pharmacies, Rite Aid and others have been supportive of the idea along with Walgreens’.