FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE MORE EVIDENCE: IT’S NARCAN REDUCING OPIOID CRISIS DEATHS, EXPOSING EXPERT LETHAL MEDICAL MISINFORMATION
In New Hampshire as consistently elsewhere decades of increasing opioid crisis deaths with expert gold standard medical cures are reversed only with dramatic, community based naloxone campaigns to reduce medical harm
by Clark Miller
Published March 14, 2025
As in Wisconsin, in Washington, and other locales, New Hampshire has been late to provide evidence based, life saving interventions to reduce opioid crisis deaths.
Not late providing the doctor-prescribed substitute opioid serving as common street currency for fentanyl and fueling the crisis, known as buprenorphine. Provision of that widely abused substance, along with methadone, has been increasing over past years, a “growing number of clinics prescribing medication to treat opioid addiction” in New Hampshire, among states with highest rates of its dispensing.
That is, predictably opioid related deaths have surged for years, as consistently elsewhere and as fueled by harm-predicting effects of America’s expert medical cure approach, along with other “gold standard” treatment approaches supported in New Hampshire and established as predicting harm, including exposure to the religious subculture AA/NA and to “peer support“.
Not late in providing those harm-predicting services. Instead, late to effective (targeted, intensive, direct, community and layperson) training and provision of the evidence based, life-saving agent naloxone.
From a December 2024 report,
MANCHESTER, N.H. —
It’s a significant milestone in the opioid epidemic fight. New Hampshire is reporting its fewest drug deaths in a decade.
The people on the front lines of the opioid crisis said this progress is years in the making, and small steps like making Narcan more widely available are saving lives.
Narcan, also known as Naloxone, can reverse a deadly opioid overdose. Today, it can be found in public buildings and first aid kits.
Chris Stawasz, from American Medical Response, said compared to just a few years ago, the life-saving drug is much easier to find.
“Narcan is now available over the counter. It’s free in many cases from your local health department,” Stawasz said.
Now, we’re starting to see the results. New Hampshire is reporting 228 deadly overdoses this year. Even with a few dozen cases still pending, it will be the fewest annual drug deaths by far over the past decade.
“It’s a tremendous amount of people whose lives are not going to end because of opioids,” Stawasz said.
“We need to keep doing what we’re doing,” Lauren McGinley, executive director of the New Hampshire Harm Reduction Coalition, said.
McGinley said her organization is expanding programs to bring supplies like Narcan and drug test trips directly to communities that need them with a second mobile harm reduction van, which is outfitted to better reach rural communities in the North Country.
From the same news piece,
“The vast majority of drug deaths in New Hampshire this year were caused by fentanyl, which is often cut into other drugs.”
And the trend looks like this –
For years Kraemer and other first responders have used naloxone, the active ingredient in Narcan. But now, the lifesaving drug has now proliferated into communities across New Hampshire and the United States.
“It’s in schools, it’s in libraries, it’s in town offices, it’s at McDonalds,” Kraemer said. “I think that’s what’s driving your [overdose death] numbers down.”
This would explain an enigma within NHDMI data: Despite large reductions in overdose deaths, EMS Narcan administration was at its lowest recorded level in 2024.
“If you have someone in need and they’re having an overdose, if they have a friend there that gives them naloxone and brings them back, they’re not always calling EMS after,” said Lt. Thomas Phelan of the N.H. Information and Analysis Center, which began the NHDMI in 2013 as a response to a lack of data regarding the crisis in the state.
That observation – that along with dramatic, successful surges in layperson reversals of otherwise fatal opioid overdoses, consequently and increasingly nonfatal opioid overdoses, a measure of high-risk use and expert treatment failure, are being dramatically undercounted, hidden – is a critically important point, echoed here by Kim Fallon, New Hampshire chief forensic investigator –
Fallon is a proponent of making Narcan available over the counter. She says she carries it.
“I think Narcan was huge, putting Narcan into the hands of family and friends and anybody,” she said. “There would really be no way to quantify how helpful that was, because a lot of those people don’t end up going to the hospital.”
As evidenced by the same trends consistently in varied states and locales, the very need for and implementation of desperate, intensive naloxone campaigns that are reversing potentially fatal ODs on a scale that more than accounts for – many times more – recent downward counts of fatal ODs is a measure of a worsening crisis of high-risk use despite efforts of America’s medical/media collusion to hide that and mystify the course of the crisis.
In that lethal mix
of expert, institutional and media pathological incompetence driving healthcare crises in New Hampshire and elsewhere – an anomalous expression of truth and a way forward, from this report, reported on here for New Hampshire –
New Hampshire has been named the healthiest state in the country two years running by the United Health Foundation, largely because of its low rates of homicide, poverty, and unemployment.
It’s doing considerably worse when it comes to deaths related to suicide, drugs, and alcohol, according to a new report from Trust for America’s Health, a national health policy and research organization.
The Granite State percentage increases were “way above” the national average in all three categories and particularly high in drug deaths related to fentanyl, cocaine, and other psychostimulants, which includes methamphetamine, said Brandon Reavis, one of the reports co-authors. …
The report includes policy recommendations, such as measures to improve economic and social factors and reduce negative childhood experiences associated with substance use disorder, increased risks of sex trafficking and teen pregnancy, and struggles with school and holding a job.
The report also shows where New Hampshire is doing well. That includes legislation lawmakers passed a year ago that legalized testing strips for fentanyl and xylazine, a veterinary sedative that doesn’t respond to Narcan.
“That’s an important development,” Reavis said. “But our focus primarily is on how do we prevent and mitigate adverse childhood experiences like abuse and neglect, because those traumatic experiences do have a direct connection to serious mental illness and addiction later in life as well as a whole range of physical health issues. We won’t be able to get the kind of foundational and generational changes that we’re looking for until we address those connections.”
Prevention? Getting to the root of the problem?
That does make some sense, decades into increasingly lethal epidemics driven by failed expert treatment approaches.
Medical “treatments” for the entirely non-medical condition of compulsive substance use? An untrained, unqualified workforce for a complex, life-threatening psychosocial issue, fabricated as “addiction“? Those harm-predicting, necessary fictions never made sense, never will.
At the very top of 40 policy recommendations listed in the report is a welcome grounding in and focus on established understanding of the roots of problem substance use, mental health, and other risks to health in preventable adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and necessary positive childhood experiences (PCE).
All that’s needed for effective prevention and to begin protecting kids from risk of future harm is a radical shift in values and toward realistic views of the developmental, social, and cultural sources of illness. A radical shift away from the soothing but lethal avoidance of painful reckoning, avoidance offered by distracting, usefully cast villains.
