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The article focuses on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper from Jennifer L. Doleac and Anita Mukherjee, which found that greater opioid abuse and opioid-related crime has resulted from laws expanding access to the overdose-rescue drug naloxone. According to the study, there is no evidence that naloxone leads more people to search for fentanyl.

As Scott E. Hadland, M.D., senior author of a dramatic paper published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine puts it, drug use among adolescents is not getting more common — it's at its lowest in almost 50 years. But it's getting more deadly, due to fentanyl. In "The Overdose Crisis among U.S. Adolescents," by Hadland and lead author Joseph Friedman, Ph.D., the problem is laid out clearly: After guns and car crashes, overdose (OD) deaths are now the third leading cause of death among adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A white paper from Canada and the United States focuses on collaboration between the two countries on their commitment to deal with the overdose crisis. "Substance Use and Harms During COVID‐19 and Approaches to Federal Surveillance and Response," issued Sept. 27, states that the increase in "substance use harms and deaths" during COVID‐19 is partly due to a decrease in access to services. The white paper itself focuses on the restrictions to methadone access in the United States and says little about the Canadian rules, but they are much more lenient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]