802 - Safer Supply: A Novel Approach to Reducing Overdose Deaths
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2024
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About this episode:
Safer supply is a harm reduction tool that involves making regulated pharmaceuticals available for people who use drugs. In today's episode: The safer supply model explained, and why some experts are saying it is time to give it a try.
Guests:
Becky Genberg is an epidemiologist studying the intersection substance use and infectious diseases.
Danielle German studies drug use and harm reduction.
Host:
Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Show links and related content:
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It's not just opioids. New drugs make it harder to fight Baltimore's overdose crisis—The Baltimore Banner
-
The New Federal Regulations Aimed At Making Methadone More Accessible—And Less Stigmatizing—Public Health On Call (April, 2024)
-
In Rural Maryland Counties, Communities Fight Back Against the Opioid Crisis—Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine (2018)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:30.8 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers, and today our topic is safer supply, a harm reduction tool that involves making regulated pharmaceuticals available |
| 0:39.2 | for people who use drugs. I talk with Danielle Germain and Becky Jenberg, two researchers from |
| 0:45.1 | the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, about safer supply and its role in a larger |
| 0:50.3 | strategy to address the opioid epidemic. Let's listen. |
| 0:58.8 | Danielle Germain and Becky Jenberg, thank you so much for joining us. We've been covering overdose prevention on the podcast, and in the past we've talked about strategies for treatment |
| 1:03.5 | like methadone and buprenorphine. We've also talked about harm reduction, like safe |
| 1:08.1 | consumption spaces. And today we're going to talk about another strategy |
| 1:12.2 | in the harm reduction toolkit, safer supply. But before we get to what safer supply actually is, |
| 1:19.7 | I want to kind of set the scene. So to start off, Becky, can you talk to us about the current drug |
| 1:25.8 | supply and why it is so particularly dangerous right now? |
| 1:29.5 | Thank you, Lindsay. I think it's a really important and great place to start this conversation. |
| 1:33.9 | As you know, we have an overwhelming overdose crisis in the United States with, you know, losing more consistently now, more than 100,000 people every year. |
| 1:42.9 | That's about 200 people every day. And we're to the |
| 1:46.4 | point where 40% of Americans have lost someone to overdose. So stated really plainly, the most |
| 1:53.6 | proximate cause of this overdose crisis that we're experiencing is that the drug supply that is |
| 1:59.9 | available to the 2 million people in this |
| 2:02.3 | country who use drugs is contaminated, it's poisoned, it's unpredictable, and it's increasingly |
| 2:08.3 | so with every day. So if we get one point across today, we hope it's this, that people who |
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