Latest news with #methadone
Daily Mail
29-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
Family pay tribute to 'caring' A-level student, 16, found dead in bedroom after heroin substitute overdose - amid mystery over how he obtained drug
A 'studious' schoolboy was found dead in his bedroom after experimenting with methadone, an inquest heard. Sunny Abreu, 16, was discovered to be unresponsive at his home and paramedics raced there to help but were unable to revive him. A post-mortem examination revealed the teenager had used methadone, a synthetic opioid used to treat heroin dependence or to provide pain relief, although it remains unclear how he obtained it. Norfolk Coroner's Court heard Sunny had taken an amount that would be considered fatal for a 'non-tolerant individual', indicating he was not a regular user. In a heart-wrenching statement at the inquest yesterday, his parents Mario and Sarah Abreu described how they were still struggling to accept the loss more than a year on. 'This still seems so unreal as in [our minds] Sunny is still with us and he has just gone away travelling,' they said. They added: 'Sunny was a kind, caring, funny and generous character who brought bundles of pure fun, joy and energy to every situation. 'He was a free spirit, fearless and adventurous. He was minimalistic, he never wanted for much and showed gratitude for what he had. 'Sunny had a way of making everyone feel special and loved – he always had a listening ear, a helping hand and a kind word. 'He was a genuine soul who touched the lives of countless people with his kindness and compassion.' The statement continued: 'Sunny was bright and positive about everything and we loved Sunny with all our being. 'Part of us has died with Sunny. Life will never be the same. Sunny was the heart of our family, our ray of sunshine and now we are living with a dark cloud looming over us. 'I hope we can finally lay Sunny at rest and move forward, celebrating and remembering his short but full life and his amazing being. 'We will always carry Sunny in our hearts. He was so loved and brought love and joy to us all.' The hearing, in Norwich, was told that Sunny was found in his room at the family home in King's Lynn on April 3 last year. He was described as a creative and academic pupil at Springwood Sixth Form in the town, where he was taking A-levels and planning to become a physiotherapist, but also enjoyed sports, particularly football. The industrious teenager also had an after-school job at N & N Convenience Store near his home where he would clean and restock shelves. Owner Trupti Patel told the Mail: 'He was such a good lad, a brilliant boy. He did his job 100 per cent and never let us down. 'He was very good with his education and he talked to customers. There were no complaints about him any time. 'The day before he died he came in to buy something and I asked him if he wanted to do any extra work. 'I'm so sad about what happened. I never thought about it [taking drugs] – he never smelled of anything. [When he died] I thought it would be a heart attack.' Area coroner Yvonne Blake concluded Sunny was the victim of a drug-related death. The formal cause of death was given as bronchopneumonia and respiratory depression due to methadone toxicity. Dozens of people paid tribute on an online memorial website last year after Sunny died. Tatum Rayner wrote 'I'll miss you and love you forever', while Joseph Hipkin said 'Miss you bud. The physics lessons and random adventures aren't the same without you'. Daisy Jeffries added 'I miss you, Sunny. Next party up there, make sure you bring the right poles for the tent aha', while Jake Bridges commented 'Sunny - miss your smile and you'. A packed funeral service took place at St Faith's Church in Gaywood on May 10 last year, followed by an interment at Gayton Road Cemetery. Data from the UK's National Drug Treatment Monitoring System shows that about 70 per cent of patients receiving opioid substitution treatment in England are prescribed methadone. The remaining 30 per cent receive buprenorphine, which is preferred when there are concerns about the patient having a low tolerance or if they have other health issues such as cardiac or respiratory disease. In 2023, there were 709 deaths involving methadone – which can be lethal in doses as low as 30mg in non-tolerant individuals - and 46 linked to buprenorphine.
Telegraph
22-05-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
‘Trump's a killer, not a healer': Heroin users fall into addiction as US aid freeze hits rehab clinics
On January 25, as the sun rose over a glistening Lake Victoria, hundreds of recovering heroin addicts dutifully arrived at a treatment clinic on the outskirts of the Ugandan capital of Kampala. They had each come to receive a small cup of methadone, the synthetic opioid used to treat withdrawal symptoms and keep former addicts functioning and stable. But on this day, despite some patients having visited for years, the staff at the clinic could not help. A sweeping 'stop-work' order had come from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, putting an immediate end to all United States funded assistance programmes. The recovering addicts were turned away one by one, and left to face their demons and the bone-deep ache of heroin withdrawal alone. The clinic was the only one of its kind in Kampala, and over the next several weeks, 200 people overdosed and three people died, said Twaibu Wamala, founder and executive director of the Uganda Harm Reduction Network. Many more of the clinic's patients relapsed, returning to foetid shacks hidden in Kampala's slums and descending into the addiction they had spent months – sometimes years – trying to escape. The funding freeze, which came without warning, had caused widespread and unnecessary suffering, said Mr Wamala. There had been an element of cruelty to it, he added. Mr Musk and other wealthy people in the US administration had let others die 'because you can'. The Telegraph spoke to the parents of the three young addicts who died in Uganda after the 'stop-work' order was issued and their treatment was withdrawn. 'We saw it as a miracle,' said Solomon, the father of one of the addicts, of the methadone programme. He asked to speak under pseudonym to avoid repercussions in a country where drug use is still highly stigmatised. 'But when Trump came and stopped it, we started to look at Trump – and the Americans who voted for him – as bad people,' he added. Two of his sons were addicted to heroin. By the time the clinic was shut down, they'd been clean for four years. He even moved closer to the facility so he could easily drive them to appointments and check in with the staff himself. 'I befriend my children. Besides being their parent, I am their friend,' he said. When the treatment centre abruptly shut its doors, Solomon was away for work. He received word that Moses, his youngest son, was in withdrawal and violently ill. Solomon rushed home, but he was too late. Moses had returned to a ghetto in desperation, starting taking drugs again, and died. He was 21-years-old. Doctors told Solomon that his son had died after a blood clot blocked oxygen flow to his brain. While difficult to diagnose, Moses' death could have been caused by the stress of reintroducing drugs to his weakened system, or contaminants within those drugs causing a stroke, said Shayla Schlossenberg, head of drug services at Release UK. Another man interviewed by The Telegraph said his son was beaten to death after the clinic was closed. He assumes the boy was caught trying to steal money for drugs. A mother said her son was found dead in a drug den in Kampala following the closure of the treatment centre. His body was taken to a public hospital before she could claim it and was buried in a mass grave. One of the patients cut off from treatment was Ivan George Serayange, who worked as a driver for the United States Embassy until a friend introduced him to heroin in 2014. Then addiction took hold. He lost his job. He lost his home. He lost contact with his family. 'It turns all your life around,' Mr Serayange explained. 'From righteous to wrong.' 'Heroin feels like you are saving your life. You're giving yourself another six hours ahead,' he said, referring to the length of time a heroin high typically lasts. 'After the six hours, it feels like you are dying.' Mr Serayange had been clean for a little more than a year when the methadone clinic shut down. Staying at his mother's house, he promised himself he would never use again. Two of his children cared for him, running their fingers down his back as he trembled and sweated. He found strength by listening to Mariah Carey's 1992 hit 'Hero' on repeat. But by day four of withdrawals, he needed something – anything – to stop the throb of cravings. He returned to the ghettos he frequented at the peak of his addiction, stealing money from his mother as he left her house. He took any drug he could get his hands on. Mr Serayange awoke in the hospital 32 hours later with an intravenous drip in his arm. He was lucky to have survived the overdose. There is little he can recall of the specifics of his symptoms, but he does remember a feeling of shame at having fallen into drug use again. The doctors and nurses looked down their noses at him 'like a pathetic sight,' he said. Then, in February, the clinic opened its doors again after almost three weeks. The bulk of its funding came from the US Centre for Disease Control, under the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), so it was subject to a waiver during a ninety-day review of United States foreign funding. Mr Serayange was in disbelief when he heard the clinic had reopened. 'I thought it was just a dream,' he said. He went there immediately and slept outside in the grass until dew wet his clothes. He was determined to be the first in line for methadone. The US funding review was extended until May 19, giving the clinic a lifeline, but so far no announcement has been made, leaving its staff and patients in limbo. CDC budgets have already been significantly cut, and hundreds of employees fired on the orders of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Mr Wamala fears the centre could be forced to close again at any moment, disrupting care for vulnerable patients who badly need consistency. 'We haven't had any communication from the US administration or our support partner,' he said. 'We are waiting to see the next steps but, for now, [we are] working as always.' A former addict himself, Mr Wamala knows just how important consistent treatment is. 'You can't be promising people services this month, and next month there are no services. This is lifetime treatment.' 'I have no hope of getting better again' Since 2020, Mr Wamala's UHRN network has provided at least 700 people with medically assisted treatment to curb heroin addiction, and hundreds more with HIV/Aids prevention support. While the clinic operates out of a Ugandan government hospital, Mr Wamala estimates that about 70 per cent of the funding for its harm reduction and drug treatment programmes comes from the CDC. Against the backdrop of this widespread disruption to funding, drugs are evolving and new threats are emerging. 'We are in maybe one of the most dangerous times in terms of the current changes in the illicit drug market, where we have new synthetic opiates emerging and spreading in various parts of the world,' said Mx Schlossenberg, of Release UK. That means it is also a particularly bad time to stop investing in methadone treatments. 'The amount of risk people will be at today navigating the illicit opiate market is so much higher than it was 10 years ago,' they added. The Telegraph met six men on the dirt floor of a heroin den, sitting on a ripped mattress. The ground was littered with matches and scorched foil, the air thick with acrid smoke. The only light came through holes in the walls. One of the men, Geoffrey Mutebi, says that methadone treatment had helped him achieve sobriety. But 'now I have no hope of getting better again'. He lights a pipe to smoke, its flame dancing off the hollows of his face. Even with the clinic open, Mr Mutebi will not return to treatment because he fears it could be shut just as quickly – it is better not to waste time. Solomon's surviving son agrees. Sometimes Solomon imagines himself in the room with the US president. 'I'd tell Trump: 'You are a killer and not a healer',' he said. 'I'd look him straight in the eyes, and tell him: 'I lost my son Moses because of you.''
The Guardian
10-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Can a methadone-dispensing robot free up nurses and improve patient care?
Lanea George pulls open a steel security door and enters a windowless room where a video camera stares at what looks like a commercial-grade refrigerator. The machine, dubbed Bodhi, whirrs and spins before spitting out seven small plastic bottles containing precisely 70ml of methadone, a bright pink liquid resembling cherry cough syrup. It is used as a substitute for morphine or heroin in addiction treatment. She scoops the bottles off the tray, bundles them with a rubber band and sets them on a shelf. It's not yet 10am and George, the nurse manager at Man Alive, an opioid treatment program – known colloquially as a methadone clinic – in Baltimore, has already finished prepping the doses for the 100 or so patients who will arrive the next day. 'Bodhi has changed my life and the lives of our patients,' she says. That's because filling the prescriptions requires more than simply pouring medicine into a bottle. It means printing out and attaching the labels one by one, precisely measuring the amounts, sealing the bottles and screwing on the caps. A spill requires the nurse to stop the work, squeegee the lost liquid into a receptacle, measure it, record the incident and destroy the sample. Repeat that process 100 or more times, and it's easy to see why, before Bodhi arrived, the task would have occupied a full day. The pressure to keep up causes many nurses to quit, as does the additional misery of carpal tunnel syndrome, which nurses often suffer from screwing on so many caps day after day, according to George. 'I've seen nurses just leave during a shift and never come back,' she says about previous clinics where she has worked. Now, instead of pouring doses, George spends more time interacting with patients. 'It lets me get more personal, have more in-depth conversations,' she says. 'That's where we get a lot of important information.' More patient interaction was the idea when Amber Norbeck came up with the idea for the machine George now uses daily. A pharmacist in the natal intensive care unit at a Montana hospital, Norbeck said so many pregnant women there struggled with opioid dependencies that as many as 50% of the newborns suffered withdrawal symptoms. Methadone therapy helped the new mothers and moms-to-be, but access undermined their efforts; some clinics she visited had 30- to 60-day waiting lists, while at others patients faced three-hour lines despite a flock of nurses toiling at service windows. Some methadone patients are required to return to clinics daily for their doses. 'It didn't look like healthcare, it looked like tellers in a bank pouring methadone,' Norbeck says. 'For patients with kids and jobs and lives, getting the medication was so time-consuming that they'd just give up.' As US overdose deaths from opioids rose from roughly 8,000 in 2009 to more than 114,000 in 2022, Norbeck saw a country caught between an opioid crisis and a nursing shortage. In 2019, she and Mike Pokorny, an engineer who had developed his own electric motor, began brainstorming ways to automate the assembly of methadone doses. They devised a robotic device that could pour, seal, label and cap the liquid version of the drug – its most popular form – in seconds. A year later, Norbeck quit her job at the hospital and in January of 2021 the duo founded Opio Connect Inc, with Norbeck as CEO and Pokorny as vice-president. They called the device they built Zing, and it came together quickly because it used parts developed for other kinds of machines. 'Existing pharmacy automation solutions weren't built to handle the kind of variability [that dispensing methadone requires],' says Sam Wilson, Opio's COO. 'So while the components of Zing existed, such as robotics, pumps, labeling tech, etc, no one had applied them to this particular challenge.' The creation of Zing coincided with the rise of Covid-19, which provided a boost. Pre-pandemic, patients who were considered 'stable' in their treatment could receive 'take-homes', allowing them to pick up seven or even 14 doses in one visit instead of making a daily trip to the clinic. To reduce in-person contact during the shutdown, federal administrators relaxed the rules on take-homes, making them available to a wider range of patients and in batches for up to 28 days. That policy shift led to more intensive prep and pouring for nurses, but post-Covid research showed that the change caused few problems and provided great benefits to patients, so the new take-home rules became permanent as of January 2024. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion By then, the first Zing had arrived at CompDrug, an opioid treatment program in Columbus, Ohio, complete with its own nickname: Alfie. The seven other Zings that have since come online around the country have likewise received monikers, and the humanizing effect has made them the subjects of naming votes, birthday parties, gender-reveal ceremonies and Halloween dress-up. Together, the fleet has assembled more than 1m doses of methadone. Norbeck expects 30 to 40 more Zings to land by the end of 2025, and the company has its eyes on the 2,100 clinics around the country as well as the prisons, where, she says, 'so many in the population need treatment, but they're notoriously hard places to get nurses to work'. Norbeck knows of no Zing-driven layoffs, but several clinics have been able to leave open positions unfilled and direct the saved money to other treatment programs. 'There were concerns that [Zing] would take nurses' jobs, but the real mission is to free nurses up,' says Pokorny. CompDrug once employed six nurses to pour and distribute methadone all day. Now, three handle the task, aided by a Zing, and the other three take telehealth appointments. All six are still on staff. At Man Alive, Bodhi's arrival gave George enough free time that she also became the clinic's home health nurse, helping patients connect with medical care and following up with them on medications and general healthcare issues. Of course, there's another side to those examples – the nurses who were not hired for open slots, telehealth roles or home health roles. Those jobs may have gone unfilled regardless of robot labor: the Health Resources and Services Administration projects a shortage of 63,720 nurses in 2030, a number that does not capture the attrition accumulated through the pandemic. Norbeck sees her field as one in which robot labor can ease employment shortfalls rather than create them. In Baltimore, George and Man Alive's other nurse, Mandy Scott, have even started holding educational events in the community and attending in-house group therapy sessions to further connect with patients. Put more simply, George says, 'Bodhi lets me be a nurse again.'
CTV News
06-05-2025
- CTV News
North Bay, Ont., woman wins appeal of impaired driving conviction
Methadone is seen in this file photo. The North Bay woman said she had taken three clonazepam tablets and half a bottle of methadone.
