A few years ago, Nabarun Dasgupta ’13 (Ph.D.) went to a drive-thru COVID-19 testing site and left with an aha moment that’s now helping prevent overdoses in North Carolina. The senior scientist at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center looked at the plastic test kit — vial and swab included inside — and thought, “We should be able to do the same thing with street drugs.”
He was right.
A pharmaco-epidemiologist devoted to battling the drug overdose epidemic, Dasgupta is putting his drive-thru idea into overdrive. It’s now part of a service project supported by the North Carolina Collaboratory that monitors the state’s illicit drug supply and offers alerts to protect North Carolinians through an online database. The mission: Prevent deaths and limit other harms by telling people what’s in street drugs and how they can protect themselves and help doctors treat overdoses and addiction with more precision.
“If we really believe in preventing drug-related harms and overdose, then we need to get ahead of the ever-changing drug supply,” Dasgupta said.
That idea makes sense to Allison Lazard, an associate professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a health communications expert.
Test results of the drug samples are posted on the project’s website. Lazard and her collaborators at Hussman help design alerts with advice created by Dasgupta on the website, making sure they’re easily understood and convey the most important points. For example, the webpage of test results from a sample that contains xylazine will also include a message on the serious skin problems it causes and offer a warning about how it can knock you out quickly.
“We’re really thinking about can we communicate certain information in a timely manner that will prevent people from dying,” Lazard said.
That has always been the goal. But now, with the state of the overdose epidemic necessitating it, Dasgupta feels there is a growing appetite for creative answers — mail-order drug testing included.
“North Carolina is the kind of place where if you do this respectfully, with the right intent and adapt it to our circumstances, there’s a lot of compassion and a lot of interest in finding better solutions,” he said.
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