People who overdose on opioids generally receive naloxone, a life-saving overdose reversal drug. This treatment has been used by emergency medicine in ambulance as well as hospital settings since the 1970s to reverse the respiratory depression caused by the overdosed opioid. In 1998 the first European take-home naloxone project was initiated in Berlin/ Germany, making the antidote available in places where overdoses are likely to occur. This harm reduction intervention combines a provision of the emergency supply of naloxone to those people who are likely to witness an opioid overdose and have a specific training in overdose emergency, after-care management as well as instructions about its administration. Since then various THN programmes/ projects were implemented in the EU and Norway with a current increase of new and recently planned initiatives.

The following report gives an overview of the characteristics of the current state of available THN programmes/ projects in the EU and Norway in 2016/2017. It aims at updating and specifying the THN projects presented in the EMCDDA Insights 20 (Strang & McDonald 2016). It specifically focuses on the description of details on the legal/ regulatory aspects and input and how to tackle them, regarding the modes of THN initiatives as well as their performance and cost needs. A collection of links to training material and of some recent scientific papers is also available. To collect the information presented in this report, a specific template has been developed in cooperation with the EMCDDA. The template contains overall questions on the THN projects and specifies on existing challenges of its implementation: type of medication and application, legal status. Further it includes questions on training components, naloxone distribution, re-fill procedures as well as on the performance and estimated resources. The templates were pre-filled with available information for each THN initiative and sent out to the national experts identified through the EMCDDA Head of Focal Points. In total 16 templates from ten EU countries have been returned.