In just a few days, drugstores like Walgreens will have it in stock, for everyone. Here’s how to use it, and who it will help.
This is a good step forward for accessibility, but unfortunately, the $50 price tag will still put it out of the hands of many who need it. It should be handed out, for free, to anybody who wants it. There’s zero downsides. It cannot be misused, diverted, or abused. It has no other uses. It has no effect on someone not ODing. It cannot benefit anyone in any possible way… unless they are actually dying right now. If we were serious about saving lives, we would be gladly giving it out. Hell, put it in free vending machines on the street. It would be the ultimate pro-life move. But, of course, in a capitalist hellscape, profit motive is of utmost importance. How about drug cos. making billions off opiods foot the bill? Thankfully, there are many great harm reduction organizations that do hand it out free, but the easier to get, the less people die. I recommend anyone pick up some, if you can find it for free, even if you don’t think you’d need it. Home/work/car, you never know what might happen in your vicinity. It’s like the modern Heimlich Maneuver. Ok… that’s my PSA for the day.
Replying to top comment for vis:
All you said is correct. Quick PSA, narcan is a temporary opioid blocker. If you administer narcan to an actual OD patient, they will rise to a higher level of consciousness. They may even be able to walk and talk.
They NEED to go to the hospital though, the opioids are still in their system, and once the narcan wears off they can drop into respiratory distress again.
Seriously, you can just inject it without any harm. I was at the CNE in Toronto recently and they had a free narcan table. The person was busy so I walked by but I know the city I live in has huge homeless problem and drug use that comes with it. Just last week I walked passed a bunch of office workers who had to call an ambulance on one guy who was having some trouble, not sure what they were but the ambulance showed up as I walked past. I should have grabbed a kit just in case
You don’t inject it, it’s a nasal spray
This is why I didn’t think I could handle the responsibilities.
Initially, it was only given by injection, but now it’s common in the nasal spray. That’s what’s great about the nasal route, it’s unintimidating and you can’t fuck it up. …I guess unless you squirt it in their ear or something. lol
Well, if you touched the applicator it would be quickly obvious
Wow, I didn’t know it wasn’t. That is crazy!
It was previously available behind the counter but a prescription was not needed .
To be clear, a prescription is still technically needed, but most states have laws in place that allows the pharmacist to write that prescription. Vaccines are done similarly.
For my Aussie friends - there is a free Take Home Nalaxone program, you can go to a huge list of chemists and get it for free, no prescriptions, no intrusive questions, super easily.
I got mine a couple of weeks ago 😄
https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/take-home-naloxone-program/where-to-access-naloxone
Awesome! Great info. I never doubted you guys would have a better program then we do in the states. Cheers.
Same here, at least on the west coast of Canada. Free, take one or two and go save some lives!
why in the fuck would it not be to begin with
Conservatives don’t want it?
i don’t know. i think there are many inconsequential things you can’t buy over the counter in the united states.
I mean health insurance plays a part in it. Conservatives don’t want to pay tax money on narcan for people they consider valueless when they are already paying for their own health care. How do I know they think they are valueless? They don’t want them to have access to a life savings thing. Also plenty will just straight up tell you that if you ask.
The fact this exists proves we lost the “war on drugs”
No, the people who started that war did win it. The objective was to slap black people and liberals with felonies to make them ineligible to vote, and it succeeded brilliantly.
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Right on. And the same tactic had been going on even earlier. Starting back in the late 1800s with the opium laws in San Francisco. Too many Asians moving in, hence the beginning of the gross “yellow peril” propaganda. The laws were specifically created to target Asians. Then in the 1930s, Reefer Madness-type propaganda was heavily targeted against Mexicans. Blacks and heroin, then crack. Jazz musicians, beatniks, hippies, on and on… always another group to “Other” because of their race or their eschewing of social mores, so pave a legal framework to come down on them from. Much of drug law history was born out of a desire to eliminate an undesireable group.
Source: Dan Baum, Harper’s magazine April 2016 issue, quoting Ehrlichman in 1994 in-person interview.
Ehrlichman had spent a short stint in federal prison, and since found work doing minority recruitment for an engineering firm in Atlanta. Reported on by CNN, with reactions from his family.
It depends on if making less drug users die counts as a win for us or the drugs. I count it as a win for us.
