Naloxone is a life saver.
There is no way around it. There are few drugs that even in the most untrained hands have the ability to flip the switch on a medical emergency. It can pull someone away from the edge of a deadly narcotic overdose and give a second chance.
That’s important when more than 100,000 people nationwide died of overdoses between April 2020 and April 2021.
In a state where the opioid crisis continues to burn like a steady, destructive fire, naloxone is as common as gauze and rubbing alcohol in a first aid kit. It isn’t used just by paramedics and EMTs. Police and firefighters carry it. People have it proactively for accidental overdoses for a valid prescription or because someone in the household has an addiction.
And now it is possible for even more people to have access.
For years, the standard was a nasal spray version. Easy to administer and hard to screw up. An auto-injector version was discontinued in 2020.
But in July, Gov. Tom Wolf issued an order allowing for single-dose, pre-filled syringes of the drug to be added to the standing order allowing the general public to access the life-saving treatment.
This week, he went a step further, authorizing a version packaged with a syringe and two single-dose vials instead.
The reason is not that the injectable form is necessarily better. That’s a question for doctors to debate and not necessarily for a politician to promote.
No, it’s about money.
Brand name Narcan spray can be around $150 or more depending on the pharmacy. The injectable can be a fraction of that.
Not everyone pays that out of pocket. It might be covered by insurance. First responders or other organizations might have their stock paid for through a grant program.
But someone is paying for it — which ultimately means that everyone is paying for it in some way.
Wolf did the right thing by making something that is saving lives more cost effective.
Now if we could just make naloxone unnecessary.
