PROFITING OFF PAIN

Price of Lifesaving Opioid Overdose Drug Skyrockets

As overdoses explode across the country, some people are paying as much as 30 times the original price for naloxone.

The life-saving drug naloxone, a typically affordable and accessible medication that can reverse opioid overdoses, is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain as prices skyrocket in correlation with increasing overdoses. The Guardian reports that the spike in prices is not because of a supply shortage, as there is plenty of the drug. Yet some are paying up to 30 times more than before. Why? “Profit,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “There’s no other way to put it.”

Amanda Latimore, director of the Center for Addiction Research and Effective Solutions, called the rise in overdoses and inaccessibility of naloxone—also sold under the names Narcan and Nevzio— a “perfect storm.” She told the Guardian that “there hasn’t been a more important time than right now to have an overdose reversal drug available.”