Nationwide, more than 150,000 people received naloxone kits from community outreach programs like Baltimore’s between 1996 and 2014, and more than 26,000 overdoses were reversed using those kits, according to a recent survey funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, police, emergency medical technicians and emergency room physicians have used the drug to save tens of thousands of lives. Baltimore police officers started carrying the kits last year.
But as the opioid epidemic seeps into nearly every small town and suburb across the country, state, local and federal officials are trying to make the life-saving prescription drug available everywhere, particularly at local pharmacies.
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