The 2020s might be remembered as the Narcan decade

It’s been a banner day for the effort stop opioid overdoses: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it has approved Narcan, a nasal-spray form of the opioid-overdose-reversing drug naloxone, for over-the-counter use without a prescription. The change is widely expected to save lives at a time when opioid overdose deaths, (largely driven by the infiltration of the highly potent drug fentanyl into the illicit opioid market), have risen as high as 80,000 per year in the U.S.

Narcan is sometimes called a miracle drug because it can essentially bring someone back to life after they’ve stopped breathing following an opioid overdose, and it’s about as easy to use as a nasal spray for allergy symptoms. At the same time, however, advocates and health care workers emphasize that there are still barriers that could prevent many people from having access to Narcan.

Chelsea Shover, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of California-Los Angeles, told me that as exciting as the FDA’s news is, other steps are still necessary to make sure Narcan is widely available:

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