AUDIO – GIVE AND LET LIVE –

Sept. 15, 2022 – Yeah. Addiction care has gotten better in the U.S. – better therapies, better medications. But getting that kind of quality treatment is still super hard in most of the country. It’s also really expensive. And what we’ve seen with research is that there are tens of millions of people in the U.S. who use drugs every year, and many of them just aren’t ready or able to quit. And, again, because those street drugs now are so toxic, a devastating number of people are dying. I spoke about this with Dr. Rahul Gupta, who heads the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. And you heard him there, Rachel, mention harm reduction and naloxone. And the U.S. has been slowly adopting some of these strategies, distributing this drug naloxone that helps reverse opioid overdoses; some communities providing clean needles to help limit the spread of diseases like HIV and hepatitis. All of this used to be really controversial. And even today, some forms of harm reduction are still illegal in parts of the U.S. But we are seeing kind of a slow-motion shift.

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