Naloxone for Party Favors –
May 16, 2019 – By the time I was first dosed with naloxone—the drug that can reverse an opioid overdose—I had been using heroin daily for a year and a half. Not only was I psychologically addicted, I was also physically dependent. Being dependant on an opioid meant that when the naloxone hit, I wasn’t just able to breathe again; I had also been jolted into withdrawal. “Narcan parties” hit the news cycle in 2017 … The idea is that opioid users gather together, stocked up on Narcan (the main brand name of naloxone) and take turns intentionally overdosing and reviving one another. Believers of this myth theorize that people at these parties can “use the opioids to whatever degree [they] want,” attaining an optimal high with the safety net of being revived. Like other recent reports of these parties, the paper acknowledges the lack of evidence supporting this rumor, but continues to argue that these parties represent a dangerous trend in which naloxone promotes criminal behavior and reckless drug use. To people who favor this kind of thinking, reviving this particular population—drug users—means promoting continued criminality, since people who are addicted to illegal opioids are likely to keep using illegal opioids. Furthermore, the argument goes, naloxone makes the use of opioids more appealing because it decreases the likelihood of fatal overdose. Overall, there’s an underlying implication that the lives of drug users are not worth saving.
