Making naloxone: overdose, death, and community response in the United States

• In Event: Producing Transformations: Drugs, Bodies, and Experimentation 2

Abstract

Naloxone, a medication used to ‘reverse’ opioid overdoses, was first developed in the early 1970s and has been used extensively since in hospital and emergency medical settings to simplify management of opioid-related overdoses. Since at least the late 1990s, drug users in multiple countries have come up with ways of acquiring and distributing naloxone to their peers to allow drug using communities to respond to overdose without the need to involve emergency services, both to facilitate speedier response and to avoid mistreatment by emergency services and prosecution by law enforcement. As the ‘opioid crisis’ in the United States has unfolded in the 2000s, leading to opioid overdose becoming the largest cause of accidental death in that country, naloxone has been taken up by a new range of highly disparate groups. These include social support groups for the parents of people who have died from opioid use, law enforcement agencies, businesses where people frequently use drugs in the toilet or other private but publication accessible spaces, and government agencies. As each of these groups have taken up naloxone, the meanings and understandings of naloxone as an object have shifted to fit with differing understandings of ‘addiction’, ‘drug use’, ‘overdose’, as well as the meanings associated with the death of someone who used opioids. This paper presentation is based on 15 years of ethnographic field notes as the author worked on public health research, intervention design and implementation, and legal change around overdose prevention in the United States.

Author

• Peter J Davidson, University of California, San Diego