BALTIMORE — As soon as this summer, people will be able to purchase the opioid overdose reversal medication Narcan as easily as they can buy Tylenol and Benadryl, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it last week to be sold over the counter.
Doctors and substance use recovery advocates cheered the decision, which they say will make naloxone — the medication’s generic name — more accessible, including in places like Baltimore, where residents have been able to buy it at pharmacies without a prescription since 2015.
“Bottom line, I think it’s going to save lives,” said Dr. Gentry Wilkerson, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Maryland Medical Center and co-lead of the downtown Baltimore hospital’s Opioid Safety Council.
