Brave Choices

“Narcan is free but insulin isn’t?” Let’s clear this up.

First—yes, affordable or free insulin should be the goal. Lives depend on it. No one’s saying otherwise.

But let’s stop pretending Narcan is “free.”
Narcan distribution is funded by settlement money from lawsuits against companies like Purdue Pharma, who profited from misleading marketing of OxyContin and fueled the opioid crisis.

That’s right—what you call “free Narcan” is actually paid for with money recovered from death and destruction. It’s not a gift. It’s a response to a nationwide crisis that’s taken hundreds of thousands of lives.

Narcan is emergency medicine. It reverses an overdose in seconds. You don’t give it daily—you give it when someone is dying. We hand it out because lives are worth saving, no matter how they got here.

So yes, let’s fight for affordable insulin.
But don’t weaponize that fight to shame harm reduction. One doesn’t have to come at the cost of the other.

Narcan saves lives. So would free insulin.