Sam Fenwick
speaker
941 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Sam Fenwick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
In the late 1990s, drug companies pushed powerful prescription painkillers, telling doctors they carried little risk of addiction.
Millions of prescriptions later, they did.
When the pills became harder to get, people moved to heroin.
Then, about a decade ago, fentanyl arrived, a synthetic opioid up to 50 times stronger.
From 1999 to 2020, nearly 840,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, with prescription and illicit opioids responsible for 500,000 of those deaths.
So why doesn't the drug that reverses an opioid overdose reach everyone in time?
Today we're looking at the chain behind the antidote.
There are four links.
What it costs to make, who pays for it, and then something stranger, companies settling their opioid bills in the antidote itself, and whether, at the end of it all, a kit is actually in the room when it's needed.
First then, what is this stuff and what does it cost to produce?
Dr. Nab Dasgupta is a senior scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He runs lab tests on street drug supply and he helped set up the Remedy Alliance, a non-profit that supplies naloxone at cost to community harm reduction programs, the groups that hand it out for free on the street.
So at just 25 cents for the drug, where does the bulk of the cost come from?
Not the chemical, but the device.
When it first launched, the breakthrough technology of nasal spray delivery came from one components maker, Aptar.
It made the spray mechanism plastics for Narcan, the best known naloxone nasal spray since 2016.
Since then, other nasal spray devices have come onto the market.
So what does the Finnish thing sell for?
Generic competition and over-the-counter sales have brought that price down, but not as far as campaigners and researchers in this field had hoped.
A study of more than 1,000 US pharmacies this year, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found the average price is still around $52.
Showing 301–320 of 941 · page 16 of 48
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