Sam Fenwick
speaker
1,068 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 2d ago
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 — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Every dollar spent in the wrong place or on the wrong product is a dollar that doesn't buy a dose where it's needed.
The scale of this public money is enormous.
Since 2018, one US government health agency has handed out more than 10 million overdose reversal kits used to reverse more than 550,000 overdoses.
And behind that sits a far bigger pot, the money the drug companies are paying for their part in the opioid crisis in the first place.
My colleague Josh Martin has been going through the numbers.
And that's where the antidote stops being just a medicine and starts being a form of payment.
This is Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
I'm Sam Fennec.
Today we're following the money behind naloxone, the drug that reverses a fentanyl overdose for just a few dollars.
By 2023, something new happened.
One of the companies started paying part of what it owned, not in cash, but in the antidote itself.
The drug that reverses the damage has become the currency that settles the bill, and Josh can tell us how that actually works.
Only the companies that actually make naloxone can pay this way.
The big names like Johnson & Johnson, Purdue, the distributors, the pharmacy chains, they don't make it, so they pay cash.
And one of the makers can tell us what that product really costs.
The company that makes a generic version of this exact spray is called Padigas.
Its CEO is Pamela Hoffman, and she explains what happens when a generic enters the market.
Padacus isn't one of the settling companies.
Its spray now sells on Amazon for $29.99.
So what does Pamela Hoffman make of the settlements crediting that same antidote at $125?
Showing 461–480 of 1,068 · page 24 of 54
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