One day a few months ago, a box mounted to a light pole appeared in the parking lot of an upscale supermarket we frequent, up in a comfortable and orderly corner of southwest Massachusetts. The box looked like one of those little libraries that dispense weathered James Patterson paperbacks, but it turned out to be dispensing free Narcan kits. The device you use to inject naloxone into a dying addict to save his life.
When I first saw it, there were six kits in the box. Not long ago, I noted there were only five. Someone probably figured they needed it on hand because there was a life they might soon have to save. Even outside a $4-per-avocado grocery in the Berkshires, where shoppers load up for the weekend before heading to Tanglewood to catch the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, death by overdose is never far away. Best to be prepared.
President Donald Trump’s budget proposal is in congressional play right now, and one of the many proposed cuts that’s unlikely to raise the slightest objection—indeed, is unlikely to even be noticed by most legislators—will eliminate a $56 million Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration grant that provides for the distribution of naloxone. For those boxes like the one near my supermarket. If it’s approved, it will disappear, along with a whole lot of others. A kid whose life might have been saved could die. Will die. Didn’t have to, but did.