Arizona Made Doctors Offer the Overdose Antidote. A Man in Tucson Says It Saved His Life.

Eli Joy works as a peer support specialist at CODAC Health, Recovery and Wellness in Tucson, and he is in recovery himself. Asked by the Tucson Spotlight about the overdose antidote naloxone, he said it flatly: “It saved my life.” He is not citing a study. He is the data point the studies cannot count.

A law can make a prescriber hand you the antidote. It cannot make you the person who survives to use it, and Arizona still does not know how many people that was.

The study is real and worth reading. Led by University of Arizona professor James Cunningham and published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, it looked at Arizona prescriptions from 2017 through 2022. The 2018 law, in effect since April 26, 2018, requires a naloxone prescription when a clinician prescribes more than 90 morphine milligram equivalents a day, a measure of high opioid dose. Naloxone prescribing at the highest doses jumped 360 percent at first, then settled at 123 percent above the old level. Pharmacist standing-order dispensing rose at least 111 percent and stayed up for about two years. Co-author Beth Meyerson, who directs the Harm Reduction Research Lab at UA’s College of Nursing, put it simply: “When you require things, it really does change practice.”

Then comes the catch. “We can say what goes out; we can’t say what’s used,” Meyerson said. In 2024 Arizona stopped requiring pharmacists to report naloxone dispensing to the prescription monitoring program, so the count of what went out got blurrier. And the outcome that matters has not followed the paperwork: Arizona’s overdose deaths were about 1,600 a year when the law took effect and are about 2,800 in the 12 months ending May 2026, per provisional CDC figures cited in the report, while U.S. deaths have dropped sharply. Mark Grant, CODAC’s medical director for medication-assisted treatment, asked the obvious question and answered it: there is more naloxone out there, but are fewer people dying? “I think the objective answer would be no,” he said. He also warned that losing AHCCCS, Arizona’s Medicaid, coverage under the federal budget law known as H.R. 1 could put treatment out of reach.

If you are on opioids, or you love someone who is, you do not need a study to know what to do: carry it, tell someone where it is, and do not assume the person next to you has one. For clinicians, the move this week is to pull your list of patients above 90 morphine milligram equivalents and confirm each has naloxone in hand, not just on a chart.

Eli Joy is alive and now sits across from people on the worst day of their lives. That is what a prescription turns into.