Every so often, I get odd ideas when I’m just about to go to sleep. A while ago, I thought of the sentences “Narcan in the water supply. Nobody ever gets high again.”
Imagine there are no legal or moral barriers to doing this: It’s a Global War on Drug Terror (For The Children!) policy and shall not be gainsaid or questioned. I’m pretty sure Narcan is orally active, so what happens if you get dosed with it pretty much constantly through the day?
Well, it’s gonna suck if you get into a major accident or need serious surgery because Narcan (from what I understand) doesn’t just block the “get high” effect, it also blocks the pain relief effect of opiates. So… you’d need a separate water supply of some sort for those requiring opiates for pain relief.
Also, it will have zero effect in regards to amphetamines, pot, alcohol, etc…
Broomstick: Right, right, I anticipated that, and I knew it wouldn’t be universally effective against all the Evil Substances.
ETA: Is there a quick way to counteract Narcan?
Also, how much Narcan are you going to need to deliver a medically useful dose once it is diluted in billions and of billions of gallons of water?
Sagan up there’s got a point. Also, is the stuff even water-soluble?
Ah, yes, drag grubby physics into my pristine medical thread. 
Just give Boiron the contract. Shouldn’t take much more than a quarter teaspoon or so.
Whack the reservoir with an oar. Its basic homeopathy.
Narcan (naloxone) has a half life of ~81 minutes. So all somebody has to do is not drink some water for a couple of hours and they will get high again. It’s an important thing to note since opioids often have a longer half life than naloxone, and if you don’t keep dosing them they’ll slip back into intoxication after a little while.
It only works with opiates, right? People can still get high from smoking pot, for example, with Narcan in the water supply.
Narcan’s oral bioavailability is only about 2% (it suffers from first pass metabolism in the liver). It is not effective as an oral medication, aside from the other issues mentioned above.
That’s a good point. It’s the idea behind Suboxone, a partial opioid agonist (buprenorphine) combined with naloxone, used to help people with opioid addictions. If you swallow it, you get the opioid effect, albeit a much milder one than heroin or other street opioids would give you, because the naloxone is poorly absorbed from the GI. If you try to inject it, however, the naloxone inactivates the opioid effect, and you can’t get high.
A waste of perfectly good, useable Narcan?
You’d also block a lot of folks’ own native endorphin system. No more ‘runner’s high’ or natural painkiller response to stress and injury.
And if you don’t want to use short-acting naltrexone, you could use long-acting naloxone, and block their receptors for 24 hours or so.
I’d tend to leave Population Neuropharmacology strictly alone.
Suboxone is a great drug for detoxing folks off opiates, particularly methadone. But I’m seeing it abused more and more often now, by folks placed on “maintenance” therapy.
Also, there’s the question of what, exactly, is going to be dosed. Just the public drinking water supply? In which case real* spring water drinkers won’t get much of a dose. Non-reconstituted fruit juice won’t have any either. Bottled drinks may or may not have any without active intervention to force bottlers to ensure it’s present (particularly in beer, as I don’t know if the drug would survive the fermentation process, even if the source water did contain it). Imported drinks would be an even bigger challenge. And finally, you have to worry about whether the drug passes through common household water filters.
Sounds like it.
This is the kind of unintended result I was interested in finding out. Thanks.
Would that be similar to going through opioid withdrawl? If getting hooked on heroin depresses your own endorphin system, it seems like blocking the effect of your endorphin system would be similar to heroin withdrawl.
You’d make a small but not insignificant number of people who were not taking opiates feel mildly to moderately uncomfortable, and really piss them off.