Naloxone, also known as narcan, is a powerful, life-saving drug that can pull an opiod user back from an otherwise-deadly overdose. But it can’t do that work if people can’t get their hands on it in the first place.

Unfortunately that appears to be the case in too many pharmacies, where confusion and misinformation regarding the drug’s availability appear to be rampant.

Separate surveys in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia found that many pharmacies — as many as half — don’t carry narcan at all. Even when they do carry it, the price can be prohibitive: one Pittsburgh-area Rite aid reportedly charges $187.99 for a single dose.

That’s bad enough. But those same surveys, performed by newspapers, found that many pharmacy employees were either unclear or flat-out wrong about laws governing the drug’s use and distribution. Some employees said the buyer required a prescription to buy the drug — wrong — or that a buyer would have to provide personal information like their name, phone number and date of birth — wrong again.

Last year, in a rare move, Pennsylvania Physician General Rachel Levin signed a standing order making naloxone available to anyone in Pennsylvania. The drug is a centerpiece of the state’s effort to stem the tide of opioid overdose deaths. It’s part of a wide-ranging strategy that includes millions of federal dollars for expanding addiction treatment services.

The crisis is so bad that the Obama Administration is pitching a $1.1 billion plan to help states expanding addiction treatment services. Under the plan Pennsylvania would get $46 million.

Pennsylvania has the eighth highest drug poisoning rate in the nation, according to the White House, and Michael Botticelli, the director of National Drug Control Policy, has said that people living in rural areas often struggle to get treatment for drug addiction.

Forty-eight of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties are considered rural, according to The Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a legislative agency established by the General Assembly in 1987.

Pouring all that money into addiction services won’t matter if opioid users continue to die at the current rate. Allegheny County alone had 246 overdose deaths in 2015, according to the office of the medical examiner.

And having all the narcan in the world in a pharmacy’s shelves won’t matter either, if people are faced with uninformed or wrongly-informed pharmacy workers who won’t give them access to the drug.

The law is simple: Anyone in Pennsylvania can buy Narcan over-the-counter at a pharmacy, if the store has it in stock. Print it on cue cards; tape it to the top of the customer service counter — one way or another, make sure store employees know the rules.