LogFAQs > #882008897

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/06/28/a-council-members-solution-to-his-ohio-towns-overdose-problem-let-addicts-die/
Emergency services shouldn't rescue repeat overdosers once they hit their third strike. Stupid is as stupid does, and how much do you really want to waste on these self-destructive idiots who repeatedly decide to endanger themselves just for a high?

Simply put, he says his town can't afford all the money they're spending on overdose "victims" and if they don't cut back there, taxes have to be raised or other services will have to be cut.

The city has spent more than $2 million responding to overdoses, nearly 10 percent of what it collects annually in tax revenue, said Picard

An addict, he told the Journal-News, “obviously doesn’t care much about his life, but he’s expending a lot of resources, and we can’t afford it. … I want to send a message to the world that you don’t want to come to Middletown to overdose because someone might not come with Narcan and save your life. We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.”

I agree with him, though his idea is surely doomed. A common defense is that opioid addicts are victims because they originally took the medication for legitimate pain issues w/ a doctor's prescription and then got addicted. But this article shoots down that false narrative: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt-cause-the-opioid-crisis-most-pain-patients-dont-get-addicted

"The simple story is that addiction happens all the time when people get opioids for pain and that simple story is clearly wrong," says Stefan Kertesz, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Alabama.

The research actually shows that people who developed new addictions in recent years were overwhelmingly not pain patients. Instead, they were mainly friends, relatives, and others to whom those pills were diverted—typically young people. Among the older patients, many who appeared to be newly addicted had actually relapsed or never recovered from prior addictions: some faked pain to get pills from well-meaning doctors; others got them from pill mills where shady physicians wrote prescriptions for cash.

I don't feel sorry for these people, they decided to ruin their own lives.
It's also downright insulting that we put people in jail for decades for marijuana when that's killed like...no one... yet for this insanely deadly batch of drugs we're now supposed to cater to the addicts of them with care and treatment only? (How deadly? This deadly: http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/16/health/police-fentanyl-overdose-trnd/index.html )
I'm not saying we should just lock up all opioid addicts (and still think we need to STOP locking up marijuana users), I'm just saying...why not let the problem solve itself?