Everybody needs regular food to avoid dying. Many need insulin or heart medication. Many need regular pills to keep their brains from going off the rails. Is this so different?
Most people don’t have their groceries delivered via ambulance, and risk dying if their food doesn’t arrive soon enough. If you did that, then yeah I’d say that’s kinda crazy too.
Some would see narcan as more like deploying car airbags - good that it's kept you alive, but if you need them routinely you should probably think twice before getting behind the wheel.
Overdosing isnt an unfortunate sideffect, its people making an error while dosing. An error that is easily preventable with a bit of care. The airback equivalent is very much fitting, its an emergency aid for once you made a mistake. If you are overdosing regularly, you are majorly screwing up making unnecessary mistakes.
I doubt it's easily preventable, or there wouldn't be so much of it. My understanding is that drugs are cut to varying strengths, and sometimes are laced with stuff like fentanyl or other compounds that you weren't expecting and that are highly active at lower doses.
Preventing ODs is easy if you have a pure product of an exact known strength and an accurate scale, but these conditions aren't often true in the real world.
Its largely preventable if you act with a reasonable level of care. Test the water with a new batch before you use it, even if its just administering a fraction of what you cooked up first. You are unlikely to have such potent stuff that a hundredth of an active dose is giving you an OD. That is unless someone is actively trying to kill you. The equivalent of an allergy test is nothing specific to injecting hard drugs.
Addicts often dont do it since the test dosage is wasted and its extra injection. It becomes especially problematic when money is tight and you buy individual bubbles. But that is the inherent risk you take with street drugs and the care and effort you have to invest to not OD. Its like never sharing anything that goes into your veins. Neither an OD nor catching HIV or Hep-C are cases of just bad luck, they are the result of being reckless and skipping an important and necessary step.
Given the psychology of addiction, is it reasonable to expect an addict who's seriously jonesing for a hit to be this cautious and delay the satisfaction of getting high?
I dont see how there is a difference to not sharing needles. The addiction argument is the same there and even people at the end of their line managed to follow that rule during the periods in history where the war on drugs included syringes as drug paraphernalia. Its simply not an option to break that rule. No ifs or buts.
Overdosing pretty clearly is an unfortunate side effect of addiction to a substance that can be overdosed with, especially one that has to be obtained on the black market.
The equivalent of an allergy test is not optional if you consume street drugs of an unknown composition. Its like never sharing anything that goes into your veins. Getting HIV or Hep-C isnt an unfortunate side effect either, its people making a stupid mistake despite knowing better. You dont have to get HIV or even HEP-C as an addict just as you dont have to OD. Make the effort and follow the appropriate precautions or you are playing Russian roulette.
As unfortunate as it is, but normally people who OD are those that no longer care if they do. There are freak exceptions of course, like tainted or mixed up batches where even a allergy test can kill you, but those arent happening regularly to individual users.
People are just risking it, and its a very human thing to do. You can see the same behavior with the failure to use protection during sex. People should know better, but some people still risk it and are then faced with the unfortunate consequences.
edit: Dont get me wrong this isnt about victim blaming, but not promoting the myth that these things are just out of peoples control like the weather. You can be a heroin addict without catching HIV or Hep-C and with a reasonable level of care you are not going to end up needing Narcan regularly. You already fucked up by becoming an addict, there is no reason to also OD or catch something. Telling people that these are just inherent side effects to being an addict just makes it easier on people to excuse themselves for forgoing basic safety precautions. ODing regularly is not something normal, even for an addict. Its the result of being reckless.
Eating healthy food and exercising regularly isn’t optional in this sense either, and yet people avoid it. Sunscreen isn’t optional if you’re light skinned and go out in the sun, but people often skip it. More examples abound.
You can talk about what people should do all you want, it doesn’t change anything.
My main point is that, as a health problem, drug addiction doesn’t look that much different from a lot of other health problems. Personal choices greatly influence your chances of acquiring it, your ability to beat it, and your odds of dying from it. This applies to many other medical conditions as well, but attitudes toward addicts are vastly different.
>Eating healthy food and exercising regularly isn’t optional in this sense either, and yet people avoid it. Sunscreen isn’t optional if you’re light skinned and go out in the sun, but people often skip it. More examples abound.
And if you are an adult chances are you know better and those arent unfortunate sideffects either. Its precautions you have to take or risk the consequences. If you get a sunburn you are not a poor victim of the sun but an idiot who skipped the necessary step of using sunscreen. As a result you are risking skin cancer. If you dont brush your teeth you get caries. It is similarly absurd to say that caries are the unfortunate sideeffects of eating. They are the reaction to your behavior of not brushing your teeth as you should. Wearing your belt in a car isnt optional either just because you have airbags. The human race, and with them you, know of what precautions you have to take to avoid certain fates. The higher the risk, the less optional they become. You might spend a day in the sun without sunscreen, the increased risk of skincancer might however be minimal if its not a regular occurrence. The risk of sharing a needle or the same watercup during cooking however is just to grave for being stupid.
Your point seems to be, that people make mistakes. I agree, but they dont have to make mistakes where they know better. There is a difference between an "ups" mistake and just a stupidly destructive choice. Unless there is a severe lack of information they chose to do something stupid for little to none benefit. Thats no mistake, thats action and reaction where you decided to no longer care for the reaction. It is people making the unfortunate decision to go from seeing themselves as addicts to seeing themselves as junkies where the tomorrow doesnt matter anymore. Sure, you can argue that there are clean people with a similar disregard for their future. Just pick people who actually live after the motto "live fast and die young". Or who are eating or drinking themselves to death. They however are making a problematic choice too.
>My main point is that, as a health problem, drug addiction doesn’t look that much different from a lot of other health problems.
I kind of agree. However different to being an addict, being a junkie is a separate kind of problem stemming from deeply destructive choices you make consciously or unconsciously. You can become an addict, there arent however good reasons and rarely good excuses for becoming a junkie. I think a vastly different approach has to be taken to help addicts then ro help people who see themselves as junkies. If you are ODing regularly, changes are you should be treated as a suicide risk who lost your will of self preservation. I dont disagree that there are other people who dont use illegal drugs where the same applies, but thats why we as a society run mental health emergency wards. Differently put, if you are ODing regularly or no longer care that you share syringes you are having a second much more dangerous problem next to your deeply unhealthy habit of injecting unknown illegal drugcocktails to escape whatever. You are having a death wish.
Well, if you're spending $50 over and over to save the life of someone who then immediately gets back up and goes off to find more heroin, then "what price is a human life worth" is an interesting question indeed. There are billions of us, and some cost a lot more than they contribute.
The answer is to provide more healthcare in the form of addiction treatment, not to abandon people to die. Because those abandoned people will continue draining budgets even if you're not providing healthcare for them.
While this is true, trying to figure out ahead of time if they’ll cost more than they contribute is the path to madness. (And even trying to figure it out after the fact is pretty ridiculous for the vast majority.)
A person who eats poorly and doesn’t exercise can easily rack up millions of dollars in treatments for heart attacks and strokes. Yet they don’t seem to get anything like the same derision. Why?
> While this is true, trying to figure out ahead of time if they’ll cost more than they contribute is the path to madness.
I'll point out that people rescued from the brink of death are usually grateful for it, whereas these poor individuals, as noted in the article, often take a swing at their rescuers. I think that pretty much answers the question of whether they cost more than they contribute.
> A person who eats poorly and doesn’t exercise can easily rack up millions of dollars in treatments for heart attacks and strokes. Yet they don’t seem to get anything like the same derision. Why?
What makes you think people don't? Have you never observed someone or even yourself doing something unhealthy and thought glumly "Yep, eating/drinking this is going to put him/her/me one step closer to death by a lifestyle disease. Foolish of him/her/me."
How does them taking a swing at their rescuers tell us anything about their relative costs and benefits to society?
What makes me think people don’t? The fact that you begrudge $50 to save an addict’s life, while your theoretical reaction to someone eating themselves to death is “foolish of him” seems to back that up pretty strongly.
I suppose one could frame it as “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
To be frank, and I say this having addicted family members, sometimes it’s rather hard to care about a junkie.
I’m not exactly in the “fuck ‘em” camp, as a society we should have a better answer than leaving them a nuisance, but the idea that we should give up at a certain point is scarcely exotic.
