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I think it’s probably good to help create a minimum effort threshold for suicide; things like putting railings on bridges and nets on high buildings make it so that individuals struck by an acute but fleeting suicidal urge are protected from doing something they’d almost immediately regret.
The people accessing medically-assisted suicide, or using other high-effort methods of suicide requiring persistent and focused intent, are probably people who genuinely are better off dead. Not every human life is destined to last until a peaceful death in old age. Not every person is psychologically constituted in a way that’s resilient to all of the various tribulations that life throws at us. I probably wouldn’t personally pull the trigger or inject the deadly solution myself if one of those people asked me, but I’m fine with professionals existing who are willing and able to do so.
As for hard drug addicts, my impression is that only a small percentage of junkies are the sorts of people who’d be very valuable contributors to society if we managed to fix their addictions. Drugs are not taking our best, in other words. I’m aware that there are some unknown number of totally normal middle-class individuals who got hooked on opiates because they were led astray by unscrupulous doctors overprescribing them; my impression is that this represents only a very small percentage of addicts, and that their numbers are being inflated by a populist coalition determined to treat impoverished white Americans as hypoagentic victims.
Junkies killing themselves, whether through overdoses or other means, is overwhelmingly a boon to society, and I think almost zero effort should be taken to prevent them from doing so.
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