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You're assuming that everyone who ODs is a hopeless junkie, and that all hopeless junkies are incapable of being anything other than bums. Pretty much every jazz musician who came up in the late 40s and early 50s was a heroin addict, and some were truly hopeless. Yet a good deal of them were extraordinarily productive. Same with any number of rock musicians who OD'd. Same with my brother's neighbor, who had a good job and had been to treatment but fell of the wagon and OD'd because she no longer had the tolerance for her old dose. My friend's ex-husband overdosed in a gas station bathroom despite having a good job and leading an otherwise normal life. You can't paint everyone who has a serious drug habit with a broad brush and say that there's no hope for recovery and that their lives have no value.
But what percentage of cases are even remotely functional, let alone high functioning? If we’re saving people who are somewhat functioning, it might make sense, but if we’re saving people who will dig through trash cans and sleep in the streets and can’t afford medical care, we aren’t saving people, just prolonging the suffering stage.
You can't separate them. The benefits to society from saving the more functional addicts are a karmic reward for being a society that regards human lives as worth effort to save even if they don't benefit society.
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Well that's the question isn't it? What percentage of addicts do you think have to be functional before it's worth spending $25 worth of Narcan on them?
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Yes, obviously many great musicians have been drug addicts. The frontman of my favorite band, a man whose music has brought much joy to my life, is a former heroin addict. I don’t know if he ever OD’d to the point of needing Narcan, but if he did, I’m glad they saved him!
However, such individuals represent only a very small percentage of total hard drug addicts. More importantly, they are important enough to a large amount of people — and are paid accordingly — such that they have a support system and financial cushion. In other words, if they OD and the police and EMTs show up to save them, they can pay for the Narcan themselves out-of-pocket, or else have someone else pay on their behalf. If they want to pursue a personal habit which is not only expensive but also extremely dangerous, they better have some money saved away for just such an occasion. I’m sure Jimmy Page and Kurt Cobain could have afforded it.
They can pay for it on credit, of course, and if the expense is too onerous, they can appeal to their fans to crowd-fund the payment of the subsequent debt. If the fans aren’t willing to bankroll it, I guess that particular musician was not generating enough fan enthusiasm to be worth saving. And if they can’t pay the debt, they go to debtors’ prison, which we also need to reintroduce.
It's not that every drug addict is a great musician as much as it is that more than you think are perfectly capable of being productive. Naloxone is trivially inexpensive; I don't think that letting someone die over a perceived inability to pay a small sum is any way for a civilized society to operate. This isn't like cancer treatment.
No, we don't. There's a reason we abolished these in the 1800s and established a bankruptcy code. Hell, for how much it costs to imprison someone, we'd better off just having the state pay the debt in all but the most serious cases. The only thing we really have that's comparable to debtor's prison in Pennsylvania is jailing people for failure to pay child support, and this isn't taken lightly. Basically, it's threatened repeatedly, but only against people who obviously have the ability to pay and are just refusing to do so. I used to practice bankruptcy, and believe me, these people are trying to pay. They've usually put themselves in a much worse spot than they could have been in if they had filed earlier. Fraud is rare, and it's rarer still to find a bankruptcy attorney who would file a case in which fraud was evident.
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Under EMTALA this would be explicitly illegal.
Given that he's advocating the return of debtor's prisons, I don't think he cares too much about EMTALA.
There is in fact a reason for EMTALA- people experiencing severe medical emergencies are often unable to confirm that they will be able to pay the bill not because of inability to pay the bill, but because of the severe medical emergency.
Lots of people are ok with letting the poor die. Far fewer are ok with letting the unlucky die from being mistaken for poor.
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