Why SHOULD Society keep mitigating bad consequences from bad decisions? - Granite Grok

Why SHOULD Society keep mitigating bad consequences from bad decisions?

NarcanI’ve been saying it for years – the goal of Progressives is to make sure that someone making bad decisions should not suffer the consequences for doing so.  Further, we’re all hateful heartless people because we complain about the socialization of those costs.  But that’s what the Nanny State demands: SHUT UP!

First a dose of reality, then showing abuse will not stop, and then the willingness “taking someone else’s money”, to make others feel good and virtue signal (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Hot Air: Ohio Councilman: Maybe We Should Stop Responding To Repeat Overdose Calls

Give Middletown Councilman Dan Picard full marks for administrative ingenuity, if nothing else. Facing rising costs from the erupting opioid crisis plaguing the US, and angry at repeat offenders, Picard offered an “outside the box” solution. Why not just let them die after three responses?  Frustration over the amount of money and public safety services being devoted to drug overdoses led to one Middletown City Council member asking if it was possible for the city to not respond to such calls…“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,” Picard said. “We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.” In fairness, the issue got prompted by the budget hit that Middletown’s taking. It’s not that they didn’t see issues with opioids as a potential crisis, but the costs have really exploded for it. The city budgeted $10,000 this year for Narcan, the antidote of choice for overdoses, but at the moment they’re on pace to spend $100,000 — and that might be a conservative estimate.

That’s no small amount of money for a Rust Belt city with slightly under 49,000 residents and a median household income (estimated as of 2015) of $36,700. Unemployment in 2015 was 9.3%, far above the national average. This is not a town with a lot of opportunities to make up budget shortfalls, and many of the calls are for transients who don’t live in Middletown at all. On top of that, police have had to make a number of repeat calls on addicts, and not just in Middletown. In Dayton, police had to supply Narcan twenty times to one individual.

How OFTEN are taxpayers supposed to keep up taking money away from their own families for people that don’t care for their own lives?  Yes, there should be help available but at what cost?  Cost DOES have to be part of the equation.  The cost of Narcan has exploded – up to $2000 each injection.  So that one person in Dayton cost taxpayers $40K.  One. Person. Dayton is a big city but I’m also sure it has a fair number of addicts using that up.

After all, nothing is as expensive as when something is “free to you” as all these catheter, braces, and other meds ads on TV tout to watchers.  But we all pay for it.  Sure, but to someone who obviously doesn’t care about themselves? To what point are we supposed to subsidize bad decisions and make sure that no one must suffer consequences that ordinarily they must assume?  I can feel for this councilman as there isn’t enough money in the world to keep doing this forever.  This is, as Progressives say, is unsustainable especially for smaller towns.

A $100,000 is a policeman, a fireman, a DPW worker, a teacher that Middletown must forego because of this kind of cost.  At some point, costs DO matter and responsible politicians have to become as pragmatic as parents whose teenager keeps wrecking the family car – costs DO matter.  But what do you do when addicts then abuse the “abuser saver”?

Atlanta Journal ConstitutionNarcan parties becoming disturbing trend, police say

“Narcan parties” are starting to pop up and WPXI has learned that they are becoming a trend in Pennsylvania. According to investigators, addicts and dealers are taking advantage of the heroin-reversal drug by having parties where they sell heroin and Narcan as a package deal. “You can party and use the opioids to whatever degree you want, and with the intent that you can be saved by the use of the Narcan,” Chief Jack Soberick of the Landsford, Pennsylania police said.

Ayup – a package deal.  But at least those that are using the services are actually paying for it, but that’s the minor part of this.  It is that people are willing to put themselves at risk over and over again. Now I’m the contrarian here – while one shouldn’t give up hope, there is a point at which one says “I can’t fix them”.  I know this up close and personal – you can’t fix them.  They have to come to a place at which they want to save themselves.  You, me, friends, family members – it won’t matter until that happens. And with some, they never will get to that place.

An “epidemic”, technically speaking, is a disease that one gets from bacteria or viruses.  In that, if you get sick, we could consider you to be a “victim”.  Better, though, to say that you’re a “patient” that even when you did all the right things, you got sick.  But this is part of the bastardization of our common language.

Obesity is not an epidemic – it is a choice to keep eating more calories than you expend.  No one, as the ad says, grows up wishing to be an addict, but the hard cold truth is that unless someone sneaks up on you and injects something into you, shoves something down your throat or up your nose, you made a decision to take something that you know to be dangerous and can kill you.  It is a DECISION that you made, as some point, that said “yes, I will take this drug”. People DO have self-agency – they are not just flowers that wave in the breeze and are not responsible for themselves.  But Progressives deny this – and then we’re back to the mitigating all bad consequences because VICTIM!  I hate this because it reduces someone to being just something that is passive and not responsible for themselves or their actions instead of being active in their own right.  Again, for the haters that will descend upon me for this contrarian view, it’s in my family.  I know it and see it.  And I’m having to deal with it.  And it all started with a single decision.

Now, we can all talk about the where and what-fors but in my opinion, I’m betting that there is a big whole in their lives.  One that many of them do not wish to even look at and figure out either why or mitigate it.

Not even these do-gooders, who are the PRIME EXAMPLE of wanting to make OTHERS pay for yet others problems so that they can virtue-signal.

Union LeaderDoctors raise alarm as cost of overdose-reversing drug spikes to $4,000

CHICAGO – When the American Medical Association annual meeting convenes in Chicago Sunday, the powerful physicians’ lobby could push for government intervention to lower the price of the heroin overdose-reversing drug naloxone. A resolution written by a Michigan doctor and three medical students notes the skyrocketing cost of the drug – a two-pack of auto-injecting syringes went from $690 in 2014 to more than $4,000 this year, while other forms of the drug have doubled in price – and calls on legislators and regulators to increase public access to affordable naloxone.

So how does one “lower” the price?

  • Petition Government to raise taxes to subsidize that “anti-drug” – hey, once again, make it “free”!
  • Petition Government to force the maker to reduce prices – yet another Govt intrusion into the marketplace (no matter the intention)
  • Petition Government to take the maker’s private property (the product / Intellectual Property) and effectively nationalize it.

I don’t think that any of those options are correct.  If this doctor and those students are so adamant, let me propose this – make your own compound and then give it away.  You’re smart people – shouldn’t be a problem.  Use your OWN resources to create your own solution – and then you can sell it and make lots of people happy again.  Look, I don’t mean to make sport of them (ok, I do, a bit) but I HATE the idea that the first knee-jerk reaction has to be “Somebody has to do something about this and GOVT is the “person” to do it).

Guess they never read De Tocqueville.  But this next part I find absolutely absurd:

“The population I serve often has difficulty affording medications for chronic illnesses that they require daily, so the idea that they would be able to purchase an increasingly costly overdose reversal medication would certainly be out of the question for them,” said Dr. Gunjan Malhotra, who works in Detroit.

I’m not even sure where to start with that.  I’m sorry that they are ill as I have chronic diseases myself like hypertension and a love of really hot chili dogs.  But I’m not about to take drugs.  Look, my Dad was an Irish drunk – and so I never made a decision to take up drinking.  We have that ability.

And sometimes, to go back to the main thrust of this post, we all can’t have what we want (like the high tech version of it):

 

 

Chelsea Laliberte, whose Live4Lali nonprofit does similar naloxone distribution in the suburbs and elsewhere in Illinois, said she has been able to get the drug free via drug company grants. But the group is expanding its work this year, and so has begun to pay for naloxone. She, too, wouldn’t discuss the exact price, but said it was under $20 per dose. “We’re only willing to pay for what is the most viable, sustainable option, which is a syringe and vials,” she said. “We don’t pay $4,400 a kit for (auto-injectors). I would never do that with anyone’s donation dollars.”

The auto-injector, sold under the brand name Evzio, is made by the drug company Kaleo. The device contains a recording that guides users through the process with voice commands. In a study performed by Kaleo employees, 90 percent of people were able to use the Evzio without training, while no one was able to administer the nasal spray correctly.

 

Back to the do-gooders and back to beseeching government.  Oh, one thing here:

They called for the federal government to take steps that are reflected in the AMA resolution, including negotiating cheaper prices with drug companies and making naloxone an over-the-counter drug, which would cut prices by attracting new manufacturers. The AMA will hold a committee vote on the resolution Sunday, and if it passes, delegates will debate and vote on it later in the week. Though the measure holds no force of law, Malhotra and her colleagues said they hoped it would be a strong advocacy statement.

“This tells legislators and citizens across our country that America’s physicians think we can do more to fight the opioid epidemic,” said Eric Walton, a student at the Wayne State University School of Medicine. “Naloxone affordability is a commonsense step toward ending opioid-related deaths.”

Yeah, everything is “commonsense” when you are making decisions about other peoples’ property and having no issue telling people what to do – especially taking it away to satisfy you and make you feel better (e.g., virtue-signaling).  It isn’t just this issue – there’s tons of them.  There’s no lack of them and no lack of activists demanding more and more. And a lot of them are “just the cost of a cup of coffee a day if we all pitch” is what I am being told.

So why do I feel that I’m always pulling two tankers behind me full of coffee?

And I hate coffee. But they never stop demanding.

Look, I have a lot of empathy for other parents in this situation – they weren’t responsible for it and they reach out to their children because, well, that’s what parents do.  As my late Mom said “you never stop being a parent”.  True, but at some point, even parents realize that adult children are adults – you can’t keep shielding themselves from themselves unless you lock them up in a room (and then you get other secondary problems).  They will make their own decisions and therefore, must own their own decisions.  Even if it hurts both them and those that love them.

A micro-rant here: too often I keep hearing that this is an “epidemic” and that people caught up in it are now portrayed as “victims”.  Hey that goes back to what I said at the start about how Progressives roll.  Mix the mitigating the bad consequences with their Critical Race Theory of oppression and every one is a victim – NO one is responsible.

Sure, drugs alter the brain’s neurons and repattern it over time.  But what I don’t hear very often is “but at the start, someone DID make that decision to start”.  That is undeniable.

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