Life-savers should keep saving lives
One can only guess at the number of lives saved since first responders regularly began carrying naloxone, the drug that reverses the effects of opioid overdoses. Suffice it to say it is in the thousands.
But not everyone is celebrating this. Social media sites are filled with memes railing that while heroin addicts are having their lives saved with free naloxone, often sold under the brand name Narcan, parents of food-allergic children can’t afford to get EpiPens, and veterans are going without medical care. These things are not mutually exclusive. We should be making sure people with life-threatening allergies have access to affordable drugs. We most assuredly should be taking better care of our veterans. But we also should be saving the lives of those suffering from drug addictions.
A significant number of people are addicted to heroin as a result of being given powerful prescription painkillers for medical reasons – by doctors. Some people get hooked on these painkillers. They gradually build up a tolerance to the drugs. If their prescriptions run out, they get them by illegal means. And they have to take more and more to get the same effect. Eventually, some will turn to a cheaper alternative: heroin. And we need to help these people, and also people who have taken other paths to opioid addiction.
The anti-naloxone forces have grown so loud the Associated Press ran a story the other day about the backlash.
Thomas Synan Jr., police chief in Newtown, Ohio, near Cincinnati, said he’s hearing the complaints.
“I understand the feeling that someone is doing something to themselves, so why do the rest of us have to pay?” he told the AP. “But our job is to save lives, period.”
Synan also noted he has never had someone tell him police and firefighters shouldn’t help a habitual drunken driver who has had a car accident, or aid someone who attempted suicide multiple times.
His words were echoed by those of Marion, Ohio, fire Capt. Wade Ralph, who said, “There’s a human factor to it that some people, I think, just forget about, or maybe they ignore it and say, ‘Hey, screw it, let them die.’ I’m like, you can’t do that. We have people here, we have guys at the firehouse, whose kids have been hooked on stuff like that.”
The AP also spoke with Ron Calhoun, an anti-drug activist in northern Kentucky who rejects the idea that saving people’s lives with naloxone is enabling drug use.
“The only thing Narcan enables is breathing. We just want to keep them alive and get them into treatment,” Calhoun said.
He added he knows of one young woman whose life was saved 15 times with naloxone.
“And today, she’s in rehab,” he said. “Corpses don’t do well in rehab.”
Addiction is a disease, and like most diseases, it is treatable. Naloxone gives addicted people another chance, if they are committed to beating their problem. Many addicts have gone on to be highly productive members of society and to lead rewarding, happy lives. Sometimes it takes more than one shot at rehab. Sometimes quite a few. And if saving these people from an overdose gives them that opportunity to achieve ultimate success in their battle with drugs, we celebrate it.
The people we lose to drug addiction are not faceless or anonymous. They are our friends, co-workers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, even grandmothers and grandfathers.
When we read or hear of another life lost to the scourge of the heroin epidemic, we are reminded of the words of John Donne, who wrote, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”