I’d got to agree with the Governor, there. Same reason I don’t support ideas such as handing out free needles. I don’t see the point of making it easier for people to be criminals. The idea that “they’re only going to do it anyway” is bullshit. Human beings are capable of making their own decisions.
And in response to some of the examples above… Yeah, if a diabetic patient refused to change their lifestyle or take their medicine, I would have no problem letting the dumb fucker die. Come back when you’re got no arms and no legs, and we’ll see your attitude then. And yes, I do know a relative that lost a leg because he refused to take his medicine. He’s a fucking idiot that got exactly what he deserved.
Same thing for cigarette cancer. Well, guess you shouldn’t have smoked the death sticks. Have fun watching your lungs turn to mush, shithead. Do me a favor and die at home, so you don’t take up a hospital bed while you’re at it.
There’s a big difference between undertaking a normal, low risk, and perhaps even necessary activity (like driving a car) and deliberately injecting yourself with poison. We all accept a necessary but manageable risk in any activity, no matter how mundane. All the slippery slope arguments here are nonsense, and honestly kind of pathetic. You sound like those gun nuts that predict any limitations or standards will inevitably lead to total catastrophe… The same downfall of every slippery slope argument.
As I said before, someone who plays sports or drives a car is not TRYING to hurt themselves. Someone who does drugs can’t make the same claim. Likewise, if they blow themselves up in a meth lab. You burned your face off trying to make poison? Karma’s a birch, and they got exactly what was coming to them. Don’t expect me to feel pity for them, because I don’t have any.
I believe that we should treat human life as having value, even if the humans don’t behave in an ideal manner. Denying lifesaving medication to someone who is overdosing seems shockingly callous and lacking in compassion to me.
With all the rocks you are throwing here, I hope you don’t live in a glass house!
I am willing to bet that one could find a few moral failings of yours that are at least as bad as “smoked cigarettes for a couple of years”. Would it be OK to put a “do not resuscitate or even render first aid” order on you if the morality judge decides that any particular thing makes you undeserving? Would it be OK to refuse service to you because you present at an ER naked and delirious after being robbed and beaten up and left unconscious in a ditch for half a day? You would LOOK like a tweeker, can the ER refuse service on looks alone?
People who do not deliberately injure themselves. That seems like a broad category, and it should be a pretty easy standard to meet.
You people keep trying to make this into something it is not, by raising bizarre hypotheticals and flawed analogies. It is very simple: You injured yourself on purpose, you deserve what you get.
And BTW, I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs and I cannot comprehend why anyone would want to. I have no problem getting through my day without drugs, so I don’t understand what is so goddamned difficult about it.
Sure, humans are capable of making their own decisions. And it’s a fact that there are always going to be some people who choose to spend most of their time fucked up. At this point, we’ve proven pretty conclusively that throwing people in prison doesn’t stop that, but it does cost a shit load of money, and it’s not clear to me what benefit we get from locking up addicts like that. If you genuinely don’t give a shit about these people, it seems the best policy is to do something like what the Swiss have been trying lately. Instead of arresting and incarcerating drug addicts, spend a fraction of that money and just give the addicts free heroin. Then let them go home and shoot up until they die.* Costs the taxpayer pennies on the dollar versus the war on drugs.
*It’s worth noting, here, that the actual program they tried in Switzerland was actually the first step in a comprehensive treatment program to get people off of heroin entirely, which sounds pretty counter-intuitive, but seems to have worked pretty well.
People who do drugs (or drink, or smoke) aren’t trying to hurt themselves. They’re trying to have a good time, and they’re hoping they can do it without incurring any consequences. And lots and lots of people do. Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. Not everyone who drinks has liver failure. Not everyone who does heroin overdoses. And not everyone who drives a race car wrecks. They’re all people who have decided that the enjoyment of an activity is worth the risk that the activity will harm them. This is very much a perfect example of a non-fallacious slippery slope. There are degrees of danger in all of these activities, and the participants have different ideas about where the line on “too dangerous” is.
Yeah, I bet you never played with the “Tint” knob on your TV when you were a kid, either.
Look, it’s great that you’re straight edge. The world needs all kinds. Including people who aren’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with people choosing different things from you. There’s no reason to get this angry at them.
Imagine how efficient our society would be if the least productive of us were just sent out on ice floes. It’s cost effective, right? What else needs to be considered?
There’s a safe injection site in Vancouver. It has saved hundreds of lives. The Conservative government tried to shut it down for years because they thought like you do: just let them die and the problem will solve itself.
Well first and foremost, no it won’t. New drug addicts replace the old ones. This is not a battle that can be won through attrition. Nor can it be won through moralizing, as if drug addicts have never been told what they are doing is wrong.
We help drug addicts because they create chaos and we want to minimize that chaos. The heroin addicts of Vancouver used to die in alleys downtown. You know what that means? Dead bodies in the streets. Are you prepared to deal with that? Would you support needle exchanges if you knew they would prevent your child from getting AIDS when they are accidentally poked by a discarded needle they didn’t even know was there?
The safe injection site has saved hundreds of lives and some of those people have gone on to sobriety. You’d have them dying at random for the crime of making a bad choice. Some politicians agree with you. If that’s the kind of world you want to live in because you think the drug addicts will eventually all die off I hate to disappoint you but it’s never going to happen.
I’ve served as an EMT for over 8 years, and I’m damn proud of my job. Over the course of that time, I’ve had to treat various overdoses. One was a 20 year old female who was trying heroin for the first time.
I’m glad I saved her life.
I had to treat a guy who had resorted to boiling his Fentanyl patches, and injecting it into his arm.
I regret that I was unable to save him. Even after his projectile vomit hit me square in the face and open mouth (fyi: you can’t quite vomit it back out. You have to steel yourself mentally and swallow).
I’ve seen some of the worst of humanity. And your callous indifference to others makes me want to place you in that category.
You want to know something? If I ever had the opportunity to meet you, face to face, and you dropped to the ground, whether from illness, or trauma, or an overdose, knowing full well who you are, and how you feel about people, you know what I’d do?
My best to save your life. That’s what I’d do. Because even someone with as much hatred and indifference to others as you have deserves the opportunity to change his mind about people.
And not just would I try to save your life, I’d guard it with my own. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care about your horrible views on humanity. I will guard your life with mine, even though, from your attitude here, you don’t deserve it.
Wow, this is both incredibly simplistic and harsh! You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, what do you do? There must be something… So either you are a teenager who has not had much of a chance to make significant bad choices yet or … what?
To be clear there are at least two different sets of goal posts here: The OP specifically talked about someone showing up (somewhere, I have assumed the ER) presenting with an apparent overdose of illegal and dirty amphetamines, and the option of refusing service on the spot with no further information, based on the “fact” that speed freaks are a bunch of thieves and have zero chance of becoming worthwhile humans. You (Chihuahua) seem to be suggesting that there are people who do not deserve (any? Medical? government paid for?) help because they use drugs and are therefore self injuring (and thus demonstrating that they don’t care for their own life?).
Addressing Chihuahua:
OK, so people who do self harm do not get any sympathy from you. Got it - bad people. You seem to be implying that one cigarette is enough to cross the line into bad people territory. Let me know if that is not accurate.
You have not mentioned other bad things - You don’t self harm but you have not claimed to be otherwise sin free - Maybe there are other things that define bad people.
Do people who murder get the same refusal of treatment in addition to other punishments?
What about rapists? What about if the rapist caught a social disease that led to harm to himself?
Do thieves who are straight edge, but use guns to scare people get a free pass, because they did not directly injure themselves?
What about people like Mitt Romney and Ken Lay who caused hundreds or even thousands of people to loose their entire retirement by making shady, barely legal deals that made them a few million dollars? Or is this particular punishment only for “self harmers”?
It is the severe, black and white focus on self harm that is getting me here - For real, where is the line? I could argue a half a dozen things that anyone has done in the last month that amount to “self harm” - lifted a box that you knew was a little too big? Neglected exercise one day? Ate too much cake? Worked too much? Did not bring in enough money? Did not save enough? Did not go to enough school? Worked full time, went to school, made food for the family and exercised plenty, but got sick because you were sleeping 2 hours a night? Trust me there is no win here and I will prove* that anyone is doing significant self harm and thus does not deserve any help.
*“prove” as in present arguments that demonstrate a harm of some kind. It would be judgement based, and not reasonable or balanced with other life goals. But, that is the burden of proof that we are using regarding self harm and use of drugs.
On preview, It occurs to me that I am connecting the punishment aspect of not treating someone who looks like a bad person with formal legal punishments for actual crimes. This may not be a debate that can boiled down to “behavior beyond this line is punished by this action, and is judged fairly by an unbiased court”. This may be emotional “I don’t like them, so they don’t deserve to be treated like equal human beings” and quibbling about this line between good and bad is just a diversion and there is no actual motive like “using government resources more efficiently”.
Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to spend resources on those who want to become doctors, etc., now and who can’t because of financial reasons (and there are a lot of them) than spend it in the off chance that someone might turn their lives around?
Is that what you got from his post? My takeaway was that prison guards aren’t doing their jobs and keeping the public (and prisoners) safe by keeping drugs out of the prison.
I don’t think that is true. Part of the definition of an accident is ‘unanticipated’. Driving a car the wrong way on a freeway while blindfolded has some pretty obvious anticipatable consequences to it.
You treat people like you’d want to be treated. Simple as that. Why bother with arguments that a person could go on to cure cancer? Most won’t.
It also isn’t fair to place the burden of making the decision to not treat patients on the caregivers. Some might screw up and treat them!
There is an assumption behind this logic that there is a fixed amount of resources that could be used either for educating drs or treating ODs at ERs. Maybe there needs to be adequate funding for both training more drs and for ERs, and we need to adjust other budget items and tax levels to more optimal places to allow for that overall spending in health. If there is in fact a manageable strain on the ER system because of ODs, then maybe the system is working as planned and we can talk separately about increasing education for Drs, and about post-ER intervention for people addicted to drugs. Overall health spending level is a different debate, but I am not willing to assume that the solution has to come from saving money in ERs or kicking med students out of school.
At this point we can afford to do both (if congress were functional) so why not try? Yes there are over impacted ERs, but there are resources to expand them and train more personnel available in our economy. The fact that the spending has not been enough in the past is no reason to assume that we will never spend an appropriate amount on health care and other human services. Sure, we might have to cut back on military spending and tax breaks for the wealthy, but the resources are there to be allocated.
Further, there are a lot of ways to reduce resources used on people who do not take care of themselves before we start refusing first aid based on what someone looks like. For instance putting some at risk un-housed people in low cost housing reduces the number of injuries, problems from exposure, and the risk of being robbed and assaulted. Due to those protections, many of these people stop going to the ER and go to much lower cost appointments and just get their meds when they need them, or get that wound dressed so it does not go septic.
So I call a general “False dichotomy” and “excluding the middle” (middle=other reasonable options) on a large part of this discussion.
That we’d all be dead in a few decades, as the first ones on the floes would include the very young.
Expenses would certainly go down, mind you.
I don’t drink, do drugs or smoke and it took me a long time to understand why other people do, but I think I’ve never been as judgmental of other people’s choices in entertainment as to think that anybody who chooses differently than me is “defective”.
The purpose of needle exchange programs is not addiction treatment, it’s disease reduction. Re-using needles spreads disease, needle exchanges reduce re-use and spread of disease. It’s done as much for the benefit of society as a whole as to help drug addicts and is a public health measure.
People who use drugs aren’t usually trying to hurt themselves, either. They’re trying to get high, not harmed.
No one can see the future, that’s why. My friend works in under-served communities that otherwise might have no doctor at all which is an extremely valuable service to society. A lot of people who want to be doctors already don’t want to do that, they want to work in a big urban area where they can specialize and make lots of money and who cares about rural residents and people living on Native reservations, right?
This is where you get into problems with trying to determine who is worthy of life and who isn’t - you can’t know what a person will contribute in the future, or how. Our society has decided that medical people shouldn’t be making such choices, they should focus on saving lives rather than dithering in an emergency whether or not someone is “worthy”.
The logic belonged to who I was replying to. They said that treating people was a benefit to society because of the good some of them could do when they recovered. The argument is flawed because we could gain quicker and more assured benefits by investing in people right now who want to improve themselves. I never said it was either/or. You should have picked that up from my last paragraph.
A drug addict who enters treatment want to improve him/herself, too - or don’t they count? Should using drugs be a death sentence under all circumstances?
Over in the Philippines they’re trying the execute everyone approach. 1900 dead so far, 700,000 in jail. If this doesn’t fix the problem perhaps going down this path is not an effective way to eradicate the scourge of drugs. Anyone who wishes to argue that they should be killing more people or doing it faster/better and that’s how you fix it is free to do so.
Listen, I’m just saying that the argument for treatment based upon some possible future benefit to society is not a good one. You should treat someone because that is the correct thing to do. If they go on and do something ‘useful’, then all the more power to all of us.
Why isn’t that yet another valid reason? MOST drug addicts who clean up do wind up contributing to society - they hold jobs, pay taxes, raise families. That’s the whole point of rehab, to make people functional members of society again.
But yeah, for me treating them for their problems because their human beings is more than sufficient reason. It’s not sufficient for everyone, though, so I’m willing to throw yet another reason in the pot.
This really makes sense putting in the time, energy, and money to save these people who are injecting any mysterious thing they can get their hands on.
