If they can afford their drug fix, they should pay for their own revival drugs. Like a medical bill. You got yourself into that situation, you should't get out without consequence.
How would you enforce that? Ive seen video where an EMT gives the guy narcan and he fucking jumped up and basically just took off. They were trying to get him to stop, to get him to a hospital or whatever and the guy was like "no thanks!" and just rushed off around a corner.
How would that guy get billed? Let's assume that he actually has a physical address and gets regular mail (unlikely). And let's assume that somehow the EMT's figured out where to send a bill...whats a good deterrent to keep a drug addict from just completely ignoring that bill?
I like you.
That's a valid point.A bill probably wouldn't work.The only thing I can come up with is identifying the addict at that moment if possible (again, probably not viable, but maybe detaining him until ID'd?) and if he is encountered again, has a note on his file of the times he was revived, and then maybe not administering narcan after one or two times? IDEALLY an officer/EMT would see 'Hey, I've revived this guy before' or 'Hey, I see that we've given this guy narcan like 4 times, he's past his limit'.
But then we get into all sorts of ethical issues. So I can't really come up with a great solution myself.
>we get into all sorts of ethical issues
Exactly. The knee-jerk reaction is to say..."fuck that junkie, I don't want to pay for that". The fact that we're dealing with repeat customers getting multiple narcan shots doesn't help. But the alternative literally ends up with bodies in the streets, and people don't want to see that either.
For me, my first thought is how'd that junkie get to that moment, when he needs a public hand-out to stay alive. The answer tends to be that they were prescribed way too many opiates for way too long a time. Those opiates were then suddenly cut off and a shit-ton of people switched to heroin.
If you're looking for a target, consider the pharmaceutical industry. They're the ones that decided to jack the price for epipen and they're the ones that caused our opiate epidemic.
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