Narcan which is used for opioid overdoses can now be bought over the counter.
What is this? To me this pretty much says "when you do drugs and overdose just use this and you can save a dopeheads life so they can live to do more drugs later". This is essentially approving drug use and diminishes their negative effects. It makes opiod abuse a little more acceptable.
Hmmm...seems like you have a rather vindictive view of the situation.
I see Narcan OTC as a good thing. If there's something that can save the life of a person who made a mistake, how is that bad?
Do you take the same stance with regards to diabetics having easy access to insulin for when they eat something they know they shouldn't? Or would your position be "let fatso die, he knows he shouldn't be eating cake"?
When I was a kid we had slogans like don't do drugs, DARE officers came to our schools and talked about drugs, comic books had little ads about not doing drugs, cartoons would sometimes have little messages about not doing drugs and so on. What happened to all of that?
...well, they largely abandoned a lot of those efforts after it backfired quite spectacularly (like many of the "war on drugs" efforts). Turns out, when you tell all the kids that marijuana is just as bad as the hard drugs, and a few them try it and realize the adults were lying to them, some of them assume the adults were full of it about the other ones too.
If you were a 14 year old, and the adults just told you that pot ranked up there as one of the worst things you could ever do (with an exaggerated list of claims about it), and you tried it for the first time... had fun, laughed at some cartoons, ate some potato chips, and felt great 3 hours later, what would your takeaway be for the next time they warned you against something "super dangerous"?
We should be discouraging drug use, not normalizing it.
I don't think this "normalizes drug use"
A) Getting narcan amid an overdose isn't "cancels out all effects and the person has a great time". For anyone who's actually seen a person being given narcan amid an OD, they're still having a bad night. Basically, it restores breathing and normalizes the heart rhythm. It's not like the person takes a snort of narcan and says "I feel great, let's go party some more!"
B) Narcan comes with withdrawal side effects of its own, including body aches, fever, vomiting, and tremors. It's not as if getting the narcan is a fun experience. It's just the lesser of two evils compared to dying.
