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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

'"Unfortunately, these are not your stereotypical "bad" people that are dying from overdoses..'

Sorry to nitpick but this is a fairly delicate subject. Does a typical 'bad' person for whom it would be totally ok to overdose exist?

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Yes, groups that society consider to be trash or defective from the get go. Not "those people" who don't "deserve" such things to happen to them. The law enforcement response to opiods versus crack in the 80s shows us how society views these groups, and what the solution is (militarized police for one, "treatment" for another).

What he probably means is that it's not (just) happening to people who are so badly addicted that an overdose is a likely conclusion in any case.

Addiction is a complicated problem and labeling the addict as 'bad' is an antipattern. Modern society should be able to approach everyone from a position of dignity and humanity - dehumanizations erodes both parties in an interaction. 'You deserve to die because of your past history' is a brutal, ethically untenable stance.

Then again, considering we have limited resources for dealing with this problem, pretending all users are the same when we damn well know they aren't is probably not the most efficient approach.

I wasn't claiming statistics or individual differences don't exist.

From the point of view of outcomes and efficiency it's better to approach people as individuals and not as statistics, or even worse, statistics with moral binning into good and bad. The logical argument is that humans are complex and it takes a lot of time to gather sufficient data to be correct.

I can dig out references if you like but medical facilities which focus more on individual-to-individal interactions rather than on factory like throughput work better.

Well sure you can cite evidence where treating people as individuals is beneficial and optimal, my dispute was that this is always the optimum approach.

I obviously agree.

The people who are overdosing from the Fentynal problem are doing so mostly unknowingly. Dealers are "spiking" their heroin with it in an effort to boost sales as when someone OD's from taking heroin, the user community takes that as being a great batch of heroin and the OD being caused by someone who is not very tolerant to heroin. It's a sick and disgusting game that dealers are using. Again it's not the drug and generally not the users who are OD'ing that are bad, it's the sick twisted dealers out to make more dope money!

Can this be astroturfing? My finances mom died of an accidental Fentynal overdose this past year. It was legally prescribed to her.

I didn't read what GP wrote as those "bad" people deserve to die (nobody deserves to die IMHO but that is another subject) but that it is not the hardcore, everyday drug users who die but the average-kid-nextdoor who is experimenting.

>the average-kid-nextdoor who is experimenting.

experimenting with drugs which, even if they are what you think they are, can be fatal. Especially when mixed (as they often are) with alcohol and other narcotics.

There isn't some special shield around newbie drug users to protect them from consequence. I find the whole concept bizarre, they are well within their rights to experiment but then they own the consequences.

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