The opioid epidemic in the US: A national health emergency - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/18/pers-j18.html
The Washington Post recently published an extraordinary article on policies to address the spiraling drug epidemic in the United States. The article—“As opioid overdoses exact a higher price, communities ponder who should be saved”—did not feature calls for emergency health care or rehabilitation programs, but rather suggestions by some local officials that the state should just let drug addicts die.
The Post highlighted, among others, the proposal of Middletown, Ohio Council Member Daniel Picard that emergency responders should not use the drug naloxone to save overdose victims more than two times. The newspaper noted that the drug is often “the only thing separating whether an overdose victim goes to the hospital instead of the morgue,” and draws the conclusion that it is perfectly reasonable to adopt policies to ensure that many more go to the latter rather than the former.
That such fascistic measures—what might be called the “Duterte solution” to the drug epidemic in the US—are being treated as a rational and legitimate part of the political debate is an expression of the debased political psychology that dominates in the American ruling class. As far as the corporate and financial elite is concerned, if tens of thousands more people die from drug overdoses, this is not only acceptable, it is a positive good.