To you, the person who wrote, "Free insulin before free Narcan. Dope head's chose their sickness. Diabetics did not." I do not condemn you for your ignorance. I do, however, urge you to straighten out your facts before posting offensive and potentially triggering content onto the web. I'm a firm believer that ignorance should be treated with compassion, as it is, after all, a separate kind of sickness altogether, produced through a noxious lack of understanding.
Let me educate you.
Before we begin, let me make one thing absolutely, resonantly clear: nobody chooses their sickness.
Not one. Mental illnesses and drug addiction can be just as debilitating and chronic as any physical illness yet it remains one of the most trivialized and dismissed epidemic issues to date. The engine of this injustice is fed by people like you and your wrongful, pestilent persistence to put fellow human beings and their conditions down as having lesser importance as your own.
The drug that is also known as Naloxone is described as an "opioid antidote" as it is used to revive a person from a potentially fatal opioid overdose. Fatalities occur when the opioids inhibit the brain's internal breathing control apparatus, thereby starving the body's organs of oxygen one by one until the individual dies. When Narcan/Naloxone is administered, an opioid's effects are reversed which allows the persons' normal breathing pattern to be restored.
More than 17,000 people of all ages died as a consequence of an opioid overdose in 2017 alone. Due to this escalating crisis, some specialized outreach programs have campaigned to provide Narcan for free — and yes, many insurances cover a fraction of the cost — but without insurance and access to said public health organizations it is expected of you to pay the cost: up to $140 for a two-time dosage.
Now that we've established that Narcan is not free, let's move on to the people you refer to as "dope heads" and their unsolicited sickness. There are four main factors that contribute to drug addiction.
1. It is possible to be born genetically predisposed to all forms of addiction.
Meaning it is possible, for instance, for the individual to be born with an addictive personality. Due to this, tampering with experimentation would escalate and make it incredibly difficult for them to stop.
2. It has been written that more than half of drug abusers also suffer from a form of mental illness.
Drug addiction would often go hand-in-hand with depression, anxiety or schizophrenia. The drugs are utilized as a form of self-medication in a desperate attempt to quieten their inner-demons.
3. Individuals who have experienced and have been scarred from trauma often turn to drugs as a coping mechanism.
Trauma could include Neglect, war, sexual abuse, bullying or domestic assault.
4. An individual may grow up in a home inhabited by arguments, domestic violence, neglect or substance/drug abuse.
These environmental factors often contribute to the individual later becoming a drug abuser themselves.
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Both Insulin and Narcan are essential for keeping people alive — by that logic, they should both be free. Why do we insist on drawing comparisons from completely unrelated sources in a mad attempt to put ourselves ahead? What good is that ever going to accomplish? All it achieves is an unnecessary humanitarian rift right at the time where we need peace, understanding, and solidarity. We need that now more than ever.
The issues lie with the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system that thrives on turning our sickness into profit and us against each other. Obviously, they're succeeding.
In essence, Narcan is not free, nobody chooses their sickness and belittling conditions completely unrelated to your own is only sprouting even more unnecessary bitterness and hatred into existence in the place of compassion.
If we fight a "battle of the sickest" nobody wins, so let's stop competing as though it'll get us anywhere.
