Word that New York City set a drug-overdose death-toll record last year was underscored this week by Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan’s proposal that everybody now pack an OD rescue kit.
“You should be carrying Narcan right now,” he says. “Narcan needs to be everywhere.”
That’s so you’ll be prepared in case you’re strolling through Tompkins Square Park one sunny afternoon, and notice someone flaked out on a bench looking seriously overdosed.
You’ll reach for your Narcan holster and come to the rescue (even though, given Tompkins’ clientele, you’ll doubtless need a much bigger holster.)
Hey — it takes a village, right?
Vasan also is, please excuse the expression, the brains behind Gotham’s city-sponsored “safe-injection” drug shoot-up sites and its “public health” vending machines — which pump out free syringes, clean needles and crack pipes to all comers.
And they say assisted suicide is illegal in New York.
Of course, not every bum on a bench is an opioid junkie — some prefer, say, Budweiser.
And a lot of them probably would resent being stabbed with a Narcan needle by a total stranger.
Good Samaritanism isn’t always appreciated, don’t you know.
But that’s not really the point.
As a matter of municipal policy, isn’t it time to recognize that most junkies essentially are victims of themselves — and that they simply won’t be denied?
Enabling them is a hopeless strategy, and very much not the proper role of government.
Providing addicts with crash pads and free paraphernalia — with everything but the drugs themselves — helps nobody but the fat-cat criminals at the top of the narcotics supply chain.
And, of course, the low-level types retailing junk to the streets; they’ve especially prospered since urban America decided that public spaces stuffed full of nodded-out addicts are preferrable to vigorous law enforcement and appropriately severe prison sentences.
It’s a bizarre choice, except for the willfully obtuse.
Consider this: Some 3,000-plus New Yorkers died from drug overdoses in 2022 — slightly more than the 2,990 murdered on 9/11.
But while 9/11 convulsed the nation — and certainly the city — all last year’s OD tally has produced is mild tut-tutting from the usual suspects and Ashwin Vasan’s other-worldly Narcan-in-every-back-pocket proposal.
Has New York — and urban Americans generally — been so beaten down by progressive government and the aftereffects of COVID that they are no longer capable of outrage?
To say nothing of self-protection?
Narcan holsters are a ridiculous Band-Aid on a gushing hemorrhage.
It is asking the public to do what government can’t — or won’t.
Protect its citizens.
Meanwhile, calling out Biden administration border failures as largely responsible for two of New York’s critical problems — its endless supply both of Mexican fentanyl and economic migrants — would be a first step toward self-respect.
And a re-invigoration of street-level drug enforcement surely would make those streets safer.
Win-win.
There are no magic bullets here, of course.
But New York needs to quit whining and take control of its own future.