Let Opioid Addicts Die: Ohio Official’s Answer To Spiraling Narcan Costs

CINCINNATI, OH — A city official in the Cincinnati suburb of Middleton says heroin overdoses have become such a costly problem — officials in the city of about 49,000 expect to spend a whopping $100,000 this year on the overdose-reversal drug Narcan — that he’s willing to let some addicts die.

Middleton City Councilman Dan Picard is catching static all over the internet, where he has been called a “disgrace to humanity” and worse, but he likely gave power to the thoughts of at least some officials in metropolitan suburbs across Ohio, which has been called the “face of the nation’s opioid epidemic.”

An average of eight Ohioans died a day due to accidental opiate overdoses in 2015, according to Ohio Department of Health statistics. For the year, 3,050 people died of overdoses, up 20 percent from the year prior. Opioid deaths similarly spiked from 2013 to 2014. (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Cincinnati Patch, or click here to find your local Ohio Patch. Follow us on Facebook, and if you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

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By June 20, Middleton emergency responders had been on 100 more opiate overdose runs than they had in all of 2016, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. If given in time, the Narcan antidote reverses the effects of the drug, but Picard asked if the EMS crews could refuse treatment to addicts who repeatedly overdose under a kind of three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy.

“Is there a law that says we have to go out?” Picard asked, adding later that he is “to the point of we need to make a decision that perhaps we don’t.”

The city can “get out of the business” by privatizing emergency medical services, said City Manager Doug Adkins, who told the Enquirer that he has asked the city’s attorneys to research whether first responders can refuse service calls for overdoses.

See Also: Patch Special Report

• Recovering Addict Reforms Police Approach To Opiates
• Curbing Opiates: Doctors Addicted To Overprescribing

Picard has tried to extricate himself from the resulting public relations nightmare and told the Enquirer his suggestion wasn’t a prescription for the opiate crisis but one that addressed its drain on city resources.

Still, people are raking him over the coals in a social media firestorm and on digital media sites.

In a post on BuzzFeed, Taryn Wanzie of TruthPharm, a New York-based group that advocates for public policy change to address the opioid and heroin epidemic, said it is “nearly impossible to wrap our heads around first the ignorance of this man, but second the cold, calculated nature” of his comments.

“To suggest that you withhold emergency medical response to overdose patients is manslaughter at best and premeditated murder at worse,” Wanzie wrote. “You won’t be ‘teaching them a lesson’ or ‘making them afraid to overdose in Middletown.’ You will be directly contributing to the exponential increase of deaths in your community.”

On Facebook, one person posted: “I really hope no-one who Dan Picard cares about ends up with a life threatening addiction problem, or his views may come back to haunt him.”

Another said Picard’s suggestion fails to address “the real community problems, a culture afraid of pain and ... the FDA charging nothing for oxycodone but a ton for Narcan.”

But not everyone was critical.

“I'm with Dan Picard on his opinion and heroin in Middletown,” one person wrote. “Think all us taxpayers need to back him, we're poor enough in this city.”

Photo via U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention