Would you choose addiction over death? I’m talking hard drugs. Bottoms out on the same street that you grew up on, or raised your children on, or worked on.

My point is that the “preventive maintenance” approach to opioid addiction is more about death statistics than it is about death itself. It’s a numbers game. A nation’s response to situations such as this will largely be determined by how many people don’t die, because people have a distaste toward death and the general public is subservient to what data suggests irrespective of its practical and tangible representations.