Three overdose, one dies in Tremont Street apartment

We are always going to have addicts, unfortunately.

What I don't hear is how someone thinks throwing money at the problem will fix it. Or how the government can help. Real, concrete, reasons. More treatment centers? Awareness campaign? Early intervention programs? Does anyone realize that all these things are useless? Try throwing those kinds of solutions at nicotine addicts. NOT smoking, nicotine addicts. They still go to CVS for their patches you know, or to the new vape store. Smoking was curbed by making it illegal to do basically everywhere but your own home, and jacking the price of smokes to the point of making it a financial burden on those who smoke (generally poorer demographics).
Guess what? Opiates are already illegal. The problem is they CAN be almost cheaper than cigarettes, and there is NO regulation on them, and greedy dealers cut their product with god-knows-what to stretch their profits. These are the risks society takes when creating a black market for something. During prohibition many a man went blind on bathtub moonshine.
No, folks, there will always be addicts. Back at the turn of the century you could get this stuff in cough syrup, and plenty of people seemed to have persistent coughs back then, sucking away at their medicine bottles. At least the product was consistent and they knew what they were getting. Even then, overdoses happened.
You cannot legislate away addiction.
You cannot fund away misery and hopelessness.
Drug education starts in elementary school. No one who puts a needle in their arm can claim ignorance. They do it out of misery and/or desperation and/or boredom. Once you start it is a lifetime battle. Even when clean all it takes is a bad day in the right place and time. Jobs, security, and a sense of hope would go a long way at fighting addiction in this country, but no one is interested in that, just band aid everything. So ok if we're gonna Band-Aid it the solution is to make drugs legal, regulate them, and make drugs of a known quality/quantity available for the junkies. Let them overdo it and die or keep booting all the way to the poorhouse. Good for them I say. Funding programs and awareness campaigns and shooting galleries hasn't, isn't, and will never do anything to solve the problem. People like getting wasted, bottom line. The problem to be tackled is getting it to the point where it stops affecting everyone else. The easiest way to do that is to give them safe drugs to do and shoo them away to what ever den/hole/alley they are comfortable doing their drugs in, and away from the public. Crack down on croaker doctors over-prescribing the pills that get people started, and make the pharmaceutical companies who push them pay their fair share of cleaning up the mess they create. The government cannot do much more to curb this problem then they are already doing. More funds and more people on the ground does nothing to stop the root problems. It's like screaming to hire more janitors to clean up the streets of litter when the real solution is putting more trash barrels out and ticketing for littering.

I don't see increased treatment making much of a dent in the OD crisis. First, it doesn't really work all that well. The numbers are really bad. They are only saving lives in the short term, while the addicts are actually there. But nevertheless treatment is meant as a long term solution. How does that address the current problem of fentanyl laced heroin, the root cause of the present crisis? This is a supply problem. That's where the solution is.

or Doctors?

Dealers exist because demand exist.

Dealers aren't even the ones getting people hooked - that would be the pharmaceutical companies (which are putting big $$$ into killing legal weed initiatives, as legal weed cuts the use of OxyContin).

It isn't as simplistic and moralistic as you paint it to be - which is why moralizing at it is NOT working and never has, and why the problem doesn't get solved by massive oversimplification of the issue like you have just done.

As a citizen it makes me furious to see all the addicts camped out on the Boston Common, using the T as their sleeping quarters, committing crimes to support their habit, and transforming the Boston Medical Center into a scene from "The Walking Dead".

You should really take off those histrionic alternate reality glasses. They are turning you into a moralizing Victorian.

Go watch reefer madness and calm down.

Yes, the rehab industry is a failure, so let's reinstitute a policy that's been a failure for 40+ years.

I'm under the impression that the 80% were not all actual prescription holders, but that they certainly used prescription opiates prior to heroin. Overprescribing causes the issue of people who don't need that level of painkiller OR the amounts given- which is why you could so easily find someone willing to sell.

Arthur, please tell me you're being ironic. We've had a forty year policy of harsh sentences and mandatory minimums. That does NOTHING to reduce drug use or addiction. It does put millions of people into the criminal justice system, largely at the discretion of police and prosecutors.

Removing the criminal sanction from drugs, allowing and regulating their sale, would do wonders for the problems we're seeing now.

Do you think heroin users WANT to overdose? Most of these preventable deaths happen because users are ignorant of the dosage and purity of what they're using, and they're ignorant because they're forced to procure their drugs on the black market.

During America's short-lived experiment with alcohol prohibition, many people died from "bathtub gin," and organized crime gained a foothold in our cities that persists to this day.

Making something illegal - whether alcohol or heroin - is a policy choice to REMOVE regulation, enrich criminals, criminalize users, and destroy communities.