Councilors want to consider Boston site where addicts could shoot up under medical supervision

Do we just allow people to sell, buy, and inject fentanyl?

What's the alternative? If you throw them in prison for drug offenses, you get to spend $40K+ a year per person to keep them away from society, and you have one fewer cell for someone who's actually committed a crime. If you leave them to their own devices, you get needles scattered in public parks, and you get a public health crisis when EMTs have to respond to overdoses caused by bad batches of heroin. If you give them somewhere safe to go, and make it legal to buy their drugs from regulated entities, you at least have some control over the problem.

So you think we should structure our treatment programs to apply only to the most far gone users? What about all the addicts that are trying to get clean and need more resources to do so? I don't see why we would deny them this service just because there might be some people that are too far gone to help.

Besides, addiction is a disease. You don't turn your back on sick people and say "maybe they'll die and that'll solve the issue". Let's try to help, first. There's no downside to piloting this program, and at the very least it'll likely get some used needles off our streets.

There is no drug epidemic that our culture has ever faced that did not significantly affect the majority 'racial' segment of the population.

Folks are concerned about the opioid epidemic because it is afffecting a large and apparently growing number of people - of all colors. For decades, the demographics of the user/victim/addict population have been a fairly close analog to the more general population. Ie, it's been mostly white folk dying from ODs for a looong time (in fact, whites have been slightly over-represented there since at least the 70s), so the idea that people only care once it affects those who share their skin tone is unsupported by historical data.

But remember abstinence only sex education? Surely that did a great job at preventing teen pregnancies... Not a knock against educating the populace, but it only goes so far. Despite education, people still find themselves in trouble with addiction either by pain meds, or in other cases bad decisions.

I get the impression that you're not exactly very well read on these facilities. Considering that these people would be administered to in the facility, I'd have to imagine that they would be monitored after the injection, as well as the needles properly disposed of. Literally keeping all of the undesirable aspects of addiction off of the street, not turning whatever neighborhood it was in into a "combat zone", or more appropriately, Amsterdam a la The Wire.

This isn't a zero sum game - we need ALL these things right now.

We need to keep people from getting hooked, yes.

We also need to deal with the damage done.