Overdoses for Christmas

Nine sad souls, heroin addicts shooting up under the railroad bridges and alley by-ways of Kensington, didn’t have someone looking over them as they overdosed on the latest batch of cheap heroin this past week.

The miracle antidote that could have brought them back from death, Narcan, wasn’t available to them.

District Attorney Seth Williams said there would have been more deaths had others using the same source for their heroin had not been saved by Narcan.

Pragmatists could say their deaths were a Christmas gift, rescuing them from a horrible addiction and a life forced into depredation to feed it.

What saddens us here is the fact our editorials, stories, and comments through the years calling for an all-out effort to reduce the availability of such addictive drugs has only met with sporadic initiatives. Remember the sunrise-sunset campaign initiated by the Police Dept. a dozen years ago? That worked well, but ended due to its success. Public interest fell off, as did continued funding, while other problems moved into top consideration, crying for more police intervention.

So we ask again the question: Why have we not read recently about major drug busts in this city? We continue to hear about them in our suburbs as those police departments proudly display for press coverage wads of money, piles of drug-filled bags and the illegal guns found at raids.

Is it because drug addiction is now considered a way of life, here to stay?

Look at marijuana, once prohibited and criminal because it was viewed as the initial doorway to more-intense drug usage! Today it is considered mainstream, even a medical blessing for some.

So maybe we are moving toward more leniency for those users of heroin. In short, are we at the point in this country, where we will soon be able to indulge freely and openly in drugs of all kinds which are now illicit?

If not … why do we hear so little of police enforcement to end the easy availability of those debilitating, dehumanizing drugs now flooding a growing portion of our population?

We also ask those clean-needle-exchange — no questions asked — promoters if they have a conscience that allows them to ignore the fact those nine may have been among those standing in the lines outside the dispensing vehicles. Making clean needles available to those unfortunates did not hasten the end of their lives, but it did not save them either.

It is a troubling dilemma for Santa Claus.

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