Die for Your Government

Apparently there's a nasal spray called Narcan that can reverse the impact of a heroin overdose. Doctors give it to patients, but it doesn't actually require training to use effectively, so public health workers around the country have started giving out OD kits to drug users, saving thousands of lives. Naturally, the Office of National Drug Control Policy wants to shut this down. As Mark Kleiman observes the logic here seems to be that we should make heroin use as dangerous as possible, the better to scare off potential users: "Why not just go all the way and poison the heroin supply? If withholding Narcan in order to generate more overdoses in order to scare addicts into quitting were proposed as an experiment, it could never get past human-subjects review. But since it's a failure to act rather than an action, there's no rule to require that it be even vaguely rational."