Redefining Addiction Care: Dr. Taylor Nichols' Compassionate Approach

People are literally dying on the streets because we are letting them, because we aren't implementing harm reduction measures, because we are telling them that they have this false dichotomy of get sober or die. Like that seems particularly evil, right? Once you've seen that, once you've seen that, like the, the unsafe drug supply and people overdosing, and that every time I get an ambulance with somebody who, you know, EMS gave them a bunch of Narcan and they're alive now, I think about how many times did we miss those other people? And that's tragic, right? If you think about that, in terms of the sheer numbers, 110,000 people died of overdoses last year. That's astounding. We should address all of the other issues that face healthcare, that face patients, but put those numbers up against anything else that's going to rank way up there in terms of preventable disease that we could of lives that we could save and the only reason that we wouldn't is because we don't value the lives of people who use drugs is because we don't value the lives of people who use drugs, of people who drink alcohol beyond their control. The only way to say that, that that's an acceptable number, is to believe that those lives don't matter. And so that's the thing that I fight, is if we can force ourselves as a society to confront that, that we are accepting that, and that accepting those numbers means that we are devaluing the lives of those people, that should be a rude awakening to all of us like none of us should be okay accepting that and so that's where the tenants of harm reduction win every time right like from a moral ethical perspective you cannot say that we should not decrease the harm when 110,000 people are dying, especially from over 70,000 from an unsafe drug supply.