A better option to treating the opioid crisis is to help those in need now … rather than waiting to see how their suffering will affect them and society as a whole.
The costs are always the same … either be a conservative and villainize these people and let them become a burden on society and costs go towards police, security, emergency health care, judicial and negative social effects from their destroyed lives
… or …
Be more socially minded and spend the funds on helping these people now and prevent them from spiralling out of control and negatively affecting their lives further or the lives of others.
Conservatives always seem to prefer being reactive rather than proactive, because when you are reactive you actually see the effects of the money being spent (gear for police, jails, etc.).
Being proactive you just see money being spent and you don’t actually see as much physical and obvious things, mostly just stats and numbers (less crowded ERs, lower crime rates, less overdoses, etc.) Which are harder for them to believe/justify.
Politics, especially on the right, likes “right now” policies. We give the cops more gear right now to crack heads, etc. And inevitably in a few years when they’re out of office they cab point to the short term changes made and campaign off that. No matter the cost to society or vulnerable populations. I mean it’s not just the right, but they provide so many examples on the regular.
It’s always better to prevent the problem both fiscally and responsibly. Modern Conservatives/Neoliberals don’t care about that though, they just want to hurt people and then pretend they’re doing something. Creating issues like this helps keep people distracted from the reality that the wealthy have robbed workers for the last 40 years
Basically the life of an IT admin in a nutshell