Use former hospital for opioid addicts

After reading articles on the different ways communities are handling the opioid crisis, I would like to add a suggestion. People tend to learn when they encounter some punishment for behavior that it is something they should not do. Evidently, some heroin addicts do not consider death a reality and it is easier when there is a drug that can bring them back from the edge of demise.

Jailing them hasn’t worked and uses space meant for criminals. It is my suggestion that the county or city lease space in the soon-to-bevacated Mount Carmel West Hospital. Everyone who overdoses should be charged with the crime of purchasing illegal drugs, causing a panic, etc. and locked up in a hospital room to go through withdrawal.

Further rehab services would be available at the same facility after they have endured the withdrawal period, on a voluntary basis. It is not the right prescription to inject them with Narcan to bring them back to life and then turn them lose to shoot up the same day. Keeping them locked up to go through withdrawal for a couple of weeks (or whatever period that entails) might make them suffer enough to get it, and might give law enforcement the names of their drug dealers and the way they are getting heroin, etc.

Perhaps some of the costs of Narcan could be directed to the costs of the lock-up as law enforcement would be using a lot less of it. Funding this might be a problem but where there is a will, there is a way.

Leslie Smith Columbus