The City Gives Up on Drug ODs

Gotham officials have given up on even pretending to fight New York’s massive and growing drug crisis. Witness Monday’s pronouncement from Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan: “Everyone should carry naloxone, get trained to use it and to recognize the signs of overdose,” he said.

This is his response to a crisis that killed more than 3,000 New Yorkers last year — a major jump over the prior year’s figure, and the biggest single-year toll since record-keeping began in 2000. That’s an OD death every three hours, by Vasan’s own calculation.

Yet our public-health experts have decided to just . . . give up and foist the onus onto untrained, unpaid random passersby.

This surrender is clearly the logical culmination of Vasan’s approach. It comes after he oversaw the rollout of “vending” machines dispensing drug paraphernalia at zero cost.

And the opening of so-called safe injection sites (big twist: they’re not safe). And after his department put out subway ads telling junkies they should be proud of their addiction.

And after another ad campaign doing its best to normalize use of the drug xylazine (ak at ranq ), an animal tranquilizer whose abusers develop rotting open sores.

No evidence suggests these “harm reduction” strategies work, at all — and plenty of it indicates that they make things worse.

Vasan is telling everyday New Yorkers that they are responsible for ending the crisis — not he and his tax-funded army of bureaucrats and “experts” — no matter that their raison d’être is to solve problems like this. (Why else do they hoover up our hardearned money?)

With geniuses like this at the helm, New York’s OD tragedy will only deepen.