In a fresh move to enable addiction, city Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan just unveiled a vending machine that dispenses free Narcan and drug-test strips — along with “safe-smoking” pipes, condoms, tampons, nicotine gum, first-aid kits and even lip balm.
Start the countdown to the day free syringes get added.
The pretense is that this will slow or stop the surge in overdose deaths, along with other grim side-effects of deep addiction.
In fact, it will normalize and feed the plague, by pretending that “safe drug abuse” is a thing.
Get ready for obvious addicts to start trying to sell you condoms, nicotine gum and so on: Anything to buy another fix.
The areas prioritized for the new $11,000 machines already host needle-exchange and safe-injection sites, methadone clinics, smoke shops (legal and illegal) and homeless shelters.
These neighborhoods, that is, are being further degraded by the progressive obsession with offering support systems for addicts in the name of “harm reduction.”
No: As recovering addict Jared Klickstein recently wrote in The Post, “a growing element of the harm reduction movement now rejects treatment or abstinence-based recovery strategies,” which are essential to saving these souls.
Mayor Eric Adams needs to school Vasan in the need for tough love — not enabling addicts.
Stand up for the largely low-income areas being turned into drug-infested, chaotic turf unsafe for families and children.
And stop using public funds to enable abusers at cost of everyone else.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
