You can't become an opiate addict without first using opiates, so it's important to ask why he was using opiates in the first place. If he was prescribed painkillers and his addiction was an adverse reaction to their use then that would make it less of a deal breaker, but the hospital might still be right to give the lung to somebody else.
This is a surprisingly good question. But the answer is by being an addict he’s already killing the rest of his body too, so new lungs are just going to prolong the eventual outcome while someone more deserving does not get them.
Daily use of opiates is not harmful to the general health. The horror stories most people are familiar with involve unsterile injection of street concoctions, anything from bathtub fentanyl to baby powder.
Lifelong oral users (and even users who inject using sterile technique) of pharmaceutical grade opiates can and do live long productive lives.
The decision to deny an addict a transplant is a moral judgement, not a medical one.
Most people's rational judgment on this issue is clouded by the highly offensive public abuse of these drugs by exhibitionists, narcissists, people generally so fucked up that their use of junk in public is to them a sort of obscene performance intended to broadcast their own personal degradation. Such people belong in jail as public nuisances and not offered the conditional "rehab or jail" option, which just wastes everybody's time and taxpayer $ in an absurd revolving-door setup that coddles the worst sort of grifters, liars, and leeches, addicts and "counselors" alike
Legalized OTC sales of narcotics to 21+ would at least allow us to isolate and punish the above-mentioned criminally antisocial assholes.
You can't become an opiate addict without first using opiates, so it's important to ask why he was using opiates in the first place. If he was prescribed painkillers and his addiction was an adverse reaction to their use then that would make it less of a deal breaker, but the hospital might still be right to give the lung to somebody else.
Why deny someone a lung transplant merely because he's an addict? It is an idiotic moral judgment that is totally irrelevant.
If someone damaged an organ by shooting up contaminated street drugs, that's one thing.
But merely being an opiate addict is NOT an ethical reason to deny treatment.
This is a surprisingly good question. But the answer is by being an addict he’s already killing the rest of his body too, so new lungs are just going to prolong the eventual outcome while someone more deserving does not get them.
Daily use of opiates is not harmful to the general health. The horror stories most people are familiar with involve unsterile injection of street concoctions, anything from bathtub fentanyl to baby powder.
Lifelong oral users (and even users who inject using sterile technique) of pharmaceutical grade opiates can and do live long productive lives.
The decision to deny an addict a transplant is a moral judgement, not a medical one.
Most people's rational judgment on this issue is clouded by the highly offensive public abuse of these drugs by exhibitionists, narcissists, people generally so fucked up that their use of junk in public is to them a sort of obscene performance intended to broadcast their own personal degradation. Such people belong in jail as public nuisances and not offered the conditional "rehab or jail" option, which just wastes everybody's time and taxpayer $ in an absurd revolving-door setup that coddles the worst sort of grifters, liars, and leeches, addicts and "counselors" alike
Legalized OTC sales of narcotics to 21+ would at least allow us to isolate and punish the above-mentioned criminally antisocial assholes.