Submitted by James Fleming
If Nevada state legislation has never made you sad before, this one might.
A bill, AB132, which when introduced proposed a comprehensive review of recent overdose fatalities, has been gutted to the point of uselessness. This shows how the Nevada public health dumpster fire isn’t just a sad waste. It will cost lives.
Nevada AB 132 would have brilliantly launched a brave, comprehensive overdose fatality review: looking at crime scene evidence, blood toxicology and the methods we use to make a determination of one or sometimes several chemical agents causing an accidental death. It would have created a quick reaction infrastructure based on real time shifts in user/dealer trends.
To the members of the Assembly Health and Human Services Committee: you and the lobbyists who convinced you to choose expediency and hand-washing over the lives of addicts made an awful decision.
The original version of this bill would have saved lives and would have fixed Nevada’s worst-in-the-nation cause of death stats. Instead we are choosing butt-covering.
To be clear, with this amendment, this committee is choosing willful ignorance, choosing not to honor hundreds of dead young folks by refusing, literally refusing, to learn from their deaths. This is refusing to go back through cases and confirm that our analytical tech and practices lag behind all other states and academic facilities for determining chemical cause of death.
Shame on you. Not only are we refusing to actually review overdoses, but this bill negates progress, sucks up valuable resources, and, in fact, shuts down investigations that would have taken place throughout the state. It shuts down science, hypothesis testing, asking the right questions, humbly reviewing past cases and maybe gently pointing out where somebody screwed up, empiricism and honoring the deaths of fentanyl overdose victims by learning from them.
All those concepts – what seems like the obvious course of action to anyone giving a shit – are not allowed in the room, or in most of the state.
If you aren’t going to help, get out of the way.
Jim Fleming is a healthcare statistician.
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