The Ethics Of The Medical Costs Of Opioid Addiction

I was in Tennessee recently and a story from the Knoxville News Sentinel caught my attention - "As Drug-Related Heart Infections Climb, Doctors Weigh Ethics Of Operating — Or Not”

The facts in the story were stark:

There are a growing number of consumers with infected heart valves (called infective endocarditis, or IE) due to injectable opioid use.
While heart valve surgery is typically successful with high survival rates, that is not so for consumers who continue to use IV drugs. The five-year survival rate for those consumers is only 7.0%.
According to the University of Tennessee staff interviewed . . .