A question of ethics - meth cookers in the burn units!

[Sunshine]

I heard from a friend of mine in Nashville that they are thinking of closing the specialty burn unit at one of the hospitals there due to the number of meth cookers whose labs have blown up in their faces.

Of course, they have no insurance and no money. They often require multiple surgeries and a lot of specialized care with their hospitalizations often running into the millions of dollars.

So what about it? Is it ethical to offer palliative end of life care only to meth cookers and just let them die, or does someone owe them millions of dollars in care?

 

[waltky]

Big Pharma keeps selling the meds that cooks turn into crank...

Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business
13 Aug.`13 > With big profits on the line, the drug industry is pulling out campaign-style dirty tricks to keep selling the meds that cooks turn into crank.

THE FIRST TIME she saw her mother passed out on the living room floor, Amanda thought she was dead. There were muddy tracks on the carpet and the room looked like it had been ransacked. Mary wouldn't wake up. When she finally came to, she insisted nothing was wrong. But as the weeks passed, her 15-year-old daughter's sense of foreboding grew. Amanda's parents stopped sleeping and eating. Her once heavy mother turned gaunt and her father, Barry, stopped going to work. She was embarrassed to go into town with him; he was covered in open sores. A musty stink gripped their increasingly chaotic trailer. The driveway filled up with cars as strangers came to the house and partied all night.

Her parents' repeated assurances failed to assuage Amanda's mounting worry. She would later tell her mother it felt "like I saw an airplane coming in toward our house in slow motion and it was crashing." Finally, she went sleuthing online. The empty packages of cold medicine, the canisters of Coleman fuel, the smell, her parents' strange behavior all pointed to one thing. They were meth cooks. Amanda (last name withheld to protect her privacy) told her grandparents, who lived next door. Eventually, they called police. Within minutes, agents burst into the trailer. They slammed Barry up against the wall, put a gun to his head, and hauled him and Mary off in handcuffs. It would be two and a half years before Amanda and her 10-year-old sister, Chrissie, would see their father again.

State troopers clean up a meth lab found on school board property about a block from a London, Kentucky elementary school.

The year was 2005, and what happened to Amanda's family was the result of a revolution in methamphetamine production that was just beginning to make its way into Kentucky. Meth users called it the "shake- and-bake" or "one-pot" method, and its key feature was to greatly simplify the way meth is synthesized from pseudoephedrine, a decongestant found in cold and allergy medicines like Claritin D and Sudafed. Shake and bake did two things. It took a toxic and volatile process that had once been the province of people with Breaking Bad-style knowledge of chemistry and put it in the bedrooms and kitchens of meth users in rural America. It also produced the most potent methamphetamine anywhere.

If anyone wondered what would happen if heroin or cocaine addicts suddenly discovered how to make their own supply with a handful of cheap ingredients readily available over the counter, methamphetamine's recent history provides an answer. Since 2007, the number of clandestine meth sites discovered by police has increased 63 percent nationwide. In Kentucky, the number of labs has more than tripled. The Bluegrass State regularly joins its neighbors Missouri, Tennessee, and Indiana as the top four states for annual meth lab discoveries.

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[dilloduck]

I heard from a friend of mine in Nashville that they are thinking of closing the specialty burn unit at one of the hospitals there due to the number of meth cookers whose labs have blown up in their faces.

Of course, they have no insurance and no money. They often require multiple surgeries and a lot of specialized care with their hospitalizations often running into the millions of dollars.

So what about it? Is it ethical to offer palliative end of life care only to meth cookers and just let them die, or does someone owe them millions of dollars in care?

Robin Hood is here to steal from those who can and give to those who won't. It should be a lovely time.

 

[Sunshine]

I need to check about this and see if Vandy still has a burn program. Last time I was in the hospital there I was in the round wing which used to house the burn patients, only I wasn't a burn patient. If uninsured meth cookers have put a valid service out of business, that would be a crying shame.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

Next, we'll hear some Republican saying burn victims must fill out a paper stating how they got the burns.

The real reason hospitals have and are closing trauma and burn units is that Reagan's socialist EMTALA is breaking them.

If we're gonna have "for profit" health care, then hospitals must (DUH) make a profit. In turn, that means we must (DUH) end socialist heath care.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

Here's another question of ethics ...

 

[Coyote]

I heard from a friend of mine in Nashville that they are thinking of closing the specialty burn unit at one of the hospitals there due to the number of meth cookers whose labs have blown up in their faces.

Of course, they have no insurance and no money. They often require multiple surgeries and a lot of specialized care with their hospitalizations often running into the millions of dollars.

So what about it? Is it ethical to offer palliative end of life care only to meth cookers and just let them die, or does someone owe them millions of dollars in care?

Everyone is owed the same level of care imo. Who are we to make ethical judgements outside of prognosis and patient/family wishes?

People often make mistakes from their lives, sometimes those mistakes are life changing.