One thing that's important is that I don't think we should rule out any intervention outright, but we need to apply the precautionary principle in the development of such protocols. What does that mean? There is an author, Nassim Taleb, who produced a paper in 2010. What he said was that you have to look at two factors. One, is the risk systemic or is it local? Does it cause a low amount of damage or a high amount of damage?
For something like this, where you're increasing the supply of fentanyl in the community, that would fall under systemic risk and high downsides, so that would be the type of thing you would apply the precautionary principle to. What you want to do is figure out if this works first.
If that were something that needed to be done, we'd need to look at small pilot projects that rigorously and objectively look at the upsides and the downsides, and many of the studies done so far in these areas do not look at downsides. That way we can measure the risks and benefits of such a program, and if such a pilot program took place and showed that objective benefits outweighed the risks, then that is something that should be implemented. However, if this has not been done, we should look at the precautionary principle when we have interventions that can increase the supply of addictive drugs in the community.