BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – Fentanyl deaths dropped last year for the first time in five years, and many think the ever-increasing availability of life-saving Narcan is a big reason why. But to hear some discuss it, you’d think those efforts are all a big waste. At least that’s the conclusion one might draw after reading comments this week on the Kern County Scanner Club Facebook page, a news and information website that boasts 77,800 members. Child death review: Car accidents are the leading cause of childhood deaths in Kern Kern County Outreach posted on the site about new machines that dispense free two-pack boxes of Naxolone, an opioid overdose-reversal drug.  In 2023, first responders and ordinary people dispensed 22 million doses of Narcan, the best known brand of Naloxone, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deaths from opioid overdoses, primarily fentanyl, actually dropped. Audrey Chavez of the Bakersfield AIDS Project hands out free Naloxone at her family business, Martin's Meats and Deli Market, and about 10 other locations. She was at a subsidized housing facility called The Blanco Tuesday morning installing a new Naloxone dispenser. We met her there to share that some on the Scanner Club page seem to think she’s wasting her time. Wrote “Kimberly”: “If you choose to do the drug you are choosing to accept the death that may result from it. Kinda like having sex & making a baby. Consequences to every decision you make.” Wrote “Jim”: “At what point do we let natural consequences prevail???” Wrote “Cassie”: “If people are stupid enough to CHOOSE to poison themselves why should we go out of our way to help them? It’s a choice. They made that choice.” Chavez had an answer for them. “Why weren’t they smarter, why didn’t they – We are constantly looking for pre-existing conditions that keep us from being accountable to our neighbor, caring or loving or compassionate,” she said. “We shouldn’t be hard like that, we weren’t made to be that way.” Never miss a story: Make KGET.com your homepage But they’re just junkies, right, folks? Said “Cassie,” perhaps agreeing with that assessment: “Not being a junkie that continues to make a poor CHOICE also saves lives.” “It’s not just street homeless people,” Chavez countered, “it’s all walks of life. It could be the doctor that's treating your child for cancer, it could be the bus driver who’s taking people on routes. … But they have an addiction.” And so it goes. Compassion or enabling? Maybe it depends on how close the fentanyl crisis has hit us personally.  Is every life worth saving? Even opioid addicts? Seems there’s actually a debate on that topic.