In September, County Executive Ed Mangano held a press conference on the growing heroin and prescription pill problem in Nassau County. At the press conference, Mr. Mangano stood with the mothers of children who died from drug overdoses. He said that there were 149 overdose deaths in 2011. To remedy this scourge he announced that Nassau is the first county that was certified by the New York State Department of Health to administer a Drug Overdose Prevention Program. This means that the County will train its employees, as well as families of atrisk individuals, in administering the overdose-reversal agent Narcan to anyone who has ingested large amounts of opioids, such as prescription painkillers like Oxycodone or street drugs like heroin, and who is in a life-threatening situation. Any step that Nassau County takes to save lives is welcome. However, at the press conference there was no mention of $7.3 million in human services funding that was cut on July 5, 2012, that included $1.75 million for outpatient chemical dependency treatment services. I am reminded of the parable about the small village on the edge of a river. One day a villager noticed a baby floating down the river. He jumped in the river and saved the baby. The next day he saw two babies floating down the river. He and another villager dived in and saved them. Each day that followed, more babies were found floating down the river. Consequently, the villagers organized themselves, training teams of swimmers to navigate the treacherous currents and rescue the babies. Rescue squads were soon working around the clock. Although they could not save all the babies, the rescue squad members felt good and were lauded for saving as many babies as they could. However, one day, one of the villagers raised an intriguing question: “Where are all these babies coming from? Why don’t we organize a team to head upstream to find out who’s throwing the babies into the river in the first place!” Implementing a new Drug Overdose Prevention Program that aims to save the lives at the same time that the County cuts drug treatment funding seems contradictory and signals a policy shift. Mobilizing county resources to pull babies from the river while simultaneously cutting back on activities to prevent the babies from being tossed into the river in the first place makes no sense at all and is likely to lead to a net loss of even more young lives. I suggest that the next time Mr. Mangano addresses the problem of drug overdoses, he would do well to turn around and look upstream.