A councilman at a city in Ohio is in some hot water after making what some believe to be a truly outrageous inhumane proposal. Councilman Dan Picard in Middletown, Ohio, asked at a recent city council meeting whether EMS workers can simply stop responding to drug overdoses, essentially letting them suffer and die.

Picard asked whether the city was legally required to keep dispatching ambulances to repeatedly rescue drug addicts. He has since gotten hate mail from all across the country for the proposal, but Picard said he’s just frustrated that the town had already spent 10 times its budget on overdose medication Narcan, and that it was time to “think outside the box.”

Specifically, he asked at the council meeting “whether there was a legal and ethical path that would allow us to legally choose to respond or not to dispatch.”

Picard said in an email to NBC News that his constituents are dvidided over his proposal.

“I would say the ones I have heard from are split 50/50,” he wrote in an email to NBC News, noting that many “do not want others to know their position. … Yesterday, when I was in court, I heard from 15 attorneys, 11 deputy sheriffs and four judges who went out of their way to support me but cautioned against using their names publicly. Everyone is afraid they will be attacked like me.”

Picard said he is not valuing money over humans.

“I am not putting money ahead of the well-being of people,” he said. “The problem is there is NO money!”