Comments

1

We should go forward with safe injection sites regardless of what the Justice Department has to say. This will force the matter into the Courts, where we may have some success in repealing the laws that lead so many to die of entirely avoidable causes.

2

And say hello to more overdoses and stray syringes! Thanks, Brian Moron.

3

I believe that the Washington State AG is an elected position, not an appointed one. The governor is NOT the AG's boss.

4

Vampire Weekend have been self-aware for their entire career. They have a song called "Oxford Comma." And don't get me started on Ezra's dancing on the "Warm Heart of Africa" music video.....

5

Moran is doing his job by informing the city that safe injection sites violate federal law, and allowing them would open up the city to various federal issues.

The city is free to take his recommendation or not. This type of thing happens all the time. You may remember back when a few states starting flirting with the idea of legalizing marijuana, despite it being illegal federally.

Long story short, the Feds aren't going to do anything anyway and if they do, it will almost certainly live and die on paper alone.

6

Speaking of Shake, Rattle and Roll --

From the New Yorker's 'Annals of Seismology,' July 20, 2015 Issue
"The Really Big One: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion
of the coastal Northwest. The question is when."

Trumpfy'll NEVER be able to compete with good ol' Mother fucking Nature.
Tho he may Try....

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

8

One good/bad thing to know about most earthquakes in the Puget lowland: shaking is much more intense from downtown Seattle/Bellevue to South King county. For a typical large earthquake (7.0) on the main fault, damage could range from moderate to severe as one goes from Shoreline to downtown and South.

9

It's a wise warning to the city. Heroin and meth addition is something to be avoided and the horrors of a junkie life should be a deterrence, not softened and facilitated by injection sites.

10

Heroin + Meth =????? Damn, you're right!

12

@10 - Typos are always fodder for the easily amused with nothing else to say.

14

@11 existing drug laws have proved ineffective and are used to discriminate. They also do not effectively regulate commercial access to opioids. They have to be amended.

existing gun laws do not sufficiently regulate access to guns. They are being amended

In both cases, progressive promote sensible reform while regressives dig in their heels like over pampered children

15

@12:

There's nothing amusing about demonstrating poor grammar skills...

18

16 - So you read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' recently?
Rooted for the mob, didn't ya! You grumpy gus.

19

"Today is the deadline for Jussie Smollett’s bill [$130K] to the Chicago Police Department."

Well, if the Po-Po were typically held liable for their Lies
employed in winning convictions
I might find merit in this Whopper of a bill.

22

Does the word Crackhouse hurt your feelings? It is a pretty apt description of derelict buildings used for illicit drug use.

23

@20
I see you're advocating for terrorism again "kip".

"We" are not surprised.

24

@15: I disagree. I think it's vital to hear what folks have to say regardless of grammar, spelling errors, or typos.

25

@17 Oh I'm sure he understands this full well. Some variety of whataboutism is just simply the only argument right-wing knobs can manage to come up with.

26

@24 Oh I for sure want to know what the church ladies have to say Phoebe.

Thanks for keeping us updated!

27

@9 I personally know this regular kid who became a junkie following an accident causing pain-killer addiction and your comment really disgusts me.

29

@22,

Huh? He simply noted that it's odd to use slang parlance in naming a piece of state sponsored legislation, which seems like a perfectly reasonable observation. Does THAT hurt your feelings somehow?

30

@27: That's an aspect I should have realized before writing and I apologize for my insensitivity.

32

@28,

I'd agree with the first portion of your statement regarding alternative solutions. Don't know if you're aware of this though, but your city/state are currently experiencing severe budget and funding shortfalls that leave you at a lack to facilitate the latter options. You have neither the officers to arrest offending citizens, nor the penitentiary and treatment facilities to house them upon apprehension. In light of this, I'd reluctantly have to conclude that the injection sites probably are the most humane (and one would hope, temporary) "solution" to such an intractable problem. Say, have you guys ever considered imposing an income tax?

33

9,

What do you believe is the purpose of drug laws?

The 'deterrence' you speak of is indeed horrible, however it doesn't seem to deter anyone. If in your mind, obedience is more important to survival, then you are not interested in deterring anything. All you want to do is cause harm, to kill anyone who does not obey. You'd like to make this appear as if it were a natural consequence, because that means you will never have to take the blame for your sadism. However, the deaths and misery caused by drug addiction are only partlty a consequence of nature. They are also partly a consequence of social forces.

You also want the entire burden of this 'deterrence' to be felt by the user. The drug manufacturers, such as the Sacler family, are not the ones dying of HCV. You want them to face no consequences at all, even though the drug crisis could not exist if it were not for the pharmaceutical companies who created everything from heroin to oxycontin. There would be no heroin addicts if Bayer had not created heroin. Yet, you are not imposing 'deterrents' on them, are you?

No, you just want to see people who might otherwise have led happy, productive lives suffering from homelessness, unemployment, hepatitis, HIV, prison and violence.

What a good citizen you are, showing so much compassion for the drug companies yet allowing their victims to die. How humane, Phoebe. How fucking humane.

You goddamn sadist. You moral vacuum. You like to play god, and determine who should die young like that, do you? Let's introduce some of your children or grandchildren to Oxycontin in the hospital sometime, get them hooked, and then cut them off so you can watch them die, too. I wonder how much toughloive you'd have if it was your own child.

34

31 - Well then, WHAT ABOUT HITLER?

35

@33: Being humane means facing reality. Having a nurse stand by while "the patient" injects heroin and other drugs into their system is hardly humane. Compassion is the ability to deal with problems realistically: methadone, forced treatment. Compassion is also helping our community maintain public health, safety, and a clean environment.

36

@32:

Yeah, frequently their first response is "throw the book at them - lock 'em all up!", until you remind them that means paying even more in taxes to cover the costs of law enforcement, courts, and jails. Then they bitch-and-moan about THAT. Apparently, we're supposed to deal with rampant addiction - an overwhelming majority of which we now know is caused by for-profit pharmaceutical companies pushing their products on the unsuspecting public - by incarcerating addicts, but magically by not spending a penny to do so.

37

@29 Crackhouse, I would argue, is no longer slang. Maybe it was slang back in 1985 but it's part of the US vernacular now. Plus the entire sentence wreaks of a SJW who thinks words are violence.

39

@32 -- What makes you think injection sites would be temporary? The one in Vancouver opened in 2003 and was supposed to be "temporary" -- but it's still there. It hasn't helped stem their drug problem and certainly hasn't stopped the number of overdoses and deaths from growing.

We should be spending the proposed $2.5 million on medication-assisted treatment (MAT).

40

35,

Being humane means preventing avoidable death, not inducing it. What you call compassion is just murder by another name.

41

@39 Can you back that statement up with some evidence? As far as I know the opposite is the case but feel free to provide a link.

42

@39 Cursory search suggests you are totally full of shit (according to Canadian government researchers). No surprise there I guess.

https://whyy.org/segments/lessons-from-vancouver-u-s-cities-consider-supervised-injection-facilities/

43

Oh, and Inslee is not running for POTUS. He is running for Secretary of the Interior. The point of getting into the debates is to make himself the most popular person for that post, should the Democratic candidate win.

44

@35:

You completely contradict yourself. These people, whether you wish to acknowledge it or no, ARE part of your community - they do not exist in some separate realm apart from the rest of us. Where safe injection sites have been established, they have proven to be a safe, effective means of providing the sort of compassion you CLAIM to want, but in a way that recognizes the REALITY that addiction exists in our society, and that some individuals will unfortunately succumb to addictive behavior. You can characterize it as some sort of "moral failing" if that makes you feel better - and no doubt it does - but as @33 rather scathingly points out above, addiction does not occur in a social or cultural vacuum - literally EVERY human being who has ever suffered from the ravages of addiction has done so because other humans created a substance which, once introduced into their bodies, they found they could not give up without significant physical, mental, emotional, and psychological trauma. In this sense one could easily call a diabetic an "addict", since without their daily injections of Insulin, they would suffer many of the same traumatic results as those of an opioid addict. Yet, we feel tremendous sympathy for their plight, presumably because of the very slight difference that, one can easily imagine becoming diabetic (even though, as with opioid users, their malady is frequently self-inflicted). I have never heard a single person avouch the position that diabetics should "suck it up" and come clean - because most people understand it would be a completely ridiculous one to take; yet, when it comes to opioids many take entirely the opposite stance.

You speak of being "humane and compassionate", but TRUE compassion - as you say, facing the reality of addiction - means recognizing the fact that the sort of "tough love" approaches you advocate have proven to be wholly inadequate to rendering the sorts of positive outcomes you envision. So, to suggest we should continue down the same road isn't "compassion", that is, an expression of concern or empathy for the suffering of others, it's simply punitive - entirely the opposite of the meaning of compassion - and puts the entire burden for "healing" or "treatment" on the one person least able to effect it. It does absolutely nothing to actually help them recover from what is a disease, not a moral deficiency, and only continues to set up addicts for failure - and more pain and suffering.

45

@44: You're preaching to the choir dear. I am well aware of the powers of addiction. We just have a different opinion on safe injection sites.

46

@44 There is no love in what Phoebe suggested. It's all about punishment for deterrent sake. The individual is nothing but an instrument in that equation. Tough love may actually work if it includes compassion and effective support. I think many families are pushed to some brand of tough love (like forcing users into rehab/jail) because of the destruction caused by extreme addiction.

47

@42: NPR has an accurate article:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/07/645609248/whats-the-evidence-that-supervised-drug-injection-sites-save-lives

48

@47 Yeah that proves what?

"In another review of studies published in August in the International Journal of Drug Policy, the researchers, criminologists from the University of South Wales in the United Kingdom, found that the evidence for supervised injection is not as strong as previously thought. However, after publication, this article was retracted by the journal, with the author's consent, because of "methodological weaknesses.""

Policy regarding addiction in this puritanical shithole of a country is ineffective, punitive and perverse. You and all those pearl wearing (and often clutching) church ladies are 'compassionately' advocating more of the same. The drug war is perhaps the most flagrant and most damaging crime against human rights in our time. Arm chair authoritarians emitting lazy ass specious justifications for it (way too many of whom are allegedly from the left) drive me right up the wall.

49

I tend to trust a peer review journal over a radio program hosted by people who aren’t even scientists, much less doctors.

If you don, then ask Terry Gross to perform open heart surgery on you.

50

@49 Seems dubious she even read the article (or maybe she heard the show before the one study that contradicts all others was retracted). It suggests the opposite of what she is asserting: safe injection sites have a marked impact on reducing overdose deaths, spread of HIV and other diseases related to sharing of needles, and getting people into treatment.

51

@39,

What makes me think these sites could be temporary? Not much!!! At least given our current societal trajectory.

And perhaps I'm hopelessly naĂŻve and idealistic but I genuinely do think we, as a society, are capable of better and more viable long term solutions. Until we find them though, this is realistically the least bad and most humane, of a number of bad and inhumane options that we need to consider.

52

Governor Jerry Brown of California last year vetoed a bill that would have legalized safe injection sites. Obviously, when presented with the data he came to a decision he thought best.

He really doesn't fit the stereotype of a peal couching church lady.

53

@52 Like I said, far too many armchair authoritarians on the left. Looks like Brown was as motivated by Trump administration threats as anything but as any retribution from the Feds would be more on the legislature than him mostly I'd say he is just another lazy ass, not unlike our pot-smoking city attorney who sometimes moonlights as a fake brothel manager, apparently inspired by the exhortations of authoritarian paleo-feminists.

54

52,

This isn’t fucking California. Go move to Orange County.

55

This is a simple solution: jail or in-patient treatment for heroin addicts. So build more jails or more treatment programs and give the addicts a choice.

But paying for supervised shoot up sites is socially irresponsible

56

Jails and treatment facilities cost more. So... I guess we raise taxes.

57

@55 More jails filled with non-violent offenders. Outstanding idea! You are a real sharp one! Absolutely 'socially responsible' to lock up yet more people in the developed country with by far the most bloated prison population in the world.

58

@52: Jerry Brown is a moralistic prude. He's an economic/environmental progressive and social conservative.

@39: you're full of bs. InSite was never "supposed to be "temporary" ". And, InSIte has been more heavily evaluated than any other safe consumption site and the data on its effectiveness at reversing overdose and reducing HIV and hep C transmission are clear. No, InSite didn't transform Downtown Eastside. But it couldn't. Downtown Eastside is the poorest postal code in Canada and for decades has been a zone of massive alcohol and other drug problems. InSite was designed to address overdose and HIV transmission, not provide housing, employment, education, ongoing case management, and a wide array of other services that would help transform the area.

59

Damn, you mean no one in Seattle will get to enjoy the shit-show-zombie-town that is 4 blocks around the shooting gallery on Hastings Street in Vancouver?

61

@60 Eh, who is engaged in moralistic posturing here? And Christ, the law? You must have missed the vast swaths of the penal code that are based on biblical injunctions.

I'd say it follows that if efforts to mitigate societal ills, prevent deaths and pestilence, are 'coddling' then facilitating death would be 'not coddling'. How about we just execute those who make stupid decisions?


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