All of the advantages accrue to our city and country. However, at the same time the money used to buy the drugs filters down south where poor and indigenous people in Latin America are subject to the violence (extortion, rape, murder) that they have no choice about. This program is very first-world privileged so we can have clean streets and reduce our health care burden. We should use the money targeted for these centers for addiction recovery programs instead.
Happy to hear this. Will be much harder to argue against when it's up and running and working like it invariably does.
@1 you say this like that money flow wasn't already happening. There will just be fewer deaths attached to it now. Implying that we shouldn't help the people suffering here because there is suffering elsewhere is an excuse to never do anything to help anyone. Addiction recovery programs already exist, but they're difficult to attend if you die. This reduces death and increases the odds someone will live long enough to get the help they need.
Yeah, yeah we get it: anyone who isn't you sucks; anyone who receives any social benefit you don't is garbage; and anyone who has problems you don't have should just die already and decrease the surplus population, amiright?
My prediction is that these will be as successful at getting people to accept treatment as needle exchanges and drop-boxes are at keeping used needles off our sidewalks and play areas.
These facilities should come with the caveat that if you have to be revived from OD, then you must attend 90 days in-patient rehab; I would gladly throw my support and tax dollars to more rehab beds if this were the case.
As proposed, these seem more like "flatliners" facilities. We'll bring you back from the brink of death repeatedly!
In Ballard, without any 10 year impact studies, the business community has begun to erect homemade makeshift shelters on top of what they've long claimed is a sacred resource: parking. The purpose of these shelters? It's a "safe" drug injection site. It's just that the drug is craft beer.
Some of your ideas are ok, but there's still the problem of trying to force recovery on someone who doesn't want it. You can dry out a drug user but then what? You gonna hold em locked up forever? Eventually they'll get out, go right back to their buds and familiar environment, and start shooting up again.
I like the idea of giving job training but again, you can't force it. You can't force someone to learn something. They have to want it.
Also, what's with the "camp far outside the city?" If they're locked up with no visitors, they can't get drugs no matter where they're located. If you don't lock em up, how hard do you think it'll be for them to call a friend to bring some drugs to them? And aside from that, drugs ain't only available inside cities alone. Rural counties all over the country have opioid and meth problems.
Anyway, like I said, I like your ideas... give them healthcare, shelter, job training, job placement, etc. But all that will only work for those addicts that come voluntarily to those programs... and even some of THOSE will end up relapsing. Addiction is a fucking nightmare problem.
"I don't care how we do it, I just want the dirty addicts removed from my sight so that: 1. Somebody else can pay for them, and; 2. I don't have to acknowledge the problem of addiction is far more intractable than 'put 'em all in jail and force 'em into rehab'."
Because, as we all know: you can't get drugs in rural areas or in detention facilities...
@12 You can not debate with people like @11 because they are so wrapped up in the cloak of righteousness it is all or nothing for them. Any questioning of the efficacy of these sites means you are willing to let people die and you are morally repugnant. Of course the debate of "safe" injection sites is more nuanced and there are some harsh truths. Sure these sites may save lives but to what end. As has been noted you can't save people who don't want to be saved and with no requirement to so much as speak to a counselor there is little incentive for the user to consider alternatives especially when they are in the throes of their habit and are probably not capable of rational thought. So we enable their behavior and hope for the best. In the interim the city is putting forth dollars on a project that has shown little if any impact in Vancouver on drug overdoses. Good governance is about effectively allocating fixed resources and the cold hard truth is those dollars may save more lives if they were invested upstream on prevention and intervention programs before someone is at the point where the need for safe consumption site to survive. Further they don't consider the harm that is being done to the community (in particular the neighborhoods where these sites are located) by enabling this behavior through increased crime and a lower quality of life. Politicians know this of course but these sites are highly visible and give them an opportunity at election time to point to an "accomplishment" and a checkbox of how they are getting things done.
"They would indeed be "locked up" or "detained" perhaps is a better depiction while they go through the process/treatment."
That's the rub though. If it's involuntary.
Drug use is already illegal, but cops and courts rarely bother with it (other than lumping it in with other criminal charges when something violent has happened) because if they started arresting and prosecuting every two-bit meth head you might as well cancel Christmas break for the next 50 years cause the courts and jails will be bursting at the seams.
On top of that, IF the cops started arresting every drug user you know there'd be a lot more issues of police violence or questionable use of force occurring. Then there's the costs of increasing police forces, courts, jails, etc. And of course, the cost of all the rehab and job programs. AND... after all that there's no guarantee they won't go right back into drug use.
I think if something like what you are proposing were actually proposed, the price tag and predicted success rate would just be unpalatable.
If, on the other hand, it were NOT involuntary... if drug users could agree to be in a locked down facility, then you get around all the due process legal problems. But then again, that's basically what we have now. Sort of. I don't know if drug users can get free health care, job training, etc.
@14: Insite is located in Vancouver's because that is where the need was when they selected a site. It is one result of the problem, not the cause of the problem.
@14: Insite is located in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside because that is where the need was when they selected a site. It is one result of the problem, not the cause of the problem.
@21: The drug war, like all wars in bipartisan:
"Democrats vote against including marijuana legalization in 2020 platform
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/28/democrats-vote-against-including-marijuana-legaliz/
@8 has it fight. We have had thousands of safe drug sites since the 21st amendment in 1933. Places where drug users can meet in a safe, supervised environment without police harassment, choose the drug of their choice and consume it in a regulated environment. They're called bars and they work better than the alternative.
The police have already moved on to persecuting the same marginalized groups they always target under non-drug related laws. For those opposed to drug sites, I can promise you we will continue to find news ways to criminalize the same groups we always target to keep our prisons full. Why are you so reluctant to move on to incarcerating the same marginalized people for breaking different lifestyle laws?
@27: "True, we will need to arrest, prosecute and go thru the judicial process which would then give the defendant the option...jail or a trip to a treatment facility."
There are no easy answers to drug addiction, but we tried just that kind of coercion from 1969 until 2010 and by almost all measures it failed badly.
When Nixon kicked off the war on drugs 1971 to punish it's political enemiesit committed $2 billion dollars. As of 2013 that number had grown to $51 billion with no impact on actual drug addiction. As of 2016 about 10% of the population used illegal drugs every months, which is where the number stood in 1971.
https://addictionresource.com/guides/war-on-drugs/
Meanwhile, the war on drugs has increased homelessness and poverty through criminal convictions, does serious damage to the Constitution and fundamentally altered the relationship between police and the public. Whenever you criminalize consensual behavior leaving no one to report the crime, the person's body becomes the crime scene and the police must set up an elaborate surveillance system our Constitution was specifically designed to prevent.
Mass incarceration due to the drug war has hidden the problem within our elaborate incarceration system (where the drug addicted actually have easier access to drugs) at a huge expense while making no one safer.
We need to fundametally move away from the model of government using coercion and stigma to twist the arms of those we don't approve of. Rather that treating it as a law enforcement issue with all the moral judgement and stigma that entails, crimes like drugs should be treated as a healthcare problem designed to reduce harm. That is, there are no good of bad drugs, but healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs. If those with an unhealthy relationship are not ready to change, we need to focus on reducing the harm to them and others until they decide to change. The alternative, using a coercive criminal system to punish them into doing the right thing has never worked. Portugal has applied this model with great success after following the same failed policies we have. We need to have the generosity to take care of those not in a position to do so themselves until they choose to change.
The alternative is either the failed drug war, on the failed benign neglect approach we are currently failing at.
Also from a purely practical standpoint, the Feds have drained the money from local police to enforce drug policy and without money the police and prosecutors simply have no incentive. If you want to go back to the had old days, you would need to re-purpose money now being used to enforce other lifestyle crimes back to the war on drugs and all those NGO's have moved on. Where there is no financial incentive, there is no law enforcement.
@5: "The whole point is to get them into EFFECTIVE drug treatment."
Voluntarily? Or kicking and screaming? Some addicts just want to use. Some get hostile when their overdose is treated with Narcan. Because that just ruins their high. With a minor side effect of saving their life.
Legalizing weed sure was a major hit to Washington's tax dollars eh? Luckily hundreds of millions in tax revenue a year materialised out of thin air to fill that hole and fund education (including informed education on marijuana as well as healthy alternatives to drug dependency for young people), physical/mental healthcare, and infrastructure. Too bad those don't help with life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness as much as taxpayer funded jailtime and a criminal record, eh?
Please wait...
and remember to be decent to everyone all of the time.
All of the advantages accrue to our city and country. However, at the same time the money used to buy the drugs filters down south where poor and indigenous people in Latin America are subject to the violence (extortion, rape, murder) that they have no choice about. This program is very first-world privileged so we can have clean streets and reduce our health care burden. We should use the money targeted for these centers for addiction recovery programs instead.
Happy to hear this. Will be much harder to argue against when it's up and running and working like it invariably does.
@1 you say this like that money flow wasn't already happening. There will just be fewer deaths attached to it now. Implying that we shouldn't help the people suffering here because there is suffering elsewhere is an excuse to never do anything to help anyone. Addiction recovery programs already exist, but they're difficult to attend if you die. This reduces death and increases the odds someone will live long enough to get the help they need.
@3:
Yeah, yeah we get it: anyone who isn't you sucks; anyone who receives any social benefit you don't is garbage; and anyone who has problems you don't have should just die already and decrease the surplus population, amiright?
My prediction is that these will be as successful at getting people to accept treatment as needle exchanges and drop-boxes are at keeping used needles off our sidewalks and play areas.
These facilities should come with the caveat that if you have to be revived from OD, then you must attend 90 days in-patient rehab; I would gladly throw my support and tax dollars to more rehab beds if this were the case.
As proposed, these seem more like "flatliners" facilities. We'll bring you back from the brink of death repeatedly!
In Ballard, without any 10 year impact studies, the business community has begun to erect homemade makeshift shelters on top of what they've long claimed is a sacred resource: parking. The purpose of these shelters? It's a "safe" drug injection site. It's just that the drug is craft beer.
@5,
Some of your ideas are ok, but there's still the problem of trying to force recovery on someone who doesn't want it. You can dry out a drug user but then what? You gonna hold em locked up forever? Eventually they'll get out, go right back to their buds and familiar environment, and start shooting up again.
I like the idea of giving job training but again, you can't force it. You can't force someone to learn something. They have to want it.
Also, what's with the "camp far outside the city?" If they're locked up with no visitors, they can't get drugs no matter where they're located. If you don't lock em up, how hard do you think it'll be for them to call a friend to bring some drugs to them? And aside from that, drugs ain't only available inside cities alone. Rural counties all over the country have opioid and meth problems.
Anyway, like I said, I like your ideas... give them healthcare, shelter, job training, job placement, etc. But all that will only work for those addicts that come voluntarily to those programs... and even some of THOSE will end up relapsing. Addiction is a fucking nightmare problem.
Shorter @5:
"I don't care how we do it, I just want the dirty addicts removed from my sight so that: 1. Somebody else can pay for them, and; 2. I don't have to acknowledge the problem of addiction is far more intractable than 'put 'em all in jail and force 'em into rehab'."
Because, as we all know: you can't get drugs in rural areas or in detention facilities...
@12 You can not debate with people like @11 because they are so wrapped up in the cloak of righteousness it is all or nothing for them. Any questioning of the efficacy of these sites means you are willing to let people die and you are morally repugnant. Of course the debate of "safe" injection sites is more nuanced and there are some harsh truths. Sure these sites may save lives but to what end. As has been noted you can't save people who don't want to be saved and with no requirement to so much as speak to a counselor there is little incentive for the user to consider alternatives especially when they are in the throes of their habit and are probably not capable of rational thought. So we enable their behavior and hope for the best. In the interim the city is putting forth dollars on a project that has shown little if any impact in Vancouver on drug overdoses. Good governance is about effectively allocating fixed resources and the cold hard truth is those dollars may save more lives if they were invested upstream on prevention and intervention programs before someone is at the point where the need for safe consumption site to survive. Further they don't consider the harm that is being done to the community (in particular the neighborhoods where these sites are located) by enabling this behavior through increased crime and a lower quality of life. Politicians know this of course but these sites are highly visible and give them an opportunity at election time to point to an "accomplishment" and a checkbox of how they are getting things done.
@12,
"They would indeed be "locked up" or "detained" perhaps is a better depiction while they go through the process/treatment."
That's the rub though. If it's involuntary.
Drug use is already illegal, but cops and courts rarely bother with it (other than lumping it in with other criminal charges when something violent has happened) because if they started arresting and prosecuting every two-bit meth head you might as well cancel Christmas break for the next 50 years cause the courts and jails will be bursting at the seams.
On top of that, IF the cops started arresting every drug user you know there'd be a lot more issues of police violence or questionable use of force occurring. Then there's the costs of increasing police forces, courts, jails, etc. And of course, the cost of all the rehab and job programs. AND... after all that there's no guarantee they won't go right back into drug use.
I think if something like what you are proposing were actually proposed, the price tag and predicted success rate would just be unpalatable.
If, on the other hand, it were NOT involuntary... if drug users could agree to be in a locked down facility, then you get around all the due process legal problems. But then again, that's basically what we have now. Sort of. I don't know if drug users can get free health care, job training, etc.
@14: Insite is located in Vancouver's because that is where the need was when they selected a site. It is one result of the problem, not the cause of the problem.
@14: Insite is located in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside because that is where the need was when they selected a site. It is one result of the problem, not the cause of the problem.
And if the US Senate doesn't flip and they vote in a DOJ that doesn't like it, then what?
@21: The drug war, like all wars in bipartisan:
"Democrats vote against including marijuana legalization in 2020 platform
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/28/democrats-vote-against-including-marijuana-legaliz/
@8 has it fight. We have had thousands of safe drug sites since the 21st amendment in 1933. Places where drug users can meet in a safe, supervised environment without police harassment, choose the drug of their choice and consume it in a regulated environment. They're called bars and they work better than the alternative.
The police have already moved on to persecuting the same marginalized groups they always target under non-drug related laws. For those opposed to drug sites, I can promise you we will continue to find news ways to criminalize the same groups we always target to keep our prisons full. Why are you so reluctant to move on to incarcerating the same marginalized people for breaking different lifestyle laws?
@27: "True, we will need to arrest, prosecute and go thru the judicial process which would then give the defendant the option...jail or a trip to a treatment facility."
There are no easy answers to drug addiction, but we tried just that kind of coercion from 1969 until 2010 and by almost all measures it failed badly.
When Nixon kicked off the war on drugs 1971 to punish it's political enemiesit committed $2 billion dollars. As of 2013 that number had grown to $51 billion with no impact on actual drug addiction. As of 2016 about 10% of the population used illegal drugs every months, which is where the number stood in 1971.
https://addictionresource.com/guides/war-on-drugs/
Meanwhile, the war on drugs has increased homelessness and poverty through criminal convictions, does serious damage to the Constitution and fundamentally altered the relationship between police and the public. Whenever you criminalize consensual behavior leaving no one to report the crime, the person's body becomes the crime scene and the police must set up an elaborate surveillance system our Constitution was specifically designed to prevent.
Mass incarceration due to the drug war has hidden the problem within our elaborate incarceration system (where the drug addicted actually have easier access to drugs) at a huge expense while making no one safer.
We need to fundametally move away from the model of government using coercion and stigma to twist the arms of those we don't approve of. Rather that treating it as a law enforcement issue with all the moral judgement and stigma that entails, crimes like drugs should be treated as a healthcare problem designed to reduce harm. That is, there are no good of bad drugs, but healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs. If those with an unhealthy relationship are not ready to change, we need to focus on reducing the harm to them and others until they decide to change. The alternative, using a coercive criminal system to punish them into doing the right thing has never worked. Portugal has applied this model with great success after following the same failed policies we have. We need to have the generosity to take care of those not in a position to do so themselves until they choose to change.
The alternative is either the failed drug war, on the failed benign neglect approach we are currently failing at.
Also from a purely practical standpoint, the Feds have drained the money from local police to enforce drug policy and without money the police and prosecutors simply have no incentive. If you want to go back to the had old days, you would need to re-purpose money now being used to enforce other lifestyle crimes back to the war on drugs and all those NGO's have moved on. Where there is no financial incentive, there is no law enforcement.
@5: "The whole point is to get them into EFFECTIVE drug treatment."
Voluntarily? Or kicking and screaming? Some addicts just want to use. Some get hostile when their overdose is treated with Narcan. Because that just ruins their high. With a minor side effect of saving their life.
@30
Legalizing weed sure was a major hit to Washington's tax dollars eh? Luckily hundreds of millions in tax revenue a year materialised out of thin air to fill that hole and fund education (including informed education on marijuana as well as healthy alternatives to drug dependency for young people), physical/mental healthcare, and infrastructure. Too bad those don't help with life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness as much as taxpayer funded jailtime and a criminal record, eh?