Do you realize under these programs, governments are actually buyers/customers of unlawful narcotics. State and local governments are essentially becoming a legal drug cartel. Read on to see how this works.
A week after President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health experts and the Clinton Foundation released a report with suggestions for curbing the epidemic that’s killing 90 Americans each day.
Among the collaboration’s top recommendations was a progressive suggestion: establishing “safe consumption sites” ― centers where drug users can go to consume or inject their drugs in a medically supervised environment. More here.
Boston Globe: US Senator Bernie Sanders released a criminal justice reform plan Sunday that includes proposals to legalize marijuana, expunge past cannabis convictions, and provide for safe injection sites to combat the opioid crisis.
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate emphasized racially disparate arrest rates for marijuana and said that such disparities “pervade every aspect of the criminal justice system.”
“When Bernie is president, we will finally make the deep and structural investments to rebuild the communities that mass incarceration continues to decimate,” his campaign website states.
A key component of the senator’s comprehensive proposal is changing federal drug laws and treating addiction as a mental health issue.
According to an outline of the plan, if elected president, Sanders will legalize marijuana while ensuring that revenue from cannabis sales are reinvested in communities “hit hardest by the War on Drugs.”
Sanders discussed aspects of his criminal justice reform vision at a campaign event in South Carolina where he addressed the cash bail system and drug criminalization. A tweet with video from the event points out that people continue to linger in prison due to high bail costs, including for simple marijuana possession arrests, while adults in legal states are able to “get marijuana delivered to your home.”
***
But it is really worse than that at the local level. Injection sites already exist threatening public safety.
Seattle has injection sites and local government is considering expanding the program at taxpayer expense. Get that? Everyday citizens taxes are paying for banned narcotics use.
Community Health Engagement Locations” (CHEL), in King County: one in Seattle and one outside of Seattle, “reflecting the geographic distribution of drug use in other King County areas.” The CHEL sites would provide supervised consumption of illicit drugs for adults with substance abuse disorders in addition to a number of other services:
- Hygienic space and sterile supplies
- Overdose treatment and prevention
- Rapid linkage to medication-assisted treatment, detox services and outpatient/inpatient treatment services
- Direct provision or linkage to basic medical treatment, wraparound social services and case management
- Syringe exchange services
- Sexual health resources and supplies
- Health education
- Peer support
- Post-consumption observation plan
Remember, we just had a recent shooting in Philadelphia in a neighborhood infested with drug use. And the Mayor is more concerned with how the several times convicted felon got all that firepower when the city has this other long term/growing issue. So what does he do?
The mayor of the city hit hardest by the opioid epidemic in the United States was in Vancouver last week to learn from police and harm reduction workers how injection sites have saved lives of drug users.
Jim Kenney of Philadelphia — a city of 1.6 million people that recorded 1,116 drug deaths last year — said he wanted to see first-hand what Vancouver’s experience is with injection sites and how the service intersects with community and law enforcement.
Like British Columbia, which has a population of five million and saw 1,535 people die of an overdose last year, the majority of drug deaths in Philadelphia have been linked to fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid.
Why is fentanyl so prevalent in Philadelphia?
“I have no idea,” Kenney said. “If I knew, I would tell the U.S. attorney’s office to go get [whoever brought it to Philadelphia] and have the FBI arrest them.”
And the idiot Democrat Larry Krasner, the front-runner to become Philadelphia’s next district attorney, says he supports city-sanctioned spaces where people addicted to heroin can inject drugs under medical supervision and access treatment, a move advocates see as a promising step toward making the city the first in the U.S. to open such a site.
What about San Francisco and New York or Denver?
Denver
Well in 2018, the Justice Department is threatening to shut down San Francisco’s proposed test of supervised injection sites amid the opioid crisis even before the governor has a chance to sign the pilot program into law.
The looming showdown could affect similar efforts in New York, Philadelphia and Seattle, where officials have grappled with the ramifications of setting up spaces where drug users could shoot up while gaining access to clean syringes, medical professionals and treatment services as an approach to curb opioid addiction and overdose deaths.
Just the facts and there are more. What the hell are we doing in America and is this giving us a generational failure?