Exactly. Its leaving out a lot of other information that changes the story.
“Police officer shoots unarmed black teen” sounds really bad.
But when you finish the sentence “… who was beating the shit out of the officer and reaching for his gun” it starts to seem less bad. Like a LOT less bad.
LGN = Lesbian Gay Neutered as far as I’m concerned.
Squeeze their fat asses into neon spandex and block the road while making everyone behind them question whether the elation of hitting them is worth the possibility of serious prison time?
I’ve signed a private secret contract a whole bunch of times for lots of things. Most contracts are private and the difference between secret and public knowledge is a matter of “who cares”. In my case, nobody.
It seems like the scale of the transaction bothers you. Its big scary numbers that point to insidious but unknown motives.
My brother does a lot of stuff with crypto and has spent a lot of time in Bahrain and UAE & whatnot. I guess it has become a nice industry destination/location.
Speaking of!!!
When did this become OK?
Not that I give a crap, but its just funny to watch the left slide further and faster down the slope of moral ambiguity.
Like that wasn’t ok a while back, but Now? “Oh, well he’s an ice agent, so…”.
So… what? Now its ok to be racist as long as the correct conditions are met.
What say you to that?
Do you still, in your wildest, wettest imagination believe you’re “On the right side of history!” ?
Always has been
Sure, but I bet who ever yelled that didn’t even have the decency to look around first!
Thats privelege! Not just any kind either. Not purple vanilla trans-quasi-proto-unicorn privilege.
Its WHITE! privilege. Where’s don lemon when we need him?
your crooked “leaders”
And NO, it shouldn’t make him feel better.
We had (have? Been out of the game for a while now) a needle exchange program. You gave out your used needle in exchange for a brand new one. It was imo a sensible enough program that actually greatly reduced the number of needles tossed onto the streets.
I’m sure you know this, but it was exactly for the same reasons they vote for the usual people in Maine. Lot’s of feel good socialist policies, including the always popular option to regularise half a million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. He’s not doing good on the polls last I checked. There have also been some corruption scandals in his cabinet recently.
No, no, no. You’ve got it all backwards my friend. He is FIGHTING the fascists.
Most of the yanks I know are from California, actually. Like 80% or so. I assume you don’t get along with most lol. I actually have relatives in San Diego and will likely visit them when I get around to it.
This is actually something where you could offer some insight. Since more liberal drug policy (decriminalization, usage rooms etc.) is something that certain parties here advocate currently.
What I’ve read, decriminalization has worked well in several European countries (like in Portugal), but has caused somewhat disastrous results in USA and Canada.
Is it because they lack proper social policies and support European countries give, or some cultural reason? Or would it be mistake altogether?
I’m personally uncertain with by stance. Punishing addicts does not help, and seems like a waste of police resources. But does decriminalization really offer any solutions?
I’ve actually read every medical study put forward at Lewiston public comment on the so-called “harm reduction” policies. I’m not a physician or an epidemiologist, but a few things stood out to me. They all look at the problem from a clinical perspective of patient outcomes, completely ignoring social outcomes like closed businesses, children growing up among street zombies, accidental needle sticks, more crime, etc.
The studies cited here all examine heroin users, not fentanyl users, who shoot up much more frequently. Like 10 times per day or more. Most of the hard clinical benefits claim disease reduction more so than better recovery statistics.
We’re now years into this experiment and it no longer passes the straight face test that these are actually doing what is claimed and they are definitely wreaking havoc on downtown. There are a lot of closed businesses in the vicinity of where the harm reduction takes place. It can also look like a hellscape at times, with parks overrun by extremely fucked up people.
The last council tried to get the “exchange” back to 1:1, not end the program entirely. It was clearly a priority among the progressive council members to keep it at 100:1.
On the school side, we now offer opt-out training to all middle schoolers and older on administering narcan. Parents aren’t directly informed and will only learn about it if their child brings home the opt-out letter.
Between “harm reduction” and allowing hundreds of CCP grow operations, it almost seems like exactly how a corrupt narco state would be run. Maine is now a great place to be a drug addict and operate a drug cartel, which we are told is a sound public health measure.
Oh, well in that case, viva la revolucion and socialismo o muerte!
I cannot speak for the US or Canada. We are certainly more culturally inclined to regard Universal Healthcare as an essencial pillar of society, and addiction falls within that umbrella.
What I can say from personal observation is that I see waay less junkies compared to 20 years ago along with less drug related crime.
Prisons were full of junkies so, even before the decriminalization law passed, they weren’t prossecuting small time possession as much, since it was getting harder for the prison system to deal with it.
There were (are) many faccilities with doctors and shrinks that provided drug related medical care so if you wanted to detox they would provide you with medication on the very same day. For methadone it could take a bit more. To be allowed into a detox facility they put you on a waiting list and it could take between 2 or 3 weeks, but again, medication on the same day and detoxing at home was always on the table, along with theraphy sessions.
Recovery centers/communities were also widely availability. You would be admitted only after fully detoxed. Ghe one I was in had a 1 year phase with limited contact to the outside world, with daily group and individual teraphy. Cleaning, cooking, landscaping, maintenance, was our responsability. After that phase they moved you into an apartment and you started to actively search for a job.
I have to say, despite the expected relapses along the way, most of the dudes from back in the day (most of them my peers, some of them my dad’s age), are doing fine. Of course I’m not including the ones that are fucking dead, but most of them died close to 20 years ago, whether from aids, OD.
Oddly enough there’s a bunch of guys I know who were never heavy drug users that decided to take up free basing in their middle age. Or crack, if you will. Same difference.
Again, this is just personal observation, but as far as my own “Lewinston” is concerned, impact was positive. Less junkies, less crime, and I haven’t seen a syringe in ages.
Here’s a link that goes beyond my own empirical observation.
I should add that I grew up in a fishermen’s town, and these men also weren’t shy about applying corrective medicine to whoever snapped their wive"s purse or broke into their homes to steal.
Assault charges were seldomly pursued in these cases. While it wasn’t exactly a deterrent for a desperate junkie, some time off in the hospital also didn’t agravatte their addiction.
This is what I find interesting. Most data and observations I’ve seen goes with this line: Europe has had success with it, but USA has not.
The drug problem has been steadily increasing here, while all drugs are strictly forbidden. Maybe focusing more to the helping of junkies would do good, since we have small population and traditionally strong social-/healtcare.
I would say the focus on recovery is more important than mere ‘‘harm reduction’’, but the latter has to have some common sense behind it. Like, a syring exchange program seems to be a much more sensible aproach than just handing off a bunch of them. I’d also add that the only Fentanyl we have here is medical/pharmaceutical, so abuse of that drug is still rare here.
What you describe tracks with what I’ve seen here. Maine has funded recovery programs for decades, and a few long-running Catholic programs actually had good track records.
The whole de facto legalization combined with no expectations of getting clean and publicly funding everything needed to destroy yourself is what turned downtown into an open air flophouse.
When you step back and look at the flow of taxpayer money, the grim reality is that we’ve commoditized the most troubled people in society. Every drug addict who shows up in Lewiston (or any city like it) is a potential revenue stream for dozens of “nonprofits” and health care organizations. They also obscure any data that might reveal how many people actually gravitate to Lewiston by claiming anyone who shows up is “from Lewiston”.
A lot of the actual organizations participating in this can only be called “healthcare” with many leaps of logic. Someone on staff might have a bachelor’s or a masters in public health or addiction counseling, but we’re not talking about physicians, surgeons, nurses, psychiatrists, or anything like that in most cases.
We’re funding groups like The Church of Safe Injection, who received nearly half a million dollars to hand out paraphernalia before city code enforcement condemned their building for being a pit of despair. It seems clear that nearly everyone on staff was an addict themselves. I posted pictures in the previous thread.
They (and many others) also function as socialist political activist organizations, participating in public comment, voter registration, and propaganda efforts. The Church of Safe Injection was also part of the larger “Decarceration Collective” that advocates for the very communist idea of abolishing all prisons.
In short, the way harm reduction has actually been implemented and funded here seems to have a priority of making money first, political advocacy second, and offering meaningful help to addicts last. They all use terms like “meet them where they are”, meaning no pressure is to be placed on anyone to stop using. It is enabling, and you can make a lot of money doing it in Maine.
Yeah. This sound like a terrible idea.
Legalization and/or decriminalization has to come with proper harm reduction policies, rehab programs etc.
I suppose it’s because such programs were run by honest people who set out to do what the program was meant for.
Just about any tax payer funded program should be subjec to oversight, periodic result evaluations, and run by qualified professionals. What you have there is a grift and everyone involved should be held accountable. They’re basically one step bellow actual drug traffickers since enabling consumption is what keeps the money rolling for these scumbags.
