The mayor of left-wing college town Ithaca New York is implementing a plan to help users of heroin and other hard drugs by decriminalizing the use of drugs and creating “Safe Spaces” (i.e. Taxpayer-funded shooting galleries) where they can use heroin under medical supervision.
An upstate New York mayor wants his city to be the first in the U.S. to offer a supervised injection facility, where heroin users would be able to shoot up under the care of a nurse without getting arrested by police.
“It’s providing a safe place where they won’t overdose, where they can get treatment,” Svante said. “We’re not going to encourage more people to use, it’s just going to save lives and give them an opportunity.”
The Ithaca program is modeled after a program implemented in Vancouver, BC, that the social left loves because it 1.) involves spending other people’s money and 2.) subsidizing destructive behavior makes them feel tolerant, compassionate, and enlightened. But Not everyone agrees that Vancouver’s “taxpayer-subsidized shooting gallery” plan was such a grand idea.
Jim O’Rourke is the executive director at the British Columbia-based Vision Quest Recovery Society. Schauffler says that O’Rourke put it in stark terms, saying the city is killing addicts with kindness. “We might as well put a bullet in their head,” O’Rourke told him. “We’re killing them. We just doing it in a much nicer way.”
That’s pretty much how socialist compassion works out.
I am open to the idea of drug decriminalization because the War on Drugs has not only been an abysmal failure, but has also severely compromised civil liberties. By that same token, I don’t believe the Government should be subsidizing (and therefore encouraging) people’s bad life choices. e.g. Using dangerously addictive narcotics.
In all fairness.. check out what Portugal did…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/05/why-hardly-anyone-dies-from-a-drug-overdose-in-portugal/
A couple of years ago, I was ambling around the Gastown vicinity in the Water Street and Trounce Alley area of Vancouver. It was about 11:00 am. All of us pedestrians had to either step over or wind our way around a man in his 20’s or 30’s who was lying passed out in a state of oblivion, dead across the sidewalk in the pedestrian area for crossing the street. His faithful dog was at his side and similarly in a state of repose.
I have encountered many derelicts in many cities, but never have I seen one jam up a pedestrian thoroughfare in such a manner. As I continued my stroll, I encountered a policewoman and I mentioned the human obstruction. Her response was more or less to inform me that everybody has to be somewhere and that guy was as welcome to his somewhere as was any pedestrian trying to use the sidewalk and street crossing.
I suppose that if the guy had taken the dead center of the intersection of the roads for his repose that the City of Vancouver would have cordoned him off with traffic cones.
Opium dens served a useful purpose. A case can be made (and the British made it) for consolidating the addicts and keeping a watch on them. Yet further case can be made (and the British made it) for keeping them addicted.
People do successfully escape from addiction. But not until they make their minds up to do so. And then the AA rules apply. Once an addict, always an addict. It is up to the addict to willfully eschew his addiction.
When the social warrior class swoops down and sanctifies their favored “victims” of the moment, why should the “victims” do anything more than play their endowed “victimhood” to the hilt?
Nothing says compassion like aiding and abetting suicidal behavior………..ROFLMAO
There is a certain logic to the idea of the city-sponsored drug den. Since drug use will continue regardless of whether it is legal or illegal, there’s a certain attractiveness to keeping all the “unknown elements” in a confined space, away from the public and the mechanisms of society. However, since my basic political philosophy runs towards “My interest in a political course of action wanes as the taxes-to-benefits ration approaches/exceeds 1,” I dislike the idea of having to pay taxes to benefit drug addicts.
Bad heroin goes around every few years killing people. What nurse is going to want to work in there? What liability will the taxpayers have? I knew a nurse that got investigated for being an angel of death(actually he just took an hours worth of smoke breaks a day) and that job sounds like asking for trouble.
Just a never ending whopping runaway national deficit growing like Topsy.
Read my lips: underfunded and unfunded entitlements are the national debit card tied to the income every working stiff in the nation.
The social justice system that can not say “no” to the “needs” and “requirements” of any sort of whiny maladjustment is puking its culture, its sovereignty and its vitality down the sewer. “Social security” becomes a guarantee of being taken care of and watched over by the state transfer of wealth scheme no matter what your free will chooses. Except, you do not have the free will not to fund the “social security” scheme. So, best you sit on your butt and and engage in your favored form of being a jerk off and let the scheme pamper you and your whole “victim” status.
It is tragic, but it was predictable. Once Colorado voted to legalize pot, it has opened the door for pro-drug advocates to push the envelope. In a small town inOregon near the Washington State border, that is financing their budget by the sale of pot. Of course the mayor is a pothead. Many customers come from across the border and Washington State says it doesn’t have the resources to do searches. For decades we’ve had drug czars from both sides of the aisle, and the message has been growing; that we are losing the war on drugs. Bernie has been promising so much free stuff, will he give away drugs too?
Steve: Bad heroin goes around every few years killing people. What nurse is going to want to work in there? What liability will the taxpayers have?
V the K: When You Subsidize Bad Life Choices, People Will Make More Bad Life Choices