Seattle's madness continues

[katygirl68]

Originally Posted by Scrat335

Damn. They say they're trying to be compassionate. My ass. If they were compassionate they would get those people out of the environment they're in so they can get well. A safe place to shoot up is just allowing the junkies to continue to do what is killing them. This is just idiocy.

I agree, this is a horrible idea. I don't understand why opioid addiction is so high in Washington. It was that way when I was younger too. In Texas where I live, people tended to favor cocaine or today maybe meth, but heroin use is not nearly as high as in Washington, or the West Coast and East Coast in general. I've always wondered why that is.

I can attest that it's not that hard to get over a cocaine or meth habit if you want to. All you have to do is get away from it. But opioids are a different story. That addiction follows you around for life. You can easily backslide like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who was a a teenage junkie who turned his life around until a couple of decades later when he got re-hooked after being prescribed painkillers by his doctor.

The best thing to do is try to eliminate it, not encourage it and give a safe place for it. The funny thing is that it's probably the same people who were instrumental in getting cigarette smoking banned in public spaces who want this. Heroin is not a victimless crime. It affects the people who aren't junkies just as much. Those people are still going to beg or steal to get their drugs. They're still going to want to be somewhere outside of an institution to do drugs, so it won't clear up the problem elsewhere.

[CrazyDonkey]

Originally Posted by pnwguy2

I certainly see both sides of this argument. However, I tend to agree with CrazyDonkey, if I understand his point...if Seattle can control this addicted population, in addition to offering treatment (something that gets lost here), doesn't that generally make it safer overall?

Please read what this all about. It is indeed a safe injection site, but it also looks to help and offer counseling and treatment for those addicted. Again, we tend to pick and choose what we want out of these proposals, and that isn't fair. As my link below points out, this is not a new idea. Has been used in Europe and Canada for years.

Seattle plans first safe drug-injection sites in the US | Politics | Al Jazeera

https://www.thecommononline.org/decr...-a-love-story/

In 2001, nearly two decades into Pereira’s accidental specialization in addiction, Portugal became the first country to completely decriminalize the consumption of all illicit substances. Rather than being arrested, those caught with a personal supply might be given a warning, assessed a small fine, or sent to have a chat with a local dissuasion commission—a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker—about treatment, harm reduction, and support services available to them. A bold stance was taken, an opioid crisis stabilized, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime, and incarceration rates. HIV infection rates, for example, plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015. The data from what is now a decade and a half of largely positive results have been studied and held up as example, and have given weight to harm-reduction movements around the globe. It’s misleading, however, to credit these positive results entirely to a change in law.

Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government—including conservative leaders who would have rather ushered in a return of the War on Drugs—could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift and collective change of heart around how the country viewed drugs, addiction, and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies, and around kitchen tables across the country. Decriminalization as an official policy allowed for the pooled support and interconnection of a broad range of health, psychological, employment, housing, social, and cultural services that were already grasping to work together to serve their communities...

Many Portuguese harm-reduction advocates have been frustrated by what they see as stagnation and inaction; they criticize the state for dragging its feet on establishing supervised injection sites and drug consumption rooms, for not making the anti-overdose medication naloxone more readily available, for not implementing needle exchange programs in prisons, and for not demonstrating the same bold leadership that led the country to decriminalize drugs in the first place.

Note that these results were achieved without "supervised injection sites and drug consumption rooms", which are simply an additional tool to reduce harm and facilitate treatment. More important is a shift in attitude, away from prohibitory and punitive "solutions" to addiction:

Portugal’s policy rests on three pillars: one, that there’s no such thing as a soft or hard drug, only healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs; two, that an individual’s unhealthy relationship with drugs often points to frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves; and three, that the eradication of all drugs is an impossible goal.

Portugal has implemented mobile Methadone clinics, which, rather than expecting their patients to travel to a central clinic, deliver maintenance doses where their recipients work, study, and live, allowing them to hold down jobs, go to school/get retraining, and lead otherwise normal lives.

[DutchessCottonPuff]

That ^^ what Crazy D said, agree 100%. This country is so stubborn sometimes - when you are talking about the situation requiring a cultural shift to make it work and I believe that it does . Everyone has to be on the same page and we are very polarized .

Seems like some people won't go for anything but," lock 'em up ,they are trash anyway" or a NURSE on another thread suggested some things ( "setting their tents on fire" and "rounding them up and sorting them like cattle ") which set this ranchers kid (me) on fire to hear a nurse say that and sorta makes me slightly afraid of who is taking care of me when I am under anesthesia . Which is often.