I am just astounded that this is being spun in such a positive light. It absolutely has had a negative impact on public safety here. They're offered public services, and they refuse them, because many of our "tiny villages" have no-drug-use policies, which they will not abide by. My city has one of the worst problems with repeat violent drug addicts in the nation (perhaps aside from the Bay) and yet we refuse to jail…
Just looked up the hot coffee case. It could only happen in a city with strict gun laws. In Texas someone would have enacted his sheriff fantasies on this perpetrator a long time ago.
In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
81–90 of 501 posts
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#82I fully support legalizing all drugs, but don't understand why the latest wave of criminal justice reform tolerates property crimes. Crimes like smash and grabs, purse snatching, bike thefts, vandalism, littering, and shoplifting clearly have defined victims and lower the quality of life for everyone. It's perfectly possible to be a heroin addict and an upstanding citizen at the same time. The same cannot be said of…
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#83... this is probably news to people actually living in Seattle. (Edit: the title was originally, "Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs") A place where meth heads attack people with pitchforks in the street a few days after being released from prison on a suspended sentence. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/man-accused-... Not to mention our random piles of used syringes, which are often…
When people say things like this, I do have to wonder if they've ever lived in a city before. Seattle's crime rate, like most American cities, has been steadily declining since the 1980s. There is just a certain amount of crime and drug use that will always exist in the big city. No amount of 'tough on crime' policing will make it go away.
Comfortable salaried people love to make a big issue about it because Seattle isn't scrubbed clean to perfection and they see a mess every once in awhile, but really the city isn't bad at all and isn't full of rampant crime.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#84I fully support legalizing all drugs, but don't understand why the latest wave of criminal justice reform tolerates property crimes. Crimes like smash and grabs, purse snatching, bike thefts, vandalism, littering, and shoplifting clearly have defined victims and lower the quality of life for everyone. It's perfectly possible to be a heroin addict and an upstanding citizen at the same time. The same cannot be said of…
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? Junkies and other folks who throw needles on the street when there’s a trash can like 5 feet away will actually make appointments to stop at these consumption sites? Who pays for this? The city of Seattle makes a mess because of their extremist policies of not enforcing laws so let’s raise taxes to make up for it?
Please cite how Seattle's policy of not locking people up to rot in prison is extremist. You had a viable argument right up until that point! Edit: Thanks for the bot downvotes! Going from +2 to -1 in the span of a minute on two separate comments is a bit of a red flag :P
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#86Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#87> “You’ve got a guy shooting heroin on the street, and the cop is supposed to say, ‘You O.K.?’” grumbled one law enforcement officer in Seattle. (In fact, an officer would typically confiscate the heroin, admonish the user and move on.) Some residents worry that when the city ignores its own laws on the books and tolerates people openly abusing narcotics, it takes a step toward incivility that will eventually result…
Your perspective promotes traumatizing systems. You are therefore a danger to yourself and society. If you are locked up as a result of this, will the reeducation take? ----------------- Thought experiment aside, you don't know what other people need and forcing your ideas onto them is how we get into these messes in the first place. Authoritarianism isn't a healing modality.
> If you are locked up as a result of this, will the reeducation take?
Ha! If offending people was illegal I'd have been in prison a long time ago.
> Thought experiment aside, you don't know what other people need and forcing your ideas onto them is how we get into these messes in the first place.
I'm not forcing my ideas on anyone. These are the laws collectively decided by us and and forefathers. As a group we've decided that we do not want people shooting heroin on our streets and we've made the practice illegal.
> Authoritarianism isn't a healing modality.
I'd argue it authoritarianism to force a law abiding member of society to put up with this craziness in their communities. The people I feel the most sorry for are on the lower end of the income scale that do not have the financial means to vote with their feet.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#88> “You’ve got a guy shooting heroin on the street, and the cop is supposed to say, ‘You O.K.?’” grumbled one law enforcement officer in Seattle. (In fact, an officer would typically confiscate the heroin, admonish the user and move on.) Some residents worry that when the city ignores its own laws on the books and tolerates people openly abusing narcotics, it takes a step toward incivility that will eventually result…
Does your squeamishness about seeing someone use an intravenous delivery method really justify the cost of state intervention?
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#89> In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with hard drugs and more on the public health toolbox. America's puritanical urges result in more self-harm than anything else. So much of the way our nation is structured is based on some ancient idea that you have to live clean and work hard in order to get to heaven. That is combined with a sen…
Unfortunately, this whole drug situation in the USA has gotten, like many things, totally out of hand through gaslighting abusive actions by those who claim to want to "help" and make things better, but instead have nothing but a record and history of making things worse, which they immediately sweep under the rug the second even they can't ignore their constant, repeated, and typical failures.
What this "caring" approach smells of to me is a kind of stasis, where the helper-syndrome types get to feel good about themselves, while getting rich as org directors, and also normalizing drug cartel operations. The Drug cartels and organized drug criminals are actually a real domestic terror and civil threat to society and communities as they kill and destroy lives by the hundreds of thousands and devastate lives by the millions every single year.
I do agree that throwing users in prison is nonsense, even though often ( and I know people who can attest to this ) it is the thing that saves them from the drug and it also leads to users giving up people on the chain towards the sources of the chemical warfare that is waged on the American people.
I also agree, this whole cottage industry of drug related careers and fortunes, whether it's NGOs or DEA, is an utter mess and corrupted. What really should be happening is that all drug producers, smugglers, transporters, and dealers be declared the perpetrators of crimes against humanity that they are and they should be treated like the enemies in war that they are, as they engage in chemical warfare that kills 80,000 people every year and destroys millions of lives and families and pillages billions and trillions of dollars.
It should be a scorched earth tactic against smugglers, dealers, and producers ... a merciless, ruthless, hunt for these people that are then erased as the war criminals and pestilence on humanity they are ... the mass murderers they are.
But that's from someone that actually hates the misery and suffering and death that drugs cause. I do not get the sense that most people actually care one iota about the 80,000 people that die every year, not to count the thousands who commit suicide due to addiction. All those who do not want to end it once and for all with direct, hard, and merciless action are complicit in and guilty of supporting the murders by the drug cartels and criminals against humanity.
Re: In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I mean, without statistics his anecdotes are meaningless. It's a common thing to complain here in Seattle, but having lived in the Midwest for most of my life I know what true violence looks like and feels like. I don't hear guns every night like I did in KC. There aren't 600 murders a year like in Chicago. I'm not saying Seattle is perfect but I've never felt safer. And I live in the Central District, which is…
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There's a large chunk of people who think that "Let's take repeat violent offenders off the streets" translates to "Let's take away offered social programs and criminalize being poor", which is not a fruitful dialog.