The idea of arresting San Francisco drug users to "force them into treatment" only makes sense if you willfully ignore the fact that there's a waiting list for people that voluntarily want to go into treatment.🤡
We have 💰 to pay cops overtime to arrest, but not Drs to treat, addiction.
About 2 people overdose in San Francisco a day. The wait list for treatment is too long. People die on that wait-list. They are begging us for help.
But instead of helping, we promise rich people that step past them on the way to our luxury lives, that the city will arrest them.
@griff @mekkaokereke I maintain it’s not a drug crisis so much as a poorly managed pain (physical and emotional) crisis.
So a public health crisis, but one we can’t solve so long as we’re facing the wrong direction.
One of the moments that sticks with me was turning a corner in Lucerne, Switzerland ~30 years ago and seeing a needle exchange with a few people using. Clean, calm, and utterly unlike US cities.
@deirdresm @griff @mekkaokereke yeah forget trying to get people off drugs, do what Portugal (I think?) pioneered and Switzerland adopted as one of the first, simply because it's cheaper
free prescriptions for addicts. then put competent social workers at the same place addicts get their daily shot, to help them fix their lives: housing, job, life stability in general. convert your addicts into tax payers!
treat the addiction like any other medical condition that requires life-long medication
@deirdresm @griff @mekkaokereke for the really hard drugs most never mange to get off them. some try, when they're in a really good spot in their life overall, but it stops being the primary goal
which also means your backlog wait list for treatment facilities becomes a lot less of an emergency issue. since you fixed the OD issue already by giving addicts high-quality long acting substances that they consume with emergency help right there
oh also crime disappears
@sima @deirdresm @griff @mekkaokereke
If people get help when they need it, how are Americans going to live in fear of their workplace?
You lose your job, you lose your entire life.
Without that feeling of desperation how are you going to get up for work in the morning?
If you're not scrabbling away at your jobs then you might have time to reflect.
As soon as THAT happened in lockdown there were _literal riots_. Nothing happened to Floyd or Taylor that was new. :(
It's straight up grim.
@normakrautmeyer @sima @mekkaokereke @griff @unixmercenary Oh, I know. We have a friend who’s a pharmacist who thinks Adderall and opioids should be banned. ADHD is too little dopamine, like Parkinson’s is, but no one’s asking that group not to have meds.
(See also my previous rants about opioid refills. Sigh.)
@sima @deirdresm @griff @mekkaokereke
Yep. You want to wipe out all drug dealers, illegal funds and related burglaries and crime. Make illegal drugs free to users without criminal consequences. Kills the market.
Somehow ‘immoral’ so it doesn’t happen. It also goes against the US slave trade of getting black people into prisons and having them making clothes.
mekka okereke 
griff ferrell :firefish:
Deirdre Saoirse Moen
🐧sima🐧
PJ "Vote Green" Coffey
Norma Krautmeyer 🏳️🌈🍵🎨✂️🖍️🐈⬛
The Animal and the Machine