War On Drugs

[malfeasance]

, I spend my time mostly at the beach community surfing up at Florence.

Cool! I lived in Florence for a decade and a half, when there was a thriving economy based in fishing and logging, and men earning money off those fields or related to those fields.

That's all gone now.

It is a retirement community with low wage server jobs now.

I do miss wandering in the mountains in the Siuslaw National Forest, far away from people, roads, and trails, and over the sand dunes as well, and pulling trout out of the lakes . . .

Making me nostalgic . . .

 

[onecock-twoballs]

You're right, my family thinks I'm crazy that I want to hangout at Heceta Head cove and surf or just watch the waves, eat some fresh fish at a diner.

You quickly lose sight of just how magical Oregon is if you live there for years, it can be pushed out of you mind by other concerns.

Lets look at it this way. You could spend your life working and buying, amassing lots of fancy toys that will thrill you for a few minutes before the excitement is gone, but when you walk, swim, climb, hike, peddle your way through paradise like Oregon you really can't put a price on that.

On your deathbed you won't flashback to the toys you bought, you will probably have images of the pristine nature of Oregon and that's a hell of a lot better way to go out than what most people will have which is mostly visions of overdue credit card statements.

 

[malfeasance]

On the economy - I wasn't referring to tearing up the wilderness. A majority of the land in Oregon is owned by the federal government, and that is not going to change based on the whims of the Oregon legislature.

The politicians there have stupid economic ideas and seem completely incapable of connecting their ideas to consequences. For instance, it is illegal to pump your own gas. The politicians there think this creates jobs. Well, it does, sort of, in the same way that making it illegal to wipe your own ass would create jobs. They also recently passed a revenue tax on businesses. Note the word revenue. Not profit. This was just last year or the year before. It was a high priority item for the Democrats in Oregon. I could go on, but hopefully the point is made. It is just a very hostile place for opening or developing a business, and the economy suffers greatly as a result. Lots of my friends and family are stuck in the lower rungs of income and seem almost hopeless about it unless they leave Oregon. Many of them do and have flourished as a result.

I don't live there myself for one reason - it is so damned easy to make money in other parts of the country. It is tough to do so in Oregon. So I have chosen to make the money and visit Oregon when I can . . .

 

[onecock-twoballs]

This is the place that I get drawn to in Oregon, you can forget all that Antifa stuff, this is where it's at.

 

[onecock-twoballs]

On the economy - I wasn't referring to tearing up the wilderness. A majority of the land in Oregon is owned by the federal government, and that is not going to change based on the whims of the Oregon legislature.

The politicians there have stupid economic ideas and seem completely incapable of connecting their ideas to consequences. For instance, it is illegal to pump your own gas. The politicians there think this creates jobs. Well, it does, sort of, in the same way that making it illegal to wipe your own ass would create jobs. They also recently passed a revenue tax on businesses. Note the word revenue. Not profit. This was just last year or the year before. It was a high priority item for the Democrats in Oregon. I could go on, but hopefully the point is made. It is just a very hostile place for opening or developing a business, and the economy suffers greatly as a result. Lots of my friends and family are stuck in the lower rungs of income and seem almost hopeless about it unless they leave Oregon. Many of them do and have flourished as a result.

I don't live there myself for one reason - it is so damned easy to make money in other parts of the country. It is tough to do so in Oregon. So I have chosen to make the money and visit Oregon when I can . . .

Oregon seems like a place to me that requires a lot from you if you want to make a living. You're right in that many of these people could make better livings in other parts of the country. It's expensive to live, seems to require a lot of education to obtain those coveted slots at the businesses you do have.

Taxes seem to be spent on well kept infrastructure and the layouts of those cities are extremely friendly to pedestrians and cyclists. The first time I visited the place I went out in the morning to run and saw hundreds of commuters flying down the bike lanes heading to work or school, its almost like Copenhagen.

I could see if you were a conservative oriented person Oregon would probably get on your nerves, I don't think I could make it there economically or I would have moved there. I always considered Oregon the place I'd live on the coast if millions of dollars fell into my lap, but otherwise it's just a place to visit.

It seems to me Oregon is one part lumberjack and one part highly educated eco yuppie.

 

[onecock-twoballs]

My favorite spot to surf Oregon coast.

 

[malfeasance]

Spent a LOT of time at Heceta Head. Man, you are bringing back a lot of memories!

 

[Michael Scally MD]

One of America’s greatest mistakes over the last century was the war on drugs, so it’s thrilling to see voters in red and blue states alike moving to unwind it.

The most important step is coming in Oregon, where voters easily passed a referendum that will decriminalize possession of even hard drugs like cocaine and heroin, while helping users get treatment for addiction. The idea is to address drug use as a public health crisis more than as a criminal justice issue.

In Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota, voters decisively passed measures liberalizing marijuana laws. Marijuana will now be legal for medical use in about 35 states and for recreational use in 15 states.

But not all the country is onboard. In Alabama, a disabled military veteran named Lee Carroll Brooker, about 80 years old, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole because he was caught in 2011 growing marijuana plants for personal medical use.

Because he had been convicted of previous felonies (robberies committed 20 years earlier), the mandatory sentence was life without the possibility of parole. So for marijuana possession, which is legal in much of the country, Brooker is slated to die in prison.

President Richard Nixon began the war on drugs almost half a century ago, after legitimate worries about the rise of addiction, especially among Vietnam veterans. Yet many years later a top aide, John Ehrlichman, explained (with some exaggeration) the policy’s roots: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

One result of the war on drugs is that today there are as many Americans with arrest records as with college degrees.

 

[malfeasance]

Supreme court considers taking case of man given life in prison for growing pot

Lee Carroll Brooker, a 76-year-old disabled army veteran, says he was growing the marijuana in his Alabama back yard to alleviate his own health problems

www.theguardian.com

 

[Michael Scally MD]

ON ELECTION DAY, voters around the country opted to relax state drug laws. New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota and Montana voted to legalize recreational marijuana, and Mississippi voted to legalize medical marijuana. Oregon went further, decriminalizing small quantities of all drugs. These movements mark a welcome shift in decades of destructive drug policy.

Since the Reagan-era escalation of the war on drugs, severe criminal penalties for drug possession have fueled a huge growth in the prison population, with particularly devastating consequences for many Black communities, where both penalties and policing have been harsher than for Whites. Using the criminal justice system as the primary tool to curb the sale and use of illicit substances has had astronomical costs without the desired effects.

In recent years, opioid overdose deaths have soared — nearly 50,000 in 2018 — underscoring just how cruel and counterproductive it is to criminalize addiction, a fact long understood by Black communities ravaged by crack cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s. Not only are incarcerated opioid users much more likely to fatally overdose shortly after being released than the general population, but contact with the criminal justice system can throw up barriers to employment, housing and government benefits, making it harder to overcome addiction. People battling addiction benefit from treatment and are harmed by imprisonment.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Vancouver city council unimously voted on Wednesday to proceed with a plan to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of all illicit drugs—from heroin to meth—as a way to help curb the province’s worsening overdose crisis that has been exacerbated by the pandemic and an increasingly toxic street supply.

Pending approval from the federal government, the city would become the first in Canada to decriminalize illicit substances, and comes shortly after Oregon became the first U.S. state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of all drugs.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

A pandemic is gripping Europe with its centre in Great Britain. More than 3 million Britons caught it in 2019-20, of whom 5,657 died – a number that has quadrupled since 2013. Scotland’s death rate has soared to three and a half times that of the whole UK, and is the worst in Europe. Multiple cures are being tested round the world, but the British government opposes every one of them.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Westminster telling the world that its Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) would stamp out illegal drugs for ever. The act failed utterly, but it has never been repealed. Among other horrors, the industry it created now enslaves an estimated 27,000 children and teenagers, some as young as eight, in “county lines” drug gangs. The government has no answer but to throw a few of them in jail.

During any crisis, radical ideas tend to come from troops at the front, rather than from the centre. Drugs are no exception. The Home Office in Whitehall is terrified not of the facts, but of the tabloid press. It is now 20 years since the Runciman committee on reforming the drug laws advised that cannabis be reduced to a class C drug, which Tony Blair’s government reluctantly did before reversing the decision. As a pro-legalisation member of the committee, I will never forget the fury of the well-dressed Stepney dealer who told us we wanted to “do me out of living”. He was a great fan of the anti-reform home secretary Jack Straw.

Since then, evidence of new ways of handling narcotics, soft and hard, has poured in from around the world. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Portugal have been in the lead, with the US and Canada across the Atlantic. For marijuana, the salient point has been its medicinal use. Medicinal cannabis is now legal in most countries.

 

[Millard]

View: https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1362882651489722372


Carl Hart, a Columbia University professor of psychology and neuroscience and author of new book “Drug Use for Grown-ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear”:

“There aren’t many things in life that I enjoy more than a few lines by the fireplace at the end of the day,” he writes, pointing out that the experience leaves him “refreshed” and “prepared to face another day.”

Hart, who studies the effects of psychoactive drugs on humans, finds his use of the narcotic to be “as rational as my alcohol use. Like vacation, sex and the arts, heroin is one of the tools that I use to maintain my work-life balance.”

Source: Columbia professor: I do heroin regularly for ‘work-life balance’

 

[pigeonhed]

Very interesting change at the presidential level. Biden is asking the Supreme Court to consider small amounts of crack cocaine be added to the First Step Act. Oregon already has decriminalized most drug use. Wonder how this plays nationwide and if the Supreme Court gets involved.

Biden reverses course in U.S. Supreme Court drug sentencing case

 

[MindlessWork]

Very interesting change at the presidential level. Biden is asking the Supreme Court to consider small amounts of crack cocaine be added to the First Step Act. Oregon already has decriminalized most drug use. Wonder how this plays nationwide and if the Supreme Court gets involved.

Biden reverses course in U.S. Supreme Court drug sentencing case

I would rather see weed decriminalized or even fully legalized at the federal level, and not the hard stuff. I lost a few people close to me to overdoses on cocaine and heroin over the years.

 

[Millard]

Very interesting change at the presidential level. Biden is asking the Supreme Court to consider small amounts of crack cocaine be added to the First Step Act. Oregon already has decriminalized most drug use. Wonder how this plays nationwide and if the Supreme Court gets involved.

Biden reverses course in U.S. Supreme Court drug sentencing case

Crack cocaine is already included as a "covered offense" as part of the First Step law.

Perhaps Trump didn't know what he signed when he later said he opposed including crack cocaine.

Biden is just making the bold step of saying that he supports the law

First Step still leaves it to the judges' discretion to disregard the law's intentions.

 

[MindlessWork]

Crack cocaine is already included as a "covered offense" as part of the First Step law.

Perhaps Trump didn't know what he signed since he later said he opposed including crack cocaine.

Biden is just making the bold step of saying that he supports the law

First Step still leaves it to the judges' discretion to disregard the law's intentions.

I am all for a first step for first time offenders and it should be a learning experience for them to realize the dangers of these hard drugs like crack, heroin, meth and fentanyl. This way we only imprison those who do not learn or have a low regard to the health and safety of others.

 

[Millard]

The war on drugs under Biden?


View: https://twitter.com/OSFKasia/status/1372563812948267011


In March 2018, under Gupta’s watch, the harm reduction program run by the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department was shut down by Charleston’s then-Mayor Danny Jones. Jones described Charleston’s harm reduction program as a “mini-mall for junkies and drug dealers,” and blamed harm reduction for a spike in crime. “It wasn’t a needle exchange. It was a needle mill. And crime in this city skyrocketed,” Jones said on WBUR’s Here & Now, a nationally syndicated radio program.

To seal the fate of future harm reduction programs, and further his political narrative that the Charleston program was mismanaged and led to more crime, Jones requested that West Virginia’s state health department conduct an audit of the now-shuttered program.

Gupta told a local news station that the audit “should be a lesson for other needle exchanges.”

Gupta obliged and, in May 2018, his department published a highly critical 62-page audit of the program. The audit criticized the program for petty offenses, like not tracking the number of condoms that were distributed and not collecting enough data about participants who accessed sterile syringes. The audit also cited unverified reports of an “increase” in needlestick injuries attributed to syringe litter, feeding into Jones’s anti-harm reduction crusade.

 

[Millard]

Criticism of Biden's likely choice for the next U.S. drug czar from Peter Davidson, PhD, Division of Infectious Disease and Global Public Health at University of California San Diego:

“Dr. Gupta was happy to put his name on an audit that justified shutting down an essential health service,” Davidson, who has studied harm reduction and the prevention of overdose and blood-borne virus transmission for over 20 years, told Filter. “He put the political situation well ahead of the urgent health needs of the community. His job should have been to help explain to the community why this program is in their best interest. He not only didn’t do that, he actively contributed to condemning the program.”

“That’s not who I’d want to see in charge of ONDCP,” Davidson added.