Discussion Should Harm Reduction supplies be funded by tax dollars?

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i gotta story for you guys but i'll keep it short - it's a true story


i worked at a prison back around 2010 and a porter came everyday to clean my room - sweep, take out the garbage and whatever.....so of course over some time i got to talking to him, and he seems like a good dude... and one day i finally asked him, why are you here?

he says go google my name

so i do - dude was on a meth binge and murdered 2 of his former co-workers...

and he asked me the next day "did you look me up?" and im like "uh yea dude wtf"

and i asked him "dude what happened?" and he's like "i dont know dude - i just lost it...."

2 people are dead and he's never getting out - he was on a death row but had it overturned






people lose there shit on meth - for real




you don't hand out pipes for that drug - you keep fighting it and you don't give up the fight ...if you're losing the war, it's because you're not fighting hard enough - you don't settle for that drug

it's really that bad of a drug
 
Mr. Krinkle said:
you're not helping anybody out by giving them a new meth pipe



that's not harm reduction


you can tell me it is until you're blue in the face


but giving somebody a pipe so they can smoke meth just isn't harm reduction no matter how you slice it

im sorry - it just isn't
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Ok how simply do you want me to spell this out -?

PEOPLE WHO ARE GONNA DO DRUGS ARE GONNA DO DRUGS WHATEVER, until you can get them to a mindset where they're ready and willing to quit.

Do you actually truly think that not providing an injector with clean needles is gonna somehow stop him injecting, or not providing a clean pipe is gonna stop someone from smoking out of a coca-cola can that's shared with several others?...

The POINT is preventing the spread of disease, nothing more. It's recognising that reality is not ideal.
I have someone who's gonna be using xyz no matter what the personal cost or the health risk, all I can do is mitigate the cost while I'm ALSO trying to motivate that person towards quitting / trying to help make it psychologically possible for that person to quit.

It's not that easily possible for many people. If say you're using drugs to cope with some major shit in your life, you're gonna need some intensive help. Unless you can access that help, being forced to quit will do precisely NOTHING apart from temporarily taking you off the grid.

Putting conditions on help and compassion also won't, because that's like asking someone with a broken leg to just walk AND THEN they'll be given a plaster cast and a crutch. Right now the attitude of most drug services is 'show us proof you've overcome your problem before we will help you with your problem.'

And more often than you might think, caring for someone's physical wellbeing will lead to that person starting to care again about their own health, which then can be expanded to address mental health and addiction issues.
 
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i highly disagree with you

you don't sit there and say "oh they're gonna do it no matter what, so lets give them the supplies to do it"

that's fuckin stupid


you spend money on taking out the dealers - not fuckin supplies to do it

they'll stop doing it when there's none around - or they'll go somewhere else - whatever it is, they need to go because they're a health hazard and a menace to everyone else around them - destroying everything including themselves with their own selfish behavior - you can either shape up or GTFO

you don't enable these people - that's the dumbest thing in the world and you and i watching it fail to an extreme level as more and more people die and each and every city falls apart and degrades


don't fuckin tell me how it is IN ALL CAPS
 
Mr. Krinkle said:
people come from all over the country, just to live in a shithole drug abyss and nod the fuck out and tweek the fuck out, all over the streets of Seattle because of "harm reduction" where you can smoke meth and fent anywhere you want downtown - you can build a tent in a parking space and nobody's gonna move your new little shit spot either
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This approach worked so well for SF that now they even have great apps for everyone, like this one:

 
Mr. Krinkle said:
i highly disagree with you

you don't sit there and say "oh they're gonna do it no matter what, so lets give them the supplies to do it"

that's fuckin stupid
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Nope, that's just an observable fact. They are gonna do it. And providing clean supplies is damage limitation.
Mr. Krinkle said:
you spend money on taking out the dealers - not fuckin supplies to do it
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You know what would take out the dealers? A legal supply. Who the fuck is gonna spend ridiculously inflated prices on a substandard cut-to-shit contaminated product, when you can instead have pure pharmacy grade for a reasonable amount of money affordable on a standard wage?
Mr. Krinkle said:
they'll stop doing it when there's none around - or they'll go somewhere else - whatever it is, they need to go because they're a health hazard and a menace to everyone else around them - destroying everythig including themselves with their own selfish behavior - you can either shape up or GTFO
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I said it before, anyone who commits actual crimes in support of their habit deserve jail time ; we should at least be in agreement on that. And I'm not denying in the least that the human population contains entirely selfish arseholes - but that goes for drug users and non-users alike. Drugs don't have magical properties to turn you into an entirely different person. If you're a druggie arsehole that means you're just an arsehole, period. Don't go blaming it on a chemical.

... 'shape up' ? I think you're deliberately disregarding the huge factor that mental illness is with any type of drug addiction. Some people fucking CAN'T 'shape up' just like that no matter how much they may may want to. And they need psychiatric help, which in most of the US and UK is DISMAL in terms of availability.
Mr. Krinkle said:
you don't enable these people
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AGAIN, you think someone that wants to say inject heroin is just suddenly not gonna do it because there's no clean works?? They're gonna do it with whatever comes to hand, which often carries grave consequences. And drug users need nobody to 'enable' them, they do that very well all by themselves.
Mr. Krinkle said:
- that's the dumbest thing in the world and you and i watching it fail to an extreme level as more and more people die and each and every city falls apart and degrades
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Well, statistics don't lie and all the statistics show that addiction rates and drug-related crime noticeably GO UP in direct correlation to how strictly 'anti-drug' the law enforcement is. Countries and regions with the most draconian drug laws consistently tend to rank higher on overdose deaths, numbers of addicts, and crimes committed because of drugs.

While historically, about a century ago before those major anti-drug laws, yes there absolutely were addicts (you'll always get a proportion of those as long as humanity exists), but it wasn't a wide-spread generic social problem. So very obviously these laws are counter - productive, yet you're calling for more of the same that hasn't worked.
Mr. Krinkle said:
don't fuckin tell me how it is IN ALL CAPS
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Just stop acting like an arsewipe then.
 
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TheUltimateFixx said:
You know what would take out the dealers? A legal supply. Who the fuck is gonna spend ridiculously inflated prices on a substandard cut-to-shit contaminated product, when you can instead have pure pharmacy grade for a reasonable amount of money affordable on a standard wage?
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you mean like pharmcetical grade meth and pharmacetuical grade opiates?

that's gonna help people?


are you really that stupid?


jesus fuckin christ
 
kiely said:
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Justin is SO diverse he can wear "blackface" without any problem.
justin_trudeau_yearbook_05.jpg
 
because he's talking about himself and representing his fellow waste-oids

he wants "legal" pharmaceutical grade like every other addict


get the fuck outta here with that bullshit


at one time, all of these drugs were in fact, legal in the US - and they became illegal and controlled because of how dangerous they are to the population



dont be stupid
 
Also just for the record @Mr. Krinkle , going by what you're proposing as a 'solution' would have outright been the end.

Being incarcerated without access to the only thing that made life bearable for me, while also not being able to access mental health services because of undersupply and insane waiting lists, would have finished me. But hey my suicide would surely have taken one more 'undesirable' off the streets.
 
TheUltimateFixx said:
Also just for the record @Mr. Krinkle , going by what you're proposing as a 'solution' would have outright been the end.

Being incarcerated without access to the only thing that made life bearable for me, while also not being able to access mental health services because of undersupply and insane waiting lists, would have finished me. But hey my suicide would surely have taken one more 'undesirable' off the streets.
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right - because you, being an intelligent human, made the fatal mistake of getting yourself an opiate habit

when you make poor choices, you pay the price


that's life

so be happy and feel fortunate enough to still be alive if that's what you want out of life
 
Mr. Krinkle said:
you mean like pharmcetical grade meth and pharmacetuical grade opiates?

that's gonna help people?


are you really that stupid?


jesus fuckin christ
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For most of human history, most people were not hopelessly addicted to drugs. DRUGS DON'T CAUSE THEIR OWN USE. Human motivations cause drug use.


What we need to do is both stop demonising drugs, and ascribing to them properties they just don't have.
I am pretty sure I would never have been an addict if I hadn't bought wholesale the rhetoric that 'if you do heroin just ONCE you're bound to end up as a back alley junkie'.
Self - fulfilling prophecy at its finest.
 
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