News Sep 19, 2023 at 6:59 pm

With Little Money for Treatment, the City Bans Public Drug Use and Possession

Though Council Member Sara Nelson backs Andrew Lewis's opponent in his city council race, they both joined hands to relaunch Seattle's war on drugs. AN

Comments

2

@SwampThing Totally agree. This is an OK starting point. Hopefully the next SCC will push it even further.

3

Odd that The Stranger writers have so little compassion for the addicted. If I didn’t know better I’d think they were dealers.

5

“the Mayor and the Council’s conservatives”

To quote “The Princess Bride”: You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

6

Whatever. Cops will fuck with whomever they want. The rules don't really matter.

7

@1 Nobody wants that, but we know that this can't change that. And will instead increase drug use quantity and overdoses, resulting in more deaths, each one of which is someone's child. And that those of us with disabilities need to stick up for each other

@3 Compassion would be if you listen to the addicted rather than speaking over them and speaking for them to tell them you know better than they do about their own lives

@5 If they arent conservatives, what the fuck are they?

@6 I almost agree but we don't live in a completely authoritarian regime (yet?), it matters what the statutes and courts say.

8

Labeling Herbold a conservative. Just wow.

10

@7 In what reality do you live in where asking people not to do drugs in public (thereby impacting innocent people) leads to more drug use and overdoses? That is some truly non linear logic. We all have compassion for addicts, there is no doubt it is a medical issue that needs treatment BUT the focus of this issue for too long has been on the addict. We excuse their impacts to other people and to the environment simply because they have a problem and ignore the many, many innocent people who are harmed either through their using (I don't care what TS says having Fentanyl on public transit is bullshit) or their actions (crime, squalor etc). There needs to be a change and this is just one part of that change that says if your problem is so overwhelming that you can not manage yourself in public there is a right to intervene. I really don't care if these people go to jail or treatment as long as the police have the ability to tell them to stop and confiscate anything they have on them so it is destroyed.

11

@10 absolutely. Well said. TS has lost it's relevance and connection with the liberals of this city. Supporting legalizing drugs is different than letting people shoot up on your doorstep.

12

Sadly @6 is correct in our current SPOG world

13

@7: “…increase drug use quantity and overdoses, resulting in more deaths,”

You actually believe there is some way to cause greater increases in these numbers? Here’s the King County dashboard on overdoses, including deaths: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/safety-injury-prevention/overdose-prevention-response/data-dashboards
Note the graph with the annual numbers. Not only has the number increased annually, the curve opens upwards, meaning an annual increase in the rate of increase! Under the existing hands-off approach, the number of fatal overdoses continues to accelerate. Seattle and King County are already at the point you describe.

“Compassion would be if you listen to the addicted rather than speaking over them and speaking for them to tell them you know better than they do about their own lives.”

Yes, we should take direction from persons who’ve managed themselves into living in tents, stealing from everyone around them for drug money. This is how Seattle and King County arrived at those above-mentioned overdose figures.

“If they arent conservatives, what the fuck are they?”

What they have always been: standard Seattle liberals, who give liberal Democrats 70-plus percent of the vote in every election (80-90-plus when Trump is the Republican opponent). Orwell was correct: failed politicians abuse language when they can’t win honestly. He was describing you.

15

Ann Davison is a lunatic. When Sara Nelson ran for office back in 2017, at the forum I attended she could barely formulate a coherent sentence (maybe it was all of the drugs & mushrooms talking). Alex Pedersen is a NIMBY ringer for the homeowner investment class.

And yet the local Democratic Party leadership decided to put them into power rather than have an abolitionist that wouldn't play ball with the local power elite or reps that would challenge the huge gaps in income-inequality in the city.

This vote is the result.

I hope all of the local VoteBlueNoMatterWho, sh*t-lib Dems are happy. They have no one to blame but themselves...

17

@13 - What would Orwell call someone who uses data from King County to blame local policies for a national trend? I'd call them a piece of shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_drug_overdose_death_rates_and_totals_over_time

Like, wow! Did Seattle City Council go over to West Virginia and implement a bunch of progressive approaches to drug abuse?

https://wvmetronews.com/2021/11/17/west-virginia-among-top-states-with-most-annual-drug-overdose-deaths/#:~:text=Overdose%20deaths%20nationally%20increased%20nearly%2030%20percent%20from,1%2C600%20West%20Virginians%20died%20in%20the%20last%20year.

But, you really care about overdoses - I can tell that you are absolutely filled to the brim with empathy - so you want to jail people to prevent them from overdosing. Let me see. What could possibly be wrong about that?

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/15/1015447281/overdose-deaths-state-prisons-increase

Wow, look at the graph on that page! Basically the same slope as the graph you linked to from King County. But I thought that a graph going up meant that the policy was bad. Oh fuck, does this mean that jail is bad?!

Why do you have to misrepresent the data to make your case? Why do you leave out the important context? No jurisdiction in the US significantly defunded their police and invested in services. So you have no idea what the result of those policies would be. We know what the outcome of the war on drugs was, though. You're looking at it. So, now you've won. Crime will go up, overdoses will go up, homelessness will go up. And you will still cry like a little baby that it's the woke Seattle libs fault, because you are full of shit.

18

"the Council’s conservatives"

I can't even.

19

We’ve literally spent billions on “solving” homelessness, and most of that homelessness is caused by addiction. There is plenty of money. Just tell Lewis to stop the preposterous spending on “tiny homes” and redirect a ton of that misspent housing money to mandatory addiction treatment in jails. And you’ll do more to solve homelessness in a year then billions spent in the last 10.

21

@15 well let's look back at who they were running against to see what happened. Petersen ran against Shaun Scott, Nelson against Nikkita Oliver and of course Davison against NKT. All three of them were police abolitionists who thought the whole justice system should be scrapped by closing prisons and using restorative justice. They demonized home and business owners while endorsing the rights of homeless people to steal and destroy the environment. They were proponents of drug use and wanted the city to set up and fund injection sites. In short they were the darlings of the activists in the city but it isn't the activists who have to live with the trail of destruction these polices cause everywhere they are tried. Don't blame the Dem Party for putting them into office, it was the voters who looked at the two choices and decided they wanted no part of the vision put forth by Scott, Oliver and NKT.

25

@17: Glad to see you’ve discovered (at least in part) America’s opiate-addiction crisis. While you’re about ten years behind reporting actual news, perhaps you could succeed where so many of us other commenters have failed, and get the Stranger’s headline posters to admit a nationwide opiate addiction exists, and that it’s been driving Seattle’s Homelessness Crisis? That would really help Seattle’s civic dialog on this issue.

“Wow, look at the graph on that page! Basically the same slope as the graph you linked to from King County. But I thought that a graph going up meant that the policy was bad. Oh fuck, does this mean that jail is bad?!”

No, it means that jail is not some magical solution to addiction. (Luckily, no one here has pretended that it is.) It also suggests that putting addicts in jail will not “…increase drug use quantity and overdoses, resulting in more deaths,” contrary to what @7 wrote.

“Crime will go up, overdoses will go up, homelessness will go up.”

Um, as just mentioned, that’s the exact opposite of what the data you cited shows. Why do you have to contradict the data to make your case?

“But, you really care about overdoses - I can tell that you are absolutely filled to the brim with empathy - so you want to jail people to prevent them from overdosing.”

Jailing homeless addicts will prevent them from assaulting and robbing everyone around them to get drug money. But your own vast empathy simply doesn’t extend to the victims of these crimes. They’ll just have to keep taking the beatings, robberies, gun violence, loss of local shops the rampant theft, etc., until you Solve Homelessness and Solve Addiction with your completely-untried defund policy. Yeah, good luck with that.

26

"The homeless addict population gives our town a bit of a cool 'edge' "

All too often, that edge is a shiv between the ribs. Still cool?

28

@15. “Your revolution is over. Condolences. The bums lost.”


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