How backwards we can be

From a scientific, public health, and public policy perspective, needle exchange programs aren’t even controversial. They save lives, reduce disease, and don’t result in increased drug abuse.

Yet politically, there are still flat-earthers out there somehow concerned about the message sent by saving people’s lives.

Indiana begins needle exchange in county with outbreak

Scott County’s needle-exchange program was created through an emergency executive order signed by Republican Gov. Mike Pence in an attempt to curb the state’s largest-ever HIV outbreak. Pence’s 30-day order temporarily suspended Indiana’s ban on such programs, but only for the southeastern Indiana county that’s about 30 miles north of Louisville, Kentucky.

“While (Pence) has been clear that he does not support needle exchange as anti-drug policy on an ongoing basis, he’s been equally clear about his concern over this outbreak, and has taken a critical step to end this outbreak by allowing this needle exchange to occur,” said State Health Commissioner Jerome Adams, the News and Tribune reported.

That is an incredible disconnect. They understand that it is absolutely essential to public health, yet they don’t support it and will only allow it on a limited basis in one county.

[Thanks, Sanho]
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31 Responses to How backwards we can be

  1. divadab says:

    Ya the only strategy these prohibitionists understand is punishment. The “War on (some) Drugs” has entrenched this view – the addict is the enemy to be beaten. And so that’s what they do – beat, humiliate, exclude, and torture the poor buggers. And then the cruel bastards tell their sick victims it’s their own fault!

    It’s a sadistic policy. Even if it worked it would be wrong – but prohibition and punishment don’t work, have never worked, and will never work – except to corrupt our body politic, diminish respect for the law, and make the police into an occupying army in the population they are supposed to be serving and protecting.

    Prohibitionists are enforcing a counter-productive policy that makes criminals of the sick and broken. Terrible and wrong.

    • darkcycle says:

      You nailed it, Diva.

    • DdC says:

      Ya the only strategy these prohibitionists understand is punishment.

      Ya the only strategy these prohibitionists understand is profits.

      “Punishment” is only one of many tools. It is a large umbrella for subhuman levels of profiteering. Mandatory sentencing, mandatory rehabilitation, pisstasting and probation. Bloated copshop budgets and forfeitured homes, foster care slave labor, prison slave labor or underground labor. Court cost, stenographer tipping permitted. The main reason is the oldest profession, prostitution. Selling their bodies to multi national corporations preserving, artificially sweetening and genetically modifying frankenfud. Fossil fools chemical clothing, lumber and plastic along with the pollution creating more jobs in the health care field and profits for the fat pharms. Its just a frickin business selling a product called prohibition. In this particular case its drugs, predominantly cannabis with the cornerstone being Hemp. Un-Illegalize cannabis and the drug worriers scamper. Perpetuating the war is the goal, not winning or losing or partial prohibition “legalizing” lawyer employment. It’s a safe staple capable of solving problems without money or investors. Let it Be.

      Poverty can lower your IQ,
      Almost All Rural Whites are In Poverty
      Almost All Rural Whites are Rush Dildo’s & Fauxwashers
      Almost All Rural Whites are prohibition groupies.
      http://endingcannabisprohibition.yuku.com/topic/1881

      Pope calls for more killing. There goeth the poor liberals…
      http://endingcannabisprohibition.yuku.com/topic/1738

      So to preserve the sanctity of Corps profit we are denied a useful plant in the name of saveding the chilruns. Selling similac and legal crack for add. Shut down clinics, ban prenatal care or drive mothers out of state to quasi legally buy remedy.

      The Common Link Between Breast Milk, Cannabis and Tea
      They all nourish a key system in the human body.
      http://www.alternet.org/drugs/common-link-between-breast-milk-cannabis-and-tea
      The ability and the desire to suckle are essential for an infant’s development. According to the European Journal of Pharmacology, the cannabinoids found in breast milk activate the CB1 receptor. This activates the oral-motor musculature, which is imperative for suckling. It is also believed that these cannabinoids promote an infant’s desire to eat, much like an adult cannabis user gets the munchies.

      Thousands of years we used this plant.
      Now we depend on government to save us from Liberty and Justice.

      Prenatal Marijuana Exposure and Neonatal Outcomes in Jamaica:
      An Ethnographic Study
      http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/medical/can-babies.htm

      While abstinence is potentially risking Chronic endoCannabinoid Deficiency. Larger Fear centers, less focus, dumbing down addiction to being told or fake choices of rocks or hard places. Herded into pastures doing time with or without bars on the windows.
      http://blog.norml.org/2010/03/23/fox-news-are-you-cannabis-deficient/

      “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
      — Thomas Jefferson, 1823

  2. Crut says:

    The “fear of the message” mentality is a big part of what is left of the resistance to ending the drug war.

    When encountering the idea of “softening” drug laws, only a fear-based mind jumps directly from “stop arresting people” to “endorsing drug use”. They see those two ideas as inseparable, and don’t see the wide chasm between them.

    The lingering puritanical moral fear that smothers rational thought still exists in the minds of those who wish to control.

  3. joe minella says:

    Users of illegal substances are a minority. Minorities are always marginalized and demonized, and worse. Even in the “land of the free”. Book: “Drug Warriors and Their Prey” by Richard Lawrence Miller, 1996 Praeger.

  4. Servetus says:

    The temporary nature of the needle exchange program is the tipoff. As an avowed evangelical Christian, GOP Governor Mike Pence would prefer to ignore disease transmissions by needles and other vectors while letting the sinners die, as Ronnie Reagan did at the outbreak of AIDS. Yet, because we have the Internet, he’s forced to act to avoid blame by other governors and political leaders for aggravating a very expensive pandemic.

    As long as the HIV rates remained stable, Mike Pence didn’t see it as a problem. Once disease levels return to normal, the needle program will stop. Pence will expect addicts and other moral transgressors in Indiana to go back to dying in small numbers as usual, minus all the whining and nit-picking that goes with it, of course. Sinners have no business complaining in Mike Pence’s moral universe.

  5. This is a reference to an article that may at first glance seem off topic, but it’s not. Please read the whole article, its excellent.

    “The Greatest Threat From Cannabis Lies in its Illegality” http://tinyurl.com/pnh9bfa

    “It would be nice to think that the policy makers who added cannabis to Canada’s schedule of prohibited substances in 1923 would have at least thumbed through the seven volumes of the Hemp Drugs Commission report, but the truth is that no one really knows why cannabis was prohibited.” …

    “Here in Canada, there persists a prohibition on rationality — at least on the government benches. The Prime Minister and his parliamentary hand puppets lambaste reformers for “wanting to sell cannabis in corner stores,” relieving his MPs of defending a discredited policy and ginning up the fear-mongering machine so beloved by social conservatives here and in the United States. When you’re committed to a fraud, perpetuation is the path of least resistance.”

    That very problem plagues us here. Prohibition itself is a fraud. It does not stop drugs – it promotes them. It promotes crime, black markets, imprisonment and death.

    A temporary reprieve was created through an emergency executive order signed by Republican Gov. Mike Pence. This in itself is proof that as a society we have committed ourselves to a political fraud of such great expanse to have become numb to the horror we have awarely created. If needle exchange saves lives, making it temporary is intentional murder by politician.

    The Illegality of drugs in the current system helps no one but those who make a living from the business of promoting death by prohibition.

  6. claygooding says:

    The worse it gets the more like the Spanish Inquisition prohibition gets,,which I suppose the SI was a prohibition,,you were saved to death if your beliefs disagreed with the Church’s doctrine and many times just for being Jewish or Muslim.
    We have progressed in most countries not to be killing the disbelievers but even that is occurring a lot more than it should be,,over mostly natures drugs.
    If the world continues the game it will be time for anarchy when the grid goes down because the DEA spent the last million dollars in the bank busting an infirmary.

  7. nick says:

    Drug addicts. A group of people you can beat on, violate, throw in prison, and treat like absolute shit whether you’re a doctor or anyone, and nobody cares. It’s a good thing there are some of us who do care. I hope the Governor sees the value in a program like this before it’s limited time only offer ends.

    In my state, Ohio, opiate addiction is at it’s “highest” according to the media, law enforcement, etc, yet they recently put new rules into effect that makes it more expensive and over all more difficult and frustrating to get in to see a Sub doctor. Thanks Ohio Medical Board, you’re saints.

    • Trish says:

      I have to wonder how many people would self-identify as “addicts” if doing this did not offer a chance to have less severe punishment – rehab instead of jail, no criminal record to follow them on all job applications, no “drug conviction” to make student aid unavailable…

      On top of that, people suffering chronic pain are completely left out of the equation. Why on earth should law enforcement have *ANY* say on what treatment a doctor prescribes for a patient?

  8. Duncan20903 says:

    .
    .

    I kind of like the statistic that in 1996 there were 67,115 Californians in “treatment” for heroin addiction. By 2013 that number was down to 31,440.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20130501052354/http://wwwdasis.samhsa.gov/webt/quicklink/ca96.htm
    http://wwwdasis.samhsa.gov/webt/quicklink/CA13.htm

    Gosh I miss those in “treatment” statistics. It’s been a couple of years since SAMHSA deleted most of them but I guess that they’re embarrassed when people realize that ever since the CUA was implemented that California is either at or very near the top State in mitigating its addiction problem. It’s even more salient when we take Prop 36 (2000) into account.

    California Proposition 36 (2000)
    California Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000, was an initiative statute that permanently changed state law to allow qualifying defendants convicted of non-violent drug possession offenses to receive a probationary sentence in lieu of incarceration. As a condition of probation defendants are required to participate in and complete a licensed and/or certified community drug treatment program.
    /snip/

    Shouldn’t it have been safe to presume that Prop 36 (2000) would have increased the numbers of California in “treatment” for the popular substances of the Federal and State’s naughty lists?

  9. Servetus says:

    PROHIBITCH ALERT: Drug enforcers attack Hungary.

    Hungarian school children are being invaded by roving bands of Scientologists pushing Scientology’s drug prevention programs in Hungary’s classrooms. Hungarians suspect the Scientologists use the drug program to assimilate Hungarian school children into the cult.

    The wary Hungarians are absolutely correct. Scientologists are an American export item designed to spread the drug war. They seek world domination, and they want your daughter.

    Meanwhile, Governor Pence and Indiana aren’t up to Hungary’s standards of drug prevention and harm reduction. At least Budapest had a working needle and syringe program until its second center was forced to close due to budget cuts and a hostile municipal council.

    When the program ended, we warned the public that this would result in an escalation of the problem, because the clients wouldn’t disappear – they would re-use needles, or attempt to access services in other parts of the town, where there is no capacity to take on new clients.

    Rational choice theory and game theory don’t operate to explain the realm of prohibition. Prohibition is its own reality. Facts obviously don’t mean anything to prohibidiots such as Goobernover Mike Pence. He believes everything he thinks, including the stuff emanating from his reptilian brain center.

  10. Duncan20903 says:

    Can You Fight Marijuana Laws with RICO Suits?
    April 6, 2015

    Colorado has been the subject of multiple lawsuits in recent months, all of them challenging the state’s first-in-the-nation tax and regulatory system for adult-use marijuana. Most of these suits are grounded in the argument that Colorado’s regulatory system is preempted by the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). As I have argued elsewhere and as David Ball has argued on this website, this argument is without merit. It is clear that Colorado has the power to repeal its marijuana prohibitions; the federal government may not require the states to enforce the Controlled Substances Act, to pass parallel legislation, to enforce their existing prohibitions or to maintain those prohibitions on the books. Given that the state could legalize all marijuana conduct, it seems clear that it may, as it has done, choose to authorize only a limited, regulated marijuana market. The greater power should certainly include the lesser.
    /snip/
    ————————————————————————————————————————————

    JURIST Guest Columnist Sam Kamin of University of Denver Sturm College of Law evaluates the success of the marijuana suits brought by private businesses in recent months and argues that possible RICO suits will face obstacles due to the difficulty of showing actual damages from marijuana businesses…

  11. Windy says:

    OT but important.
    http://www.safershirts.org/2015/04/know-your-grower-wa-dr-gil-mobley-says.html

    Along with the legalization of recreational marijuana in Washington came reassurances that the products offered to the public for consumption would be lab tested for safety and consistency.

    A recent study by a Washington state physician that is documented by Seattle Times reporter Evan Bush shows this is far from the case. The doctor says, “The public is being lied to about the state marijuana being properly tested for safety. It is not!”

    Two weeks ago emergency trauma physician Gil Mobley, MD, purchased seven various marijuana products from two different stores in the Seattle area licensed by the state to sell recreational marijuana. The samples were delivered to five different Seattle area marijuana testing labs and one in Portland to undergo an extensive battery of tests.

    “I was shocked at the results as every citizen from the state should be, especially those who have been misled into believing that they are consuming safe and quality tested
    cannabis products. Anything coming out of these stores should be considered unsafe until proven otherwise, and industry is years away from that goal.”

    Specifically, the study showed an alarming fivefold variance in the amount of psychoactive THC between the state approved labs performing the testing on the same product. That is a 500% difference.

    • DdC says:

      Problem solved… 15 years ago…

      Santa Cruz Legalizes Cannabis if its Organic! – 03/30/00

      A result of Incremental Illness,
      letting liars who profit write policy.

      gugle: Dr. Gil Mobley
      Doc protests health officials’ handling of Ebola threat
      Dr. Gil Mobley on why the CDC is ‘lying’ about Ebola
      Dr. Gil Mobley | Fox News Insider
      CDC Is Lying – Fox News Insider

      Dr. Gilbert L Mobley MD – Vitals

      State of Washington v. James Barber Sr. case # 42669-2-II
      i.e. they can’t render services for the corporation.. because they are not a shareholder..

      That’s why I pointed out Doctor gil mobley as an example, he has the proper licensing for his mmj medical clinic.. P.S. which stands for Professional Services Corp.

      THCF is not a Professional Services Corp.. which is a mandate of Washington state in the medical professions arena..

      Don’t learn the hard way..

      Professionals, more of a problem, than solution?
      ☛ Only 13% of the medical schools surveyed
      mention the endocannabinoid science to our future doctors.
      ☛ California Cops Are Trained ‘Marijuana Is Not A Medicine’
      ☛ The political repression of the scientific study of cannabis.

  12. Frank W. says:

    The article doesn’t mention Mobley’s connection with Fox News.

  13. DdC says:

    How bassawkwards we can be…

    Jack Herer – Emperor Of Hemp
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDRP7rv8ZXc
    This documentary chronicles the life of Jack Herer and his struggle for awareness and enlightenment of cannabis sativa, a.k.a. marijuana or hemp. His research into this plant culminates in his writing The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Official Hemp Bible. He has dedicated his life to educating people about the history and many utilizations of hemp, the conspiracy against it, and ending marijuana prohibition.

    Jack Herer
    http://endingcannabisprohibition.yuku.com/topic/736

    via @PopResistance
    Colorado Will Release All Marijuana Prisoners & Expunge Their Records

    Tax free, until the Government distributes restitution for inflated Ganja prices over the past 4 decades. Due entirely by their own racketeering prohibition. Compensation for the false imprisonment, forced rehabilitation, forfeitures, confiscaations, assault, traumatized and denied medications. Deaths, job loss, driving suspended, piss tests and evictions. Un-Illegalize it back to where it once belonged!

    nixon lied. end of story. Un-Illegalize It!

    Yet the PC still barter with reality.
    Job fucking security,
    4 more decades of appeasing?
    More pacifying and placating liars.
    Acceding to their demands.

    Pot lobby turns its back on ‘Cheech & Chong’

  14. Servetus says:

    Tennessee has introduced a medical marijuana bill in its state legislature. That’s the good news.

    The bad news is that Tennessee’s proposed changes in its marijuana laws demonstrates the kind of extremist, control-freak mentality one would expect of a bill having been introduced by Republicans. The bill’s utter contempt of anyone requiring medical marijuana mimics the ill treatment of addicts and illicit drug consumers in general.

    For example, Tennnessee wants to persecute medical marijuana patients by taking away their driving privileges once they’re issued an ID card. The driving prohibition section starts at the bottom of page 12 of the bill. No such driving restriction exists for Tennessee consumers of Big Pharma products, nor of traditional opiates like codeine.

    The mandated method of cannabinoid ingestion is vaping, oils and transdermal patches. No smoking, even if one is also a cigarette smoker. No personal cultivation is allowed. Use in set and setting are tightly regulated. Those wanting to start a dispensary are hamstrung by a non-refundable $50,000 application fee, and a required performance bond of $5 million.

    It’s unlikely Tennessee’s medical marijuana bill will be accepted by those who need access to cannabinoid medications. Instead, the bill appears to be a kind of symbolic appeasement for a majority of voters who are expected to have faith that Tennessee politicians are genuinely concerned about creating a viable medical marijuana program.

    With marijuana and the drug war being such a huge political issue foreshadowing the presidential campaign, we can expect to see more of this kind of trash politics prior to the 2016 election. Beware of politicians bearing gifts.

    • Frank W. says:

      Rand Paul just “announced”, let’s see him put his mouth where the money is. Like Obama he’s going to be a big back-pedalling sellout.

      • Duncan20903 says:

        .
        .

        Now don’t go out on a limb when making predictions Frank. Predicting that a politician is going to backpeddle on his stated beliefs in his campaign platform is just slightly less safe to presume than a prediction asserting that the sun will rise in the eastern sky in the morning and then set in the west in the evening.

        Regardless of that it wasn’t that long ago when a main stream politician would never have backpeddled on a comparable plank in his campaign platform. That was only true because he never would have included anything even remotely similar in his campaign platform in the first place.

        Do you recall when the Oregon Legislature voted to re-criminalize cannabis in 1997 and Governor Kitzhaber signed that stillborn law? Governor Kitzhaber acknowledged that he signed that law because he didn’t want people to think that he was “soft” on crime. Of course the 1998 veto referendum which kicked that law to the curb by a margin of 66.5%-33.5% indicated that he should have been more concerned with being perceived as soft in the head instead of soft on crime.
        http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Oregon_Ballot_Measure_57,_Possession_of_Marijuana_a_Class_C_Misdemeanor_%281998%29

  15. It wasn’t the NSA that started the mass surveillance in America. It was the DEA. The NSA got the idea from them. Now we are getting down to the source of it all. – The Drug War. http://tinyurl.com/nyrvcks

    • Servetus says:

      The DEA is the front man for everything subversive and despicable the government wants to do. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of corruption.

      • Duncan20903 says:

        .
        .

        Oh man, the Swiss Army Knife of corruption! Now that’s just plain funny!

        Two thumbs up with a swirl for Servetus!

  16. darkcycle says:

    Wow. From the I love living where I live file.
    Bellingham gets it’s first Vapor Lounge, and it looks like a nice place to visit:
    http://www.peopleoftheleaf.me

    What say we check it out Divadab and Windy?

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