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  1. #1

    Seattle opening "Safe Injection Facility" For Heroin*Addicts, first in US

    What will it do to the neighborhood it's in? I'm sure it's not next to Bill Gate's house.

    I waffle between getting mad at substance abusers for not having the strength to be responsible and pitying them.








    https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghoray...Bpz#.ejVJmee3V

    Seattle and King County, Washington will be the first places in the US to build so-called safe injection facilities for heroin users, Seattle mayor Ed Murray announced Friday, an effort to reduce an epidemic of deadly drug overdoses.
    Long controversial, the facilities provide anyone who walks in with access to clean needles and space to inject drugs. Nurses are on hand monitoring the users, and, if an overdose occurs, can administer the reviving medication naloxone. The facilities also provide testing for HIV and hepatitis, as well as medical services.
    “Like many places across our nation, Seattle and King County are experiencing an epidemic of heroin and prescription opiate use unlike any we’ve seen before,” Murray said in a statement. “Keeping people alive gives them the opportunity to get treatment and begin their path to recovery.”
    Fears that the facilities, long established in Europe and Canada, amount to condoning illegal drug use have until now stymied their use in the US. Vancouver’s Insite facility, the first safe injection space in North America, has been visited nearly 3.5 million times since it opened in 2003. Nurses have intervened in nearly 5,000 overdoses, and no one has died.
    “The goal is to prevent overdose deaths,” Jay Unick, medical epidemiologist at the University of Maryland, told BuzzFeed News. “There is overwhelming evidence that safe injection facilities do that.”

    Richard Chenery injects heroin he bought on the street at the Insite safe injection clinic in Vancouver, B.C. Darryl Dyck / AP
    On Friday, the King County Executive, Dow Constantine, and Murray announced that they were directing Seattle/King County Public Health to set up two sites, though they have yet to announce specific locations or funding sources.
    The announcement comes as many US cities grapple with how to fight the a crippling heroin overdose epidemic raging across the country. More than 33,000 people died in 2015 due to misuse of opioids, the highest number ever recorded. Heroin use has more than quadrupled since 2010.
    Heroin deaths spiked by 58% in Seattle in 2014.
    “The reality is people are using drugs, and it should be our mandate to keep people alive and make sure that they can reduce the harms associated with drug use as much as possible,” Alyssa Aguilera, executive director of advocacy group VOCAL NY.

    A registered nurse holds a tray of supplies to be used by a drug user at the Insite safe injection clinic in Vancouver. Darryl Dyck / AP
    The political resistance to opening up safe injection sites are similar to fights against setting up needle exchanges in the 1980’s, Unick said.
    “There were no needle exchanges until HIV came around,” Unick said. “And then HIV presented a public health emergency that needed to be addressed, and clean needles were the solution.”
    As governor of Indiana in 2015, Vice president Mike Pence drew sharp criticism from public health experts after refusing to set up a needle exchange, even as an outbreak of HIV due to injection drug use spread rapidly in his state. Eventually, he put it an order allowing it to be used for harm reduction during a public health emergency.
    New York City, which currently has 14 needle exchanges scattered across the city, is also considering building a supervised injection facility, although right now the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is just at the very beginning stages studying “the clinical, legal, and safety issues associated with SIFs,” spokesman Christopher Miller told BuzzFeed News.
    In March of last year, the mayor of Ithaca, Svante Myrick, also announced his support for a safe injection space in the city, though no concrete plans are yet underway.
    After the mayor’s announcement, a Cornell University law professor, William A. Jacobson, said a safe injection space in the city would be tantamount to “government-run heroin shooting gallery.”
    For Gwen Wilkerson, who prosecuted cases in the war on drugs as Ithaca’s district attorney for 25 years, the topic is personal: her son is in recovery from a serious heroin addiction.
    “When I first heard about SIFs, I said you’re out of your goddamned mind,” Wilkerson told BuzzFeed News. “But the more I read the more I am convinced that the SIF is the best avenue to reaching those people whose disease is so intractable that they have not been able to get help any other way.”
    .

    "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."

    -- Capt. Copeland

  2. #2
    The Insane Acidbaron's Avatar
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    This has been done in other nations and the result is good, it means less needles around, cleaner areas, less diseased people (what meant if you had any social security system worth mentioning less strain on society)

    It also reduced the number of addicts in the long run, i think The netherlands and Portugal got some impressive programs with equally impressive results.

    Addiction is a disease and not a crime and it should be treated not punished.

  3. #3
    From a public health perspective, this is probably a good idea.

    From a cultural commentary standpoint, this looks obviously insane and is a depressing commentary on the state of society.

  4. #4
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Hubcap View Post
    What will it do to the neighborhood it's in? I'm sure it's not next to Bill Gate's house.
    It will clean up the neighborhood. That program worked greatly in Portugal (first country that implemented it) to the point that is being copied in other countries. It even reduced the number of drug addicts.

  5. #5
    You'd be amazed at what offering help vs scorn does.

  6. #6
    The Lightbringer serenka's Avatar
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    offering them help and a safe space to do it is a lot better than letting them shoot up in a park or something.
    dragonmaw - EU

  7. #7
    Seems humane and overall better than allowing for unchecked, unsafe and dangerous addiction habits.

    The goal should be some rehabilitation, however. I ma fairly anti-drug abuse but the approach of America's 'war on drugs' has been largely disastrous. Moving toward other methods that treat the disease and cultural problems that lead to massive drug use as in America should be the focus. Rather than just allowing unchecked public health issues go by because addicts are often shitty people and poor.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Fencers View Post
    Seems humane and overall better than allowing for unchecked, unsafe and dangerous addiction habits.

    The goal should be some rehabilitation, however. I ma fairly anti-drug abuse but the approach of America's 'war on drugs' has been largely disastrous. Moving toward other methods that treat the disease and cultural problems that lead to massive drug use as in America should be the focus. Rather than just allowing unchecked public health issues go by because addicts are often shitty people and poor.
    Yeah I think a lot of people's kneejerk response is that this equates to permissiveness and I don't think that's necessarily the case. You can still be harsh with dealers while not treating addicts as criminals. All the evidence available seems to show that this is a good idea, reducing the demand side of the equation, which is something the US hasn't been all that great at addressing.
    While you live, shine / Have no grief at all / Life exists only for a short while / And time demands its toll.

  9. #9
    The Insane Acidbaron's Avatar
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    People need to learn the difference between legalization of drug use and decriminalizing drug use.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Acidbaron View Post
    People need to learn the difference between legalization of drug use and decriminalizing drug use.
    The difference is semantics.

  11. #11
    The Insane Acidbaron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by darklady View Post
    The difference is semantics.
    Something can be illegal and not a crime, but that might be a subject beyond your limits of understanding.

  12. #12
    When people argue for drugs staying illegal and not taking measures to help users, all I can imagine is someone bashing their head against the wall while saying, "I'm sure it will fall down eventually".

    I'm not sure what more evidence can be presented that making drugs illegal and throwing users in prison doesn't work.

  13. #13
    I'm ok with the safe space, because it keeps society safer. People are going to do what they want, and this does keep more heroin addicts out of parks and the streets when they, inevitably, lose everything. It also makes the clean up job more efficient when they, inevitably, die of an overdose. But I think the help should end there. Like I said, people are going to do what they want, and I don't agree that addiction is a disease. I'll change my mind when any drug abuser shows me the crystal ball that predicted they wouldn't end up like any other addict when they first chose to use. They knew what they were getting into.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Acidbaron View Post
    Something can be illegal and not a crime, but that might be a subject beyond your limits of understanding.
    I'm not an enabler. Clearly you are.

  14. #14
    The Insane Acidbaron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by darklady View Post
    I'm ok with the safe space, because it's keep society safer. People are gonna do what they want, and this does keep more heroin addicts out of parks and the streets when they, inevitably, lose everything. It also makes the clean up job more efficient when they, inevitably, die of an overdose. But I think the help should end there. Like I said, people are gonna do what they want, and I don't agree that addiction is a disease. I'll change my mind when any drug abuser shows me the crystal ball that predicted they wouldn't end up like any other addict when they first chose to use. They knew what they were getting into.

    - - - Updated - - -



    I'm not an enabler. Clearly you are.
    As world strange as you are, these programs reduce drug use as pointed out and death isn't the outcome it prevents it. Addiction is a disease, how one becomes addicted is not important as we are no longer speaking of prevention but rehabilitation.

    This type of intolerance is what causes drug abuse to become a rampant problem to begin with, as you act like an ostrich assuming it would go away. It's never your kind their problem until it has an impact on your living space, the irony is if you react with these type of programs beforehand you never have to be exposed to it and can remain in your own bubble

    Statments like "they got themselves into it" tell me that you don't even know what addiction is. Which is why i'll end this conversation on my end with you here since your opinion on this carries as little weight as it possibly can.

    ps: your ideology around this is in effect and has failed for several decades in a row, this type of thinking and aid is proving to be working both in short term and long term, so guess it is you as predicted decades ago was in the wrong with their moral war on drugs.

  15. #15
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by darklady View Post
    The difference is semantics.
    Do explain how the difference is semantics when the success of this type of programs contradicts it.

    http://www.medicaldaily.com/portugal...g-drugs-382598
    Last edited by mmoc516e31a976; 2017-01-29 at 04:05 PM.

  16. #16
    Void Lord Felya's Avatar
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    Why would it be near Bill Gates house? I think the point is to help people, not spite...
    Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
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  17. #17
    Brewmaster Fat Mac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Felya View Post
    Why would it be near Bill Gates house? I think the point is to help people, not spite...
    i have no info to back this up but i think Bill "the Gateway" Gates has been the main supplier of heroin on the west coast

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by Felya View Post
    Why would it be near Bill Gates house? I think the point is to help people, not spite...
    Oftentimes they put places like this in the poor neighborhoods along with homeless shelters, soup kitchens that give out free meals. It means all the street people will go to the poor neighborhoods where the rich will never see them but the poor will.
    .

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  19. #19
    The Lightbringer serenka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hubcap View Post
    Oftentimes they put places like this in the poor neighborhoods along with homeless shelters, soup kitchens that give out free meals. It means all the street people will go to the poor neighborhoods where the rich will never see them but the poor will.
    also the sort of place bill gates lives probably doesnt have that many heroin addicts. Of course they will put it in a location where those that need it can actually access it easily.
    dragonmaw - EU

  20. #20
    Void Lord Felya's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hubcap View Post
    Oftentimes they put places like this in the poor neighborhoods along with homeless shelters, soup kitchens that give out free meals. It means all the street people will go to the poor neighborhoods where the rich will never see them but the poor will.
    That's wierd... are you saying they put things for the poor, in poor neighborhoods? Yeah, I don't get it... why not make the poor and 'street people' travel to Medina...
    Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
    Every damn thing you do in this life, you pay for. - Edith Piaf
    The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - Orwell
    No amount of belief makes something a fact. - James Randi

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