“If only we had more money… “
On December 23rd, the City of San Francisco brought their “plan” for Emergency Response to the drug crisis in the Tenderloin to the County Board of Supervisors for concurrence. The plan involves giving the city permission to unilaterally expend unbudgeted tax dollars for support services with the caveat that not a single nickel will be allowed to flow towards the Police Department.
This “special meeting'' runs some 10+ hours, and I’ve been slowly working through the archived video because what SF is experiencing is mirrored on the streets of Santa Cruz. I have to say, it’s a bit frustrating hearing the diatribe from the progressives that sit on that County Board. Endless banter about how addicts aren’t criminals, they’re just “sick.”
Fact is- users of hard drugs, controlled substances, are enslaved by their addictions. They are beyond any measure of self control. They live in an endless cycle of Buy drugs-Use Drugs-Commit crimes to acquire more drugs. They justify their anti-social behaviors by placing their needs above everyone else's. Progressive ideology enables that self justification, and through policy have abandoned both businesses and citizens alike.
In those rare instances when an addict decides they need help, that help must come immediately, for that window of willingness is extremely small. Immediate help, even with the billions of dollars expended towards this effort, simply does not exist. It was the intent of Proposition 47 to lessen the offense of possessing controlled substances so that the courts could intervene on behalf of the enslaved addict and offer them the choice of rehab or local incarceration. This includes the addicts’ frequent arrests for crimes committed to acquire controlled substances. That isn’t happening, and I don’t know why.
So- let’s look for a minute about that claim- "is addiction a sickness," and should a sickness be punished?
Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that addiction to hard drugs is a sickness. If so, then I agree that addicts should seek help on a voluntary basis. But the sickness they choose to live with does not give them the right to commit crimes to support their addiction. It does not give them the right to take over city parks or open spaces. It doesn’t give them the right to defecate on the street, or vandalise a business, or throw used syringes on the ground. Those aren’t acts of sickness, they’re criminal acts.
If the progressives, who currently seem to be running both the jails and the courts in California (the County of Santa Cruz for sure) don’t feel it’s compassionate to prosecute drug users for possession, they should be prosecuting people for robbery, burglary, and theft. If they don’t, then they have in effect changed state laws without a vote by the people. That’s a recipe for creating a lawless shithole, and that is what’s occurring on the streets of the Tenderloin, and in the City of Santa Cruz.
One complaint I’m hearing espoused during this SF Board of Supervisors meeting is that their courts have a four month backlog, so prosecuting “sick people” in a timely manner is unrealistic, and should therefore not constitute a criminal act. I would counter that the reason the courts are backlogged is due directly to not prosecuting offenders. Rather than trying one case for a single offender, they kick the can down the road allowing this single offender to accumulate dozens of criminal cases. In the end- the addict is allowed to continue to ingest poisonous chemicals paid for through criminal acts.
To date, the only response to the drug epidemic by progressives has been to establish service providers on an industrial scale who are so caught up in their own sense of themselves, that they don’t have either the ability or the opportunity to respond to the needs of those that they are committed to help. They even present each other with awards, not for having any measurable impact in anyone's lives, but based largely on the level of compassion they display during zoom meetings.
We all make choices in life: to use drugs or not, to delife a child’s playground or not, to be a better person or not… It’s also a choice to be genuine or not. Progressives have made a conscious ideological choice to be disingenuous, and it's literally killing those they claim to care the most about. Their answer always seems to be “if only we had more money… if we only had more support services... ”
~Big Joe 77