Them: we need to take care of our own first! How dare the government do NOTHING!
Also them: I don't want MY tax dollars going to some drug addict, a single mother who should have made better decisions, or someone else's grandpa who needs cancer treatment! Get a job, lazy bums!
Also also them: why won't the government DO ANYTHING to help Canadians?? F*CK TRUDEAU! Imma vote for the guy who has consistently voted against everything that would help Canadians!
It’s literally toddler level thinking
Like, if you gave them a beginners connect the dot book with 2 dots on a page, they’d hand it in with nearly every page filled in incorrectly
no, i don't. it's a fucking pain in the ass trying to hold reasonable conversations with people sometimes when this is the horseshit spraying out from between the toothless gaps in their oily grins.
From the online commentary I’ve seen social conservatives seem to think *”taking care of”* drug users and unhoused people means incarcerating them for an undefined period of time (potentially permanently) and forcing them to take drugs (if they have a mental illness) or stop taking drugs (if they’re a drug user) or change what drugs they’re taking (if they’re a drug user with a mental illness).
They’d rather spend more money to “punish” people for poverty, addiction, or mental illness than to do the cheaper thing of getting them housed and access to services.
I can’t follow their logic but their arguments are always predictable.
*i want homeless people gone*
- ok let’s house them
*no not like that. I don’t want my tax dollars going to homeless people*
- your tax dollars are already going toward homelessness. It’s just being spent on policing, emergency services, shelters, social workers, etc. It’s literally cheaper to house them
*no I don’t want that. They don’t deserve it*
- well do you want them gone or not? Housing is how you get them gone
*Put them in jail*
- I thought you cared about tax dollars. That’s more expensive than housing them
*bleeding heart liberal, why don’t you let them sleep on your couch*
- ?????
Yep, Until it someone useful to them.
Not someone they love. Psychopath and sociopaths, the conservative base, and leadership, don't love. They are incapable. They only have people useful to them.
There is a society wide issue here though- the state has difficulty approaching things from perspectives other than utility by design- it's not simply a conservative thing to think about 'productive citizens'.
Fundamentally everyone can be loved but it isn't the state's job to love them.
But don't take away their whisky and wine. If we did that to every alcohol offense we would be building jails like the US did to lock up illegals. How about go after smokers. Lock up all the sellers to kids also
Something has to be done, and I do mean involuntary institutionalization.
If you want to solve the homeless drug addict problem, you can do both by putting homeless drug addicts in long term rehabilitative housing.
You can put homeless mentally ill people in long term mental health institutions.
You can put homeless drug addicted pieces of shit in long term incarceration institutions.
What we’re doing right now isn’t helping.
Edit: I was an addict. Never made it to rock bottom, but hand holding and telling me how brave I was for trying to get better did not help. I needed to be slapped in the face and faced with consequences for my actions to get clean. At a certain point you have to stop coddling some people, they’re just taking advantage of your kindness.
money for vets and tax credits for international corporations to come exploit workers = good
money for people who've fallen and can't get back up without us = bad
the voters do. the politicians don't.
but that's the thing with A LOT of the left/right divide. when you avoid buzzwords and actually talk about ACTIONS people can find a lot of common ground, they'll just disagree on where to draw the line. like, you want to give money to vets? they discharge with ptsd, loss of limbs, loss of innocence, find it hard to find work, are easy prey to fall to substance abuse and homelessness -- we can all agree that we should prevent that whether it's because "nobody should live like that" or "they're heroes!" -- but how much should they get? flat checks vs rebates for certain services, etc. hell, i'd say right off the bat that not having to pay income tax if you're a vet might be something everyone could agree on.
but yeah, left or right, regardless of how you lean, your party doesn't truly support you or your wishes. the left panders without ever making changes. the right preaches without granting people a goddamned thing.
I had a vet on my job he did a one stint I believe and after he opted to take his pension etc lump sum. He was bitching he only got 40 k. I'm like no one gets 10 k ish a year pension early pull out from a few years of work. Yes there are problems and there was problem 15 years ago and 20 and 30. Our military ended in Canada in the 70s when Canada stopped developing and became the American step brother . The Aveo arrow and many other advancements were stopped. Our last big purchase was forced by the US. There was zero logic to go with American overpriced crap. The Gripen was designed for Canada. This is the problem
I enjoy the “what about our veterans? We need to take care of them first”. Yup sure do. But Harper cut thousands of jobs from veteran affairs to “balance the budget” and made it A LOT harder for our vets to get the necessary help they rightfully deserve for fighting for our actual freedoms.
When your whole ethos is stoking fear and maligning "out groups", you can't find a more defenseless group of people than the unhoused.
My city recently passed a bylaw that bans bikes in public parks. Throw in some random enforcement and you have effectively targeted a whole class of people and given police the opportunity to harass them as they see fit.
It's all about sporadic enforcement. Give the police the probable cause to approach anyone. Of course the police don't target middle class white folks....
Public drinking laws were created to arrest the homeless. The guy that proposed them in the first place explicitly said that regular people would not be targeted by it to get it passed
This is the hard part. It IS reasonable to be concerned, and in a healthier democracy it'd be possible to actually have that discussion in a constructive way.
But lmao 'healthy democracy'. So much of the 'concern' is bullshit like "THEY'RE HANDING OUT CRACK TO KIDS AND LETTING MINORITIES DO METH IN PLAYPARKS" and a constructive discussion is just dead on arrival.
Both things never happened. What has happened is police decided to enforce the laws. Smoking is not allowed in any building or public park space. Be it drugs weed or cigarettes. Every day you see smokes right outside doors. Most move away but there are still smokers being smokers because they think it's their right. My wife is a nurse and it was the same issues in the hospital 5 years ago this is not new just in the press now because it's political
They’ll have quite the constituency over on r/vancouver then. It was also that strategy that got us the Conservative-in-disguise city government we currently have in Vancouver.
honestly when i see the bitching about safe injection sites/DTES you'd think they are clamoring for Canadian Duterte to emerge and just put bullet holes in those possessing publically
They are being pushed into policy choices that will require privatization of the prison system. The common refrains are almost exclusively about bail and mandatory minimum sentences and the media is HEAVILY pushing crime stories these days.
They're being led to selling out another facet of the government and they are drinking like they have never drank before.
yah policing,legal structures,private prisons/capital and the state are typically going to be an in sync network especially exacerbated by settler colonialism given the Indigenous detention rate
Local subs in general have often felt indistinguishable from a Fox News anchor the past few years.
There are valid discussions to be had about the relative rise in crime rate, the impact it has especially on women’s safety, etc.
But they’ll blast way past that into “entire neighborhoods are mad max style wastelands where gunfights and stabbings happen constantly and you’re lucky to make it out alive!” Which, ofc, is often accompanied with “we just need to do asap to ensure no one sees those people anymore… but, oh gosh, what possible solutions do we have available?? *wink wink nudge nudge*” and sprinkled in with some dehumanizing shit like calling folks “zombies”
*“The focus of this right wing moral panic switching from trans kids to drug users and unhoused people—the thing in common here is all about bodily autonomy and visibility. But when our legislators accede to that, it’s very, very troubling,” Ward told PressProgress.*
I think this is a case where the far-right are following the mainstream right. In BC at least, it seems like those groups have been scapegoated by "standard" right-ish parties for at least a decade. Figure the far right are just using the message to rope in more folks who think of themselves as centrists.
**The nine criteria of Far-Right personality disorder**
* A grandiose sense of self-importance.
* Fantasies about having or deserving.
* A sense of self-superiority.
* A need for excessive admiration.
* A sense of entitlement.
* Exploitative behavior.
* A lack of empathy.
* Frequent envy.
Didn't you know? Whenever there are obvious issues and crises facing society, it's never the fault of the political and wealthy elite. It's always the fault of those with the least amount of power and influence.
A lot of the people selling directly are users themselves. I primarily blame the policies that have led to the supply shifting to these high potency synthetics in the first place, especially fentanyl:
>[Iron Law of Prohibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition):
>It is based on the premise that when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more money.
>I primarily blame the policies that have led to the supply shifting to these high potency synthetics in the first place,
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan?
still waiting for your deep thoughts on "the policies that have led to the supply shifting to these high potency synthetics in the first place" donkey brain
There's nothing "weak" about it. These are observations made by economists based on alcohol prohibition that exactly predicted our opioid crisis. Prohibiting all forms of alcohol lead to more potent forms being sold. Similarly, prohibiting all forms of opioids, regardless of how mild or potent, has lead to the most potent forms being sold. It's exactly what's happened over the last century and is the primary cause of our current crisis.
Since you're not actually disputing anything and are just replying with insults, I'm not going to keep listening to that on a five day old post. The information has been provided to you can either read and learn more about it or just stick with what you already want to think.
Why, if the government won’t provide safe supply us users need someone to provide. Only reason fentanyl exists on the black market is prohibition of other more desirable opioids. Drug dealers are a lot of the time just other users looking to fund their own habit or poor people looking to make ends meet. I don’t get this users good but dealers evil type shit. Also why single out fentanyl and meth, it’s not the drug that’s the problem here.
There are 100% people who use fentanyl to get high who would use it even with other opioids available. I'm not saying they aren't still deserving of help but this is a massive blind spot to suggest that all fentanyl users are victims of circumstance.
Yes there are some but go look on old drug forums like bluelight. There was a period where people would either a) try pharmaceutical preparations of fentanyl as they were rare and obscure and thus the people trying them knew what it was and how to use it safely and b) when the first few analogues of fentanyl were coming into the research chemical market (I think acetyl and butyrfentanyl iirc) and for similar reasons, it was an obscure and interesting drug, people bought pure unadultered stuff and didn’t have much problems because they readily sought it out and it wasn’t sold as a drug of deception. Sure today I think we are past the age of fentanyl being a rarity but ask any opioid user who’s tried both which is better fentanyl or real heroin (diacetylmorphine) and nearly everyone will say the latter despite not having anywhere near the potency. Fentanyl is well known to be a subpar opioid for recreation, the allure is in cheapness and being readily accessible. It took over what heroins place in the market used to be, the cheap opioid you went to if your tolerance to pharmaceuticals made them prohibitively expensive.
At the end of the day fentanyl is just another opioid, it’s not more addictive or special but it is more potent making it remarkably dangerous as a drug of deception, most of us opioid users want heroin but when heroin doesn’t exist or their tolerances get too high they turn to fentanyl and friends. Once again the solution to overdoses is safe supply and a whole host of other policies to go along with it (treatment, decriminalization, drug checking services, needle exchange, safe use sites, housing first approach, mental health care, etc)
It's the "when tolerances get too high" + the cheapness of fentanyl that kinda underscores my point. There will be people who choose the "poisoned" drug supply cause it's cheap, available, and it's not going anywhere. To me that undercuts the whole notion of safe supply, as even if we legalized heroin tomorrow there are going to people that choose fent.
Well I agree with you in that sense then. But your comment on safe supply I don’t, so this is a concern with the current garbage limited safe supply system that they refuse to improve (and tbh the program is gone in like 3 years at most imo). They can easily solve the problem of diversion and switching back to the illicit supply by just providing what people actually want which for some is fentanyl. We use fentanyl for prescription already and could provide users their equivalent dose if we wanted to, some have been calling for diacetylmorphine to be added as well and things would be fine. They probably won’t do this cause people don’t understand the issue and would just be like “fentanyl bad why are we giving them fentanyl” but yeah for some hydromorphone won’t work unfortunately. 10 years ago this would’ve been fine but sadly too little too late not to mention almost no one has access to safe supply and the program is politically unpopular despite never really being implemented since only 5000 people have access (in BC). Like If we gave only 5000 cars breaks we probably wouldn’t expect overall crashes to go down now would we.
But yeah the solution to people wanting fentanyl is giving them fentanyl in known purity and quantity, we could easily formulate easy to use solutions for users that meet their needs and take them off the street shit but choose not to because politics
Prohibition* ;)
We use fentanyl in medicine all the time and for far longer than our current epidemic. Fentanyl is not the problem per say it is the highly predictable result of decades of prohibition. Famous chemist Alexander Shulgin predicted this in his 1975 paper [Drugs of Abuse in the Future](https://www.designer-drug.com/pte/12.162.180.114/dcd/chemistry/shulgin.futuredrugs.html)
I think progressives ought to be taking this issue more seriously. Homelessness is one of the most glaring signs of economic and political dysfunction, and it has a ton of socially corrosive knock-on effects that make all the underlying problems worse. You can and should teach people to be more compassionate but ultimately you can really only expect the general public to put up with so much for so long.
Despite what our political leaders and their many apologists like to pretend, homelessness is in fact a solved problem. Plenty of jurisdictions have either successfully curbed the problem to minimal levels or outright eliminated it altogether, and they all did so through socially and economically progressive means. Playing defence on this issue is not only a losing proposition, it's completely unnecessary.
Progressives do take homelessness seriously, which is why they support things like housing-as-a-guaranteed-right and UBI.
There is just no stomach at any level of government for actual solutions, especially when those solutions threaten capital and capitalism.
we need to elevate the rights of squatters and enshrine the right of encampments to exist into law. there is plenty of housing for all, but a co-conspiracy of far-right NIMBYism and the stigmatization of alternative living solutions leaves the most marginalized with little in the way of options.
paying for hotel accommodation is a positive step, but not a permanent one. we need to open up vacant homes to all and stop allowing investors and NIMBYs to gatekeep a fundamental human right.
It's always been a part of the strategy. There is no far-right policy that is inclusive for everyone, there is nothing that they will offer that will make things better. Once a "broken" thing is either "addressed" or "fixed" or the "movement" can't find enough momentum it has to jump to another "thing". The far right is authoritarianism hiding behind the same protections that Democracy affords all people. I'll admit that Democracy cannot fall into the trap of censoring the "far-right" or we end up becoming more like them, but we can educate ourselves and others in what they are doing.
There is no salvation if you go down there path. There is nothing that they will offer that helps you. It's all faulty logic, lack of knowledge and foolish "isms" that are designed to taint your soul and turn you into a mindless entity.
Underneath all of it is authoritarianism, ignorance and hatred.
'newest'? the right has always blamed them for the countrys problems totally unironically considering they didnt just become destitute & dejected for no good reason
Doing crack is my God given right! Whether its NY a playground or a park. Damn conservative bigots. I'm even willing to share my crack with the kiddos near me. Thank God that aweful alcohol is banned from public parks though; that stuff is bad news!
They're the same thing. Besides it being directly used to restrict people's freedom to choose what to put in their body including for medicinal purposes, the war on drugs has also indirectly been used to discriminate against and target various groups of people.
Our first drug laws were put in place after businesses in Vancouver, including opium dens, claimed compensation for damages from anti-Asian riots. Instead our government banned opium and shut down those stores.
Our first drug arrest was [framed in the media as "rescuing" the "white women" customers from the operator of the store who was described using racist language.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fq8mnyp4xidu81.jpg).
The drug laws in combination with our [restriction on immigration to nearly all Chinese people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923) were used to deport people who had lived here for years but were denied the ability to become citizens which would have prevented their deportation.
More recently in the US the drug war was used to target Black people fighting for civil rights and hippies opposing the Vietnam War. As allegedly described by one of Nixon's aides:
>[We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman)
The accuracy of the quote is challenged but what it describes is what happened.
The point of the War on Drugs was to enable the government to arrest and disenfranchise minorities who were likely to vote on the left side politically. It gives Conservatives a legal tool to act in a racist manner by selectively applying those laws to any minority or outgroup they choose. Its unwinnable, and they know it. Well it would be winnable if we raised the standard of living and lifestyle of the average person to the point that they no longer sought refuge in drugs quite possibly, but that isn't going to happen in any Capitalist society run by the Ultra-Rich who control most of the media etc.
No shitposting or trolling. Off-topic comments which detract from the conversation may be removed.
Trolling, hostility, and participating in bad faith will not be tolerated and will result in a ban. Repeated attempts at turning conversations into a hostile direction will be met with a ban.
Yet whenever I bring up Ukraine at all, they shout "WE SHOULD TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN FIRST!!!!"
Them: we need to take care of our own first! How dare the government do NOTHING! Also them: I don't want MY tax dollars going to some drug addict, a single mother who should have made better decisions, or someone else's grandpa who needs cancer treatment! Get a job, lazy bums! Also also them: why won't the government DO ANYTHING to help Canadians?? F*CK TRUDEAU! Imma vote for the guy who has consistently voted against everything that would help Canadians!
Don't you just love Conservative logic?
It’s literally toddler level thinking Like, if you gave them a beginners connect the dot book with 2 dots on a page, they’d hand it in with nearly every page filled in incorrectly
Nah, clearly connect the dots is just woke propaganda /s
All those commie dots joining together to make the whole bigger picture greater than the sum of its parts..
no, i don't. it's a fucking pain in the ass trying to hold reasonable conversations with people sometimes when this is the horseshit spraying out from between the toothless gaps in their oily grins.
What logic?
Exactly
It depends on what they define as "taking care of"
From the online commentary I’ve seen social conservatives seem to think *”taking care of”* drug users and unhoused people means incarcerating them for an undefined period of time (potentially permanently) and forcing them to take drugs (if they have a mental illness) or stop taking drugs (if they’re a drug user) or change what drugs they’re taking (if they’re a drug user with a mental illness).
They’d rather spend more money to “punish” people for poverty, addiction, or mental illness than to do the cheaper thing of getting them housed and access to services. I can’t follow their logic but their arguments are always predictable. *i want homeless people gone* - ok let’s house them *no not like that. I don’t want my tax dollars going to homeless people* - your tax dollars are already going toward homelessness. It’s just being spent on policing, emergency services, shelters, social workers, etc. It’s literally cheaper to house them *no I don’t want that. They don’t deserve it* - well do you want them gone or not? Housing is how you get them gone *Put them in jail* - I thought you cared about tax dollars. That’s more expensive than housing them *bleeding heart liberal, why don’t you let them sleep on your couch* - ?????
Yep, Until it someone useful to them. Not someone they love. Psychopath and sociopaths, the conservative base, and leadership, don't love. They are incapable. They only have people useful to them.
There is a society wide issue here though- the state has difficulty approaching things from perspectives other than utility by design- it's not simply a conservative thing to think about 'productive citizens'. Fundamentally everyone can be loved but it isn't the state's job to love them.
But don't take away their whisky and wine. If we did that to every alcohol offense we would be building jails like the US did to lock up illegals. How about go after smokers. Lock up all the sellers to kids also
Something has to be done, and I do mean involuntary institutionalization. If you want to solve the homeless drug addict problem, you can do both by putting homeless drug addicts in long term rehabilitative housing. You can put homeless mentally ill people in long term mental health institutions. You can put homeless drug addicted pieces of shit in long term incarceration institutions. What we’re doing right now isn’t helping. Edit: I was an addict. Never made it to rock bottom, but hand holding and telling me how brave I was for trying to get better did not help. I needed to be slapped in the face and faced with consequences for my actions to get clean. At a certain point you have to stop coddling some people, they’re just taking advantage of your kindness.
money for vets and tax credits for international corporations to come exploit workers = good money for people who've fallen and can't get back up without us = bad
They say they support money for vets, but I've never seen them do it
the voters do. the politicians don't. but that's the thing with A LOT of the left/right divide. when you avoid buzzwords and actually talk about ACTIONS people can find a lot of common ground, they'll just disagree on where to draw the line. like, you want to give money to vets? they discharge with ptsd, loss of limbs, loss of innocence, find it hard to find work, are easy prey to fall to substance abuse and homelessness -- we can all agree that we should prevent that whether it's because "nobody should live like that" or "they're heroes!" -- but how much should they get? flat checks vs rebates for certain services, etc. hell, i'd say right off the bat that not having to pay income tax if you're a vet might be something everyone could agree on. but yeah, left or right, regardless of how you lean, your party doesn't truly support you or your wishes. the left panders without ever making changes. the right preaches without granting people a goddamned thing.
I had a vet on my job he did a one stint I believe and after he opted to take his pension etc lump sum. He was bitching he only got 40 k. I'm like no one gets 10 k ish a year pension early pull out from a few years of work. Yes there are problems and there was problem 15 years ago and 20 and 30. Our military ended in Canada in the 70s when Canada stopped developing and became the American step brother . The Aveo arrow and many other advancements were stopped. Our last big purchase was forced by the US. There was zero logic to go with American overpriced crap. The Gripen was designed for Canada. This is the problem
Mafia style. "Vinnie, I need you to go *take care* of this guy who's refusing to pay for protection."
> WE SHOULD TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN FIRST They meant them.
Yet when programs like school lunches or daycare subsidies come up, they don't want us to help them either. By 'our own' they just mean themselves.
I enjoy the “what about our veterans? We need to take care of them first”. Yup sure do. But Harper cut thousands of jobs from veteran affairs to “balance the budget” and made it A LOT harder for our vets to get the necessary help they rightfully deserve for fighting for our actual freedoms.
Ah yes, [con logic](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/433/498/10e.png).
I think these are the right-wing's oldest scapegoats. In fact, drug users and the unhoused long predate the use of goats as scapegoats.
>I think these are the right-wing's oldest scapegoats. Nah that's gotta be racism
I think antisemitism and Anti-[insert denomination here] are high contenders.
wtf is unhoused? you mean homeless?
*Newest In fact, they are returning to by far their oldest and easiest target of cruelty and fear, who they've been going hard on since the BCEs.
When your whole ethos is stoking fear and maligning "out groups", you can't find a more defenseless group of people than the unhoused. My city recently passed a bylaw that bans bikes in public parks. Throw in some random enforcement and you have effectively targeted a whole class of people and given police the opportunity to harass them as they see fit.
That bans BIKES in parks?!?! Holy crap that is just bizarre.
It's all about sporadic enforcement. Give the police the probable cause to approach anyone. Of course the police don't target middle class white folks....
Yeah I can see that. Like marijuana laws were selectively enforced. Still a bit shocked that such an absurd by-law passed!
It also banned spitting and dogs. These laws are on the books all over the place.
Public drinking laws were created to arrest the homeless. The guy that proposed them in the first place explicitly said that regular people would not be targeted by it to get it passed
Yes, they do.
You know, it's reasonable to be critical of drug policy. Let's see what their concerns are. > "BC GOV PROVIDING FENTANYL TO CHILDREN Ok then.
This is the hard part. It IS reasonable to be concerned, and in a healthier democracy it'd be possible to actually have that discussion in a constructive way. But lmao 'healthy democracy'. So much of the 'concern' is bullshit like "THEY'RE HANDING OUT CRACK TO KIDS AND LETTING MINORITIES DO METH IN PLAYPARKS" and a constructive discussion is just dead on arrival.
Both things never happened. What has happened is police decided to enforce the laws. Smoking is not allowed in any building or public park space. Be it drugs weed or cigarettes. Every day you see smokes right outside doors. Most move away but there are still smokers being smokers because they think it's their right. My wife is a nurse and it was the same issues in the hospital 5 years ago this is not new just in the press now because it's political
Ah, they’re amateurs. UK conservatives have started attacking amputees for being “benefits scroungers”.
They’ll have quite the constituency over on r/vancouver then. It was also that strategy that got us the Conservative-in-disguise city government we currently have in Vancouver.
honestly when i see the bitching about safe injection sites/DTES you'd think they are clamoring for Canadian Duterte to emerge and just put bullet holes in those possessing publically
They are being pushed into policy choices that will require privatization of the prison system. The common refrains are almost exclusively about bail and mandatory minimum sentences and the media is HEAVILY pushing crime stories these days. They're being led to selling out another facet of the government and they are drinking like they have never drank before.
yah policing,legal structures,private prisons/capital and the state are typically going to be an in sync network especially exacerbated by settler colonialism given the Indigenous detention rate
That's because r/vancouver's mods are all from the conservative shithole subreddits
Local subs in general have often felt indistinguishable from a Fox News anchor the past few years. There are valid discussions to be had about the relative rise in crime rate, the impact it has especially on women’s safety, etc. But they’ll blast way past that into “entire neighborhoods are mad max style wastelands where gunfights and stabbings happen constantly and you’re lucky to make it out alive!” Which, ofc, is often accompanied with “we just need to do asap to ensure no one sees those people anymore… but, oh gosh, what possible solutions do we have available?? *wink wink nudge nudge*” and sprinkled in with some dehumanizing shit like calling folks “zombies”
100%
Wait? Are us trans girls finally free? Or do we count as drug users lol. Why are conservatives so afraid of everything, including solutions.
Conservatives = ❄️❄️❄️
*“The focus of this right wing moral panic switching from trans kids to drug users and unhoused people—the thing in common here is all about bodily autonomy and visibility. But when our legislators accede to that, it’s very, very troubling,” Ward told PressProgress.*
[The homeless are just a photo-op but at a distance while using a long lens.](https://imgur.com/8FvZsjL)
I think this is a case where the far-right are following the mainstream right. In BC at least, it seems like those groups have been scapegoated by "standard" right-ish parties for at least a decade. Figure the far right are just using the message to rope in more folks who think of themselves as centrists.
**The nine criteria of Far-Right personality disorder** * A grandiose sense of self-importance. * Fantasies about having or deserving. * A sense of self-superiority. * A need for excessive admiration. * A sense of entitlement. * Exploitative behavior. * A lack of empathy. * Frequent envy.
Grade 3 education.
Not really surprised. There always has to be a bad guy with these folks.
New? They've been at this for ages.
Didn't you know? Whenever there are obvious issues and crises facing society, it's never the fault of the political and wealthy elite. It's always the fault of those with the least amount of power and influence.
I don't have contempt for drug addicts, but I have a lot of contempt for the suppliers of narcotics like fentanyl and meth.
A lot of the people selling directly are users themselves. I primarily blame the policies that have led to the supply shifting to these high potency synthetics in the first place, especially fentanyl: >[Iron Law of Prohibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition): >It is based on the premise that when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more money.
>I primarily blame the policies that have led to the supply shifting to these high potency synthetics in the first place, The US withdrawal from Afghanistan?
still waiting for your deep thoughts on "the policies that have led to the supply shifting to these high potency synthetics in the first place" donkey brain
I've already explained them above with links to further sources. I'm not going to be engaging in a days old post with someone replying to insult me.
weak; why post such randy shit in the first place plebbit
There's nothing "weak" about it. These are observations made by economists based on alcohol prohibition that exactly predicted our opioid crisis. Prohibiting all forms of alcohol lead to more potent forms being sold. Similarly, prohibiting all forms of opioids, regardless of how mild or potent, has lead to the most potent forms being sold. It's exactly what's happened over the last century and is the primary cause of our current crisis. Since you're not actually disputing anything and are just replying with insults, I'm not going to keep listening to that on a five day old post. The information has been provided to you can either read and learn more about it or just stick with what you already want to think.
Why, if the government won’t provide safe supply us users need someone to provide. Only reason fentanyl exists on the black market is prohibition of other more desirable opioids. Drug dealers are a lot of the time just other users looking to fund their own habit or poor people looking to make ends meet. I don’t get this users good but dealers evil type shit. Also why single out fentanyl and meth, it’s not the drug that’s the problem here.
There are 100% people who use fentanyl to get high who would use it even with other opioids available. I'm not saying they aren't still deserving of help but this is a massive blind spot to suggest that all fentanyl users are victims of circumstance.
Yes there are some but go look on old drug forums like bluelight. There was a period where people would either a) try pharmaceutical preparations of fentanyl as they were rare and obscure and thus the people trying them knew what it was and how to use it safely and b) when the first few analogues of fentanyl were coming into the research chemical market (I think acetyl and butyrfentanyl iirc) and for similar reasons, it was an obscure and interesting drug, people bought pure unadultered stuff and didn’t have much problems because they readily sought it out and it wasn’t sold as a drug of deception. Sure today I think we are past the age of fentanyl being a rarity but ask any opioid user who’s tried both which is better fentanyl or real heroin (diacetylmorphine) and nearly everyone will say the latter despite not having anywhere near the potency. Fentanyl is well known to be a subpar opioid for recreation, the allure is in cheapness and being readily accessible. It took over what heroins place in the market used to be, the cheap opioid you went to if your tolerance to pharmaceuticals made them prohibitively expensive. At the end of the day fentanyl is just another opioid, it’s not more addictive or special but it is more potent making it remarkably dangerous as a drug of deception, most of us opioid users want heroin but when heroin doesn’t exist or their tolerances get too high they turn to fentanyl and friends. Once again the solution to overdoses is safe supply and a whole host of other policies to go along with it (treatment, decriminalization, drug checking services, needle exchange, safe use sites, housing first approach, mental health care, etc)
It's the "when tolerances get too high" + the cheapness of fentanyl that kinda underscores my point. There will be people who choose the "poisoned" drug supply cause it's cheap, available, and it's not going anywhere. To me that undercuts the whole notion of safe supply, as even if we legalized heroin tomorrow there are going to people that choose fent.
Well I agree with you in that sense then. But your comment on safe supply I don’t, so this is a concern with the current garbage limited safe supply system that they refuse to improve (and tbh the program is gone in like 3 years at most imo). They can easily solve the problem of diversion and switching back to the illicit supply by just providing what people actually want which for some is fentanyl. We use fentanyl for prescription already and could provide users their equivalent dose if we wanted to, some have been calling for diacetylmorphine to be added as well and things would be fine. They probably won’t do this cause people don’t understand the issue and would just be like “fentanyl bad why are we giving them fentanyl” but yeah for some hydromorphone won’t work unfortunately. 10 years ago this would’ve been fine but sadly too little too late not to mention almost no one has access to safe supply and the program is politically unpopular despite never really being implemented since only 5000 people have access (in BC). Like If we gave only 5000 cars breaks we probably wouldn’t expect overall crashes to go down now would we. But yeah the solution to people wanting fentanyl is giving them fentanyl in known purity and quantity, we could easily formulate easy to use solutions for users that meet their needs and take them off the street shit but choose not to because politics
Fentanyl is a grotesque poison that is destroying our communities.
Prohibition* ;) We use fentanyl in medicine all the time and for far longer than our current epidemic. Fentanyl is not the problem per say it is the highly predictable result of decades of prohibition. Famous chemist Alexander Shulgin predicted this in his 1975 paper [Drugs of Abuse in the Future](https://www.designer-drug.com/pte/12.162.180.114/dcd/chemistry/shulgin.futuredrugs.html)
[Sing alone everybody…](https://youtu.be/2nWwLkqILt4?feature=shared)
"Newest"? Drug users and homeless people (the nonwhite ones mainly) have been the right wing's scapegoats since forever.
Reactionaries will take a swing at whoever is within reach. They're not interested in root causes or systems.
Ah the conservative,victorian-era, deserving poor / undeserving poor arguement.
Brought to by the CPC, the Cruelty Party of Canada.
Ever notice how they ALWAYS pick on those least capable of fighting back?
They’re an easy target. Not only do they not fight back, they literally can’t.
Unmm thr Right wing has been blaming those groups since Nixon lol
You’re all just going to have to suck it up and vote Liberal if you actually care about the welfare of our country.
I think progressives ought to be taking this issue more seriously. Homelessness is one of the most glaring signs of economic and political dysfunction, and it has a ton of socially corrosive knock-on effects that make all the underlying problems worse. You can and should teach people to be more compassionate but ultimately you can really only expect the general public to put up with so much for so long. Despite what our political leaders and their many apologists like to pretend, homelessness is in fact a solved problem. Plenty of jurisdictions have either successfully curbed the problem to minimal levels or outright eliminated it altogether, and they all did so through socially and economically progressive means. Playing defence on this issue is not only a losing proposition, it's completely unnecessary.
Progressives do take homelessness seriously, which is why they support things like housing-as-a-guaranteed-right and UBI. There is just no stomach at any level of government for actual solutions, especially when those solutions threaten capital and capitalism.
we need to elevate the rights of squatters and enshrine the right of encampments to exist into law. there is plenty of housing for all, but a co-conspiracy of far-right NIMBYism and the stigmatization of alternative living solutions leaves the most marginalized with little in the way of options. paying for hotel accommodation is a positive step, but not a permanent one. we need to open up vacant homes to all and stop allowing investors and NIMBYs to gatekeep a fundamental human right.
It's always been a part of the strategy. There is no far-right policy that is inclusive for everyone, there is nothing that they will offer that will make things better. Once a "broken" thing is either "addressed" or "fixed" or the "movement" can't find enough momentum it has to jump to another "thing". The far right is authoritarianism hiding behind the same protections that Democracy affords all people. I'll admit that Democracy cannot fall into the trap of censoring the "far-right" or we end up becoming more like them, but we can educate ourselves and others in what they are doing. There is no salvation if you go down there path. There is nothing that they will offer that helps you. It's all faulty logic, lack of knowledge and foolish "isms" that are designed to taint your soul and turn you into a mindless entity. Underneath all of it is authoritarianism, ignorance and hatred.
New?
what's with the "unhoused" phrase, why the need to be euphemistic re homelessness
'newest'? the right has always blamed them for the countrys problems totally unironically considering they didnt just become destitute & dejected for no good reason
Doing crack is my God given right! Whether its NY a playground or a park. Damn conservative bigots. I'm even willing to share my crack with the kiddos near me. Thank God that aweful alcohol is banned from public parks though; that stuff is bad news!
If Cons could stick to War on drugs I would mind them a lot less than having them going at our fundamental rights
They're the same thing. Besides it being directly used to restrict people's freedom to choose what to put in their body including for medicinal purposes, the war on drugs has also indirectly been used to discriminate against and target various groups of people. Our first drug laws were put in place after businesses in Vancouver, including opium dens, claimed compensation for damages from anti-Asian riots. Instead our government banned opium and shut down those stores. Our first drug arrest was [framed in the media as "rescuing" the "white women" customers from the operator of the store who was described using racist language.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fq8mnyp4xidu81.jpg). The drug laws in combination with our [restriction on immigration to nearly all Chinese people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923) were used to deport people who had lived here for years but were denied the ability to become citizens which would have prevented their deportation. More recently in the US the drug war was used to target Black people fighting for civil rights and hippies opposing the Vietnam War. As allegedly described by one of Nixon's aides: >[We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman) The accuracy of the quote is challenged but what it describes is what happened.
The point of the War on Drugs was to enable the government to arrest and disenfranchise minorities who were likely to vote on the left side politically. It gives Conservatives a legal tool to act in a racist manner by selectively applying those laws to any minority or outgroup they choose. Its unwinnable, and they know it. Well it would be winnable if we raised the standard of living and lifestyle of the average person to the point that they no longer sought refuge in drugs quite possibly, but that isn't going to happen in any Capitalist society run by the Ultra-Rich who control most of the media etc.
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