faf777 We Thought We Were Compassionate, but We Were Too Permissive

data de lançamento:2025-03-25 04:57 tempo visitado:136

As a good liberal, I used to oppose arresting people for using drugs. They need health care, not handcuffs, I thought. But then to my surprise and dismay, I found myself praying that my old pal Drew Goff would be arrested.

Drew, 40, was homeless, using fentanyl and also selling it. His wife, who was with him, was pregnant and had overdosed 27 times, including twice in a single day. It seemed only a matter of time before Drew killed himself or one of his customers. So Drew’s mom and I confided to each other our hope that he would end up in the relative safety of prison and get treatment there.

“It’s the only way to save his life,” his mom said wearily. And in the end, Drew himself agreed.

Drew’s journey constitutes a rebuke to liberals and conservatives alike. Drew is the third generation in his family to wrestle with addiction, and his life reflects the failure of the right’s half-century war on drugs, fought with only the criminal justice toolbox. Public health approaches were neglected, so even now the federal government estimates that fewer than one in four who need substance use treatment get it. It’s no accident that Republican-led states, while tough on crime,66jogo casino have some of the highest rates of drug fatalities in the country.

Yet it’s also true that Drew’s most recent tumble into addiction came in part because of a permissive liberal culture toward drugs on the West Coast. This was meant to be compassionate, but it almost killed him (and has killed many of my other friends). In Portland, a person could be arrested for drinking a beer on the sidewalk but until recently not for smoking fentanyl. Smoking cigarettes in public places was often limited or banned on the West Coast while fentanyl use was tolerated.

President Trump is right to insist on greater urgency in addressing fentanyl, and he took some important steps in his first term, such as allowing telehealth options for addiction treatment and pressing China to crack down on its chemical companies that fuel the drug trade. His threats on Mexico today seem to be leading leaders there to work harder to curb fentanyl smuggling.

The police believe the person whom the gunmen were targeting was among those killed, Scott Thurmond, the city’s police chief, said at a news conference on Sunday morning. He said the shooters had approached the scene in a vehicle, got out, opened fire and then fled in the vehicle. The police said they believed the shooters had used machine gun conversion devices, which alter semiautomatic weapons so that a single pull of the trigger can empty a gun’s entire magazine.

But many of their smiles shrank when they were asked about the embattled Republican nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has been under fire since CNN reported this week on the lewd comments he made on a pornography website several years ago. According to CNN, Mr. Robinson wrote on the site that he was a “black NAZI,” that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography and that slavery was not bad. He also recounted on the site how he went “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a teenager.

Yet some of his proposed solutions seem mostly performative and might even make the problem worse. Military strikes on drug cartels on Mexican soil might freeze Mexican cooperation. Most alarming, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are exploring cuts in Medicaid that would probably reduce access to treatment — the strategy that arguably works better than any other.

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