From Otto's
War Room:
There's a new drug causing havoc, acetyl fentanyl mixed with heroin. It is killing
people — and as usual politicians, those who lack any vision, intuition or the
ability to grasp social change stick to the same old solutions and of course,
those old solutions just done work.
Maine Attorney General Janet
Mills was recently
interviewed by NPR radio. She gave the same old answer to the
problems with the out-dated "war on drugs."
She told NPR that prosecutors should seek the
ability to make felony charges in fentanyl cases. She wants that both to push
users to roll over on their friends and dealers and also forcing them into
rehab.
"We want to have a significant
sentence hanging over them, Mills says, "so that we can encourage them —
force them, if you will — into treatment."
There is no question this is a
dangerous mixture. Fentanyl is almost 100 times as strong as heroin. It's
affects are supposed to be similar. The average addict could likely handle a
grain or more of pure heroin. The problem is that they usually shoot up street
heroin, up to a gram at a time because heroin gets cut with other powders from
one drug dealer to the next to stretch it out. The average gram of street
heroin is about 2 to 10 percent pure. The fentalyn is being added by
street dealers to boost their drug and make their customers satisfied so they
will buy more. But a fentalyn high can be as much as a few grains of salt. It
just takes a little too much of it to kill a person.
But new federal penalties are not
inline with movements to stop the ridiculous jailing of people for petty drug
charges. Such a movement has been going on in Wichita
"The real problem is that locking
up users of marijuana has filled our jails, and that has put a heavy tax burden
on our society. It should be clear to everyone by now that we are locking
people up for petty reasons.
The group JENI (Jobs and Education-Not
Incarceration) and the Peace and Social Justice Center worked for months to
gather the needed signatures to put this issue on the ballot in Wichita. They
are concerned about mass incarceration and are looking for ways to reduce it.
Keeping marijuana users out of prisons is a good first step".
Also there is the problem of freedom of
choice. [1] We can decide what people actually do,
but do we have the right to force them to change their minds?
Such tactics rarely work . There is
evidence that drug treatment works, but mostly with people who WANT to get off drugs. If a person likes
those drugs or feels a need to self medicate, they will only go on to using
them again. From -សតិវ អតុ:
Our founding fathers called for “the
pursuit of happiness.” And yet those who want certain drugs that may help them
to feel better are denied by a puritan society that believes prayer and
religion should be the only kind of self medication. The founding fathers’
words are simply ignored. We live in a “one-size fits all” society that
believes we must all live the same, believe the same, act the same and live in
a restricted environment where our life style choices are heavily controlled.
There is a the simple case that those
who really want to self medicate with narcotics, for what ever reason, have the
right to refuse treatment. They should not be forced into something they really
don't want.
And there is the moral argument that
those who fail treatment and get a felony conviction, they will not find work
when they are released and they may end up permanently ruined.
We need to focus on reducing mass
incarceration and protecting our freedoms. Drug laws lead to fascism.
So the bottom line is—yes fentanyl is a
dangerous drug. But oppose taking our freedom away from us.
Pix by www.popularresistance.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment