Finland explained himself in the comic, but in 2010 Denmark started giving heroine to drug addicts for free and it was such a huge success that it has continued until today. Because of this Norway has started experimenting with it too.
It’s a lot cheaper for society because the addicts commit less crime, they don’t have to spend money on drugs so instead they spend it on things that are more healthy for them so they don’t end up on the hospital as often, they have to take the drugs in special clinics so there’s no chance of them taking an overdose or using dirty needles and spreading diseases among each other, there’s always staff ready to help them if they want to get off the drugs, and it’s a lot more effective way to help more people because addicts come into contact with professionals who want to help them before they even think about getting help themselves.
Nobody wants to be homeless or an addict. Though they often end up getting involved in criminality because of their situation, the act of being homeless or an addict is not a crime in itself and the people deserve help like anyone else.
It also gets money out of mafia/crime communities. Really hard to base your business on selling drugs people can get safer for free. Really hard to spend that drug money on weapons or other dangers if you never made it in the first place.
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
“Your regulations are written in blood.”
These regulations were not written on a whim.
They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Anyone who supports deregulation needs to read The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum (or watch the documentary). If only to learn about “embalmed milk,” a.k.a. milk preserved with formaldehyde, which killed thousands of children.
Regulations protect you from people who don’t care if you die as long as their profit margin is higher. Never forget that.
On this day, 18 October 1931, German workers in Braunschweig went on strike in protest against the Nazis. In the latter half of 1931 there were 25 political strikes by 30,000 workers in protest against fascism, with many more the following year. However they remained mostly short stoppages in small and medium enterprises and were insufficient to damage the state.
We have reproduced artwork by 1930s German antifascists, including the three arrows logo pictured, to help fund our work: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/anti-fascist
Pictured: anti-Nazi protest in Berlin, 1932 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1558101461041665/?type=3
Pope Francis on Saturday permanently removed a Polishbishop who was kicked out of his diocese a few months ago pending a Vatican investigation into allegations he covered up cases of sexual abuse by his priests.
The resignation of Edward Janiak as bishop of Kalisz suggests the Vatican was able to substantiate at least some elements of the accusations made in a documentary about sex abuse in Poland that has undermined the country’s influential Catholic hierarchy.
Francis on Saturday accepted Janiak’s resignation and confirmed the archbishop of Lodz, Grzegorz Rys, as the diocese’s temporary administrator. At 68, Janiak is well below the normal retirement age of 75 for bishops.
Francis in June had ordered Janiak to leave Kalisz and forbade him from having any influence on how the diocese is run pending the investigation.
In May, the online documentary “Playing Hide and Seek” exposed two cases of pedophile priests that Janiak handled, first as an auxiliary bishop of Wroclaw and then as bishop of Kalisz, which he had headed since 2012.
It featured court testimony about Janiak’s role in helping transfer one priest, subsequently convicted and defrocked, from Wroclaw to another diocese even after a criminal investigation had begun. The film also documented an alleged cover-up relating to another priest during Janiak’s time as Kalisz bishop.
The film was the second on Polish clergy abuse to be made by brothers Tomasz and Marek Sekielski. Their first film last year, “Tell No One,” triggered a national reckoning in a country where there is no higher moral authority than the Catholic Church and its clergy.
The Polish bishops conference, in reporting the news on its website Saturday, simply posted a statement from the Vatican ambassador to Poland reporting that Janiak had resigned and Rys would be the “apostolic administrator" of Kalisz until the position is permanently filled.
An Italian governor has promised to impose a regional curfew on 31 October to slow the spread of coronavirus, branding Halloween a “huge stupid Americanism”.
Vicenzo De Luca, centre-left leader of the Campania region, which includes Naples, said the shutdown would begin at 10pm that night, amid a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases there this month.
“Halloween is this huge piece of nonsense, this huge stupid Americanism that has also been imported into our country,” Mr De Luca said in a Friday briefing broadcast on Facebook.
“There we go. Halloween is a moment of idiocy.
“Seeing as we must deal with reality, and seeing as I’m hearing about people already preparing to have parties, from 10pm on the last October weekend, everything will be shut.
“There will be a curfew. Moving around won’t even be allowed.”
Halloween has only recently become popular in Italy, but the following day, 1 November, has long been a public holiday in the country to mark All Saints Day.
On Thursday, Mr De Luca also announced he was closing schools in the region for two weeks.
Mr De Luca’s comments come just months after he threatened in March to send police with flamethrowers to break up student parties as the pandemic raged.
In September, the 71-year-old was re-elected to his post with 68 per cent of the vote.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
