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Oregon law to decriminalize all drugs goes into effect, offering addicts rehab instead of prison:
"I lived in the bottom for years," says [Janie] Gullickson, 52. "For me and people like me, I laid there and wallowed in it for a long time."
But if she has to pick the lowest point – one that lasted years, not days, she says – it came shortly after she hit 30 in 1998. At that time, Gullickson had five kids, ages 5 to 11, by four different men. She came home from work one day as a locksmith to find that her ex-husband had taken her two youngest and left the state. Horrified, devastated and convinced that this was the beginning of the end, her life spiraled: She dropped her other son off with his dad, left her two daughters with her mom and soon became an IV meth user.
In prison six years later, Gullickson was contemplating joining an intensive recovery program when a "striking, magnetic gorgeous Black woman walked in the room, held up a mug shot and started talking about being in the very chairs where we were sitting," Gullickson remembers. There was life on the other side of addiction and prison, the woman said. But you have to fight for it. Gullickson believed her.
"I remember thinking, I may not be able to do all that, be what she was, but maybe I could do something different than this," Gullickson says. "That day, I felt the door open to change and healing."
Now Gullickson, executive director of the Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon, is determined to give other addicts the same opportunity. That's why she pushed for the passage of Measure 110, first-of-its-kind legislation that decriminalizes the possession of all illegal drugs in Oregon, including heroin, cocaine, meth and oxycodone. Instead of a criminal-justice-based approach, the state will pivot to a health-care-based approach, offering addicts treatment instead of prison time. Those in possession will be fined $100, a citation that will be dropped if they agree to a health assessment.
The law goes into effect Monday and will be implemented over the next decade by the state officials at the Oregon Health Authority.
[...] "I hope that we all become more enlightened across this country that substance abuse is not something that necessitates incarceration, but speaks to other social ills – lack of health care, lack of treatment, things of that nature," says Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J., an outspoken critic of the War on Drugs.
[...] Watson Coleman also points out that it's far more expensive to pay to incarcerate someone than get them treatment. Rehab programs not only empower people, she says, but they also save communities money.
Also at: CNN.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 02 2021, @01:00PM (24 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RS3 on Tuesday February 02 2021, @02:48PM (10 children)
I think it was the show "60 Minutes", or maybe "20/20" that did a report a few years ago about that. California had decriminalized pot, but the feds had not, so there were cases where pot smokers thought they were okay, not breaking the law, and got hauled into federal prison with multi-year sentences, and lost everything they owned to "civil forfeiture" (which is a crime in itself, IMHO).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 02 2021, @03:07PM (9 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday February 02 2021, @05:38PM (8 children)
You're welcome. I did a brief web search and I can't find reference to the story, but I remember it vividly. I did find references to law firms that help with the problem, and that the feds were using tax evasion, "dispensing medication without license", and pretty much anything they could use to prosecute people. This one is specific to Oregon, but shows the tangled and depressing web our legal system is: https://www.kahntaxlaw.com/how-the-feds-are-going-after-cannabis-businesses-now-that-the-cole-memo-has-been-revoked/ [kahntaxlaw.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 02 2021, @07:51PM (6 children)
My tinfoil hat is recording more and more politically charged stories that no longer appear in Google searches. One personal favorite was the Miami cops who landed their helicopter at Dunkin Donuts to pick up a couple of boxes on the way back to base - at a taxpayer expense of some hundreds of dollars additional operational cost on the bird. That one was all over papers, local and national news, and searchable in Google for 10+ years. Gone now, as far as I can see - similar story out of Phoenix later, because: cops, predictable, and mostly untrainable it would seem.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02 2021, @08:16PM
invaluable training value, practiced one extra landing/takeoff cycle, trial transport of precious cargo (ala organs). example found with a searchnow is from Albuquerque, so i guess they only need one precautionary tale floating around at a time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Tuesday February 02 2021, @09:04PM (4 children)
I wish you had not posted that. I used several search engines, came up with many stories about CA, pot, etc., but not the one I'm looking for. I vividly remember the story. It could even still be on a VHS tape in a box of tapes I have. I got a bit worried that things are being "disappeared", and now I'm unreasonably sure. Now what do we do. AOC talked about forming a "truth in media" committee or something.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 02 2021, @09:25PM (3 children)
It's a hell of a sticky problem. How long do you want "stop the steal PROOF" to last in the archives? Whoever does the archiving also becomes a sort of arbiter of truth.
There is the Wayback Machine [archive.org], but it is far from complete and I have seen things disappear off of there too.
You can run your own personal archives, and maybe should for things you find important to you - if you ever archive anything important to somebody else to disappear you'll probably experience first hand how it happens, I suspect bribery is the usual route for larger publishers - probably threat of libel litigation for individuals. In 2013 I worked in a building where an entire 20,000 sf floor was devoted to an "Internet Reputation Company," they had lots of employees and seemed to use multiple methods including burying or erasing information for their clients, who were mostly individuals there. I can easily imagine organizations like police departments spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on "community relations" to tailor their public image with such services.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday February 02 2021, @11:28PM (1 child)
Wow, okay, your karma just clobbered my dogma! That's downright scary.
You make a good point about personal archive, but it's nearly impossible to know what will become important someday in the future.
I naively thought book-burning was a thing of the past- irrelevant in the age of computers and Internet. That the Internet was too big and broad for anyone to truly censor things and steer public opinion. And maybe that's partially true, but we've also seen how major media, Facebook, Twitter, can have huge influence on public perception of "facts"- at least, significant bias can be induced by the major media companies. It's deeply in discussion in Congress and other govt. agencies, recent article about Tim Cook's views https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/02/01/1725247, [soylentnews.org] calls for breaking up Facebook, AOC looking into some kind of truth in media commission (good luck with that!). Even if it's all true, there's slant and spin and placement and it's been getting too difficult to know what's real.
So yeah, buy hard disks and backup systems and archive everything.
And to your point about police- I'm always seeing, esp. recently, articles about how police departments are doing this and that good community thing. They still rescue cats stuck in trees. And that's all good, but shouldn't whitewash the wrongs. I'm more interested to know why the wrongs have been glossed over for so long... Trying to not believe in conspiracy theories, or govt. pressure on media to hide things like police killing innocent, or relatively innocent people, or pepper-spraying 12 year olds, or whatever they're doing today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:37AM
Yeah - exactly - I frame it through a parallel: when a father beats his daughter, but takes her for ice cream the next day, the ice cream doesn't make it all OK.
When cops save a kitten it absolves them of no wrongs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2021, @07:23AM
Internet Archive respects the *LATEST* cookies file in what it displays from its web cache. What has not been made clear is if they keep the archives or delete them when the cookie settings change. One of the damaging things about this is that if a website changes owners, say when a previous owner dies or lapses their ownership, the new owner or domain squatting firm can in fact block the content via the robots.txt file and Internet Archive will block or remove all previous archived content from availability, rather than caching the robots.txt file from every period it cached a page and using the OLD copy for checking if old cached data should be displayable.
I think this was due to requests/lawsuits over people accidentally leaving stuff viewable through robots.txt that wasn't supposed to be archived, but in all honesty that should not be allowed in the first place since it makes too much he said/she said of easily modifiable/ephemeral data.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:35AM
At Burning Man there were arrests of folks carrying Nevada permits for weed. It was feds who took them. It was a big deal and literature for the next year made it VERY clear that Nevada permitted puffers couldn't expect to be unmolested.
I never met those people myself but the reporting channels were the official BM ones, and they're the ones who have to deal with law enforcement and political pressure, and who would've had to go back to those persons' camps to inform their campmates that there'd been an arrest, not a missing person. BM Org is pretty good about not bullshitting anything that can be sourced, like arrest records.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02 2021, @04:33PM (10 children)
Let's look at the details [apnews.com] to listen in on the rational debate about this issue.
Well at least it's only a hollow political gesture these days rather than protecting our precious white women from rape. Progress.
(Score: 2, Informative) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 02 2021, @06:20PM (9 children)
The republicans no longer control the senate. Any failure now is purely on the democrats, just like 12 years ago.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 02 2021, @06:55PM (7 children)
Democrat senators vow to legalise cannabis this year [independent.co.uk]
Supposedly they'll release the plan in spring/summer.
Weed became legal in my state during those 12 years so for a lot of people those years were a success.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 02 2021, @07:37PM (6 children)
Uh huh... Think they'll get a covid relief bill out by then too? What's the holdup? Why is McConnell's name still in the news?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 02 2021, @09:00PM
They're voting on the relief bill today.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 02 2021, @09:19PM (4 children)
Covid bill just passed. Was that quick enough for you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 03 2021, @01:41AM (1 child)
Meanwhile SCANDAL!!! "Kamala Harris criticized for wearing controversial label Dolce & Gabbana"
Hell, I take that instead of seeing news that Jared "motherfucking" Kushner is being put in charge of *anything*. *Ever*.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:43AM
The outrage they peddle when a democrat isn't doing anything worth criticizing is very revealing and extremely pathetic.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday February 03 2021, @03:21AM
Yeah great! Now do universal health care...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday February 03 2021, @08:28AM
Correction... It did not pass... They only agreed to move it to the next step within the senate. It's not going to the president's desk yet. And now they have their "villain" [thehill.com] to keep the game going
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:55AM
>The republicans no longer control the senate.
Define "control". The Republicans are no longer in charge, but so long as the filibuster remains an option the Republican's have an enormous amount of obstructive power. And personally I think the filibuster has proven itself a valuable tool over the decades, so I'm not in favor of eliminating it.
What remains to be seen is if the Democrats have the will to just recognize that the Republicans are going to be unwavering obstructionists, just as they were 12 years ago, and just ram through what needs to be done, rather than trying to give a seat at the table to those who clearly don't want it.
Of course, my money has always been on everyone from both sides being mostly so deep in the same pockets that the same cross-party trend will continue. The rich and powerful will get more perks and breaks, while the rest of us get screwed to pay for them.
(Score: 4, Touché) by ikanreed on Tuesday February 02 2021, @04:34PM (1 child)
You don't need to make a federal case out of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02 2021, @05:04PM
Yeah, but you do...