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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 02 2021, @10:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 02 2021, @09:25PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday February 02 2021, @09:25PM (#1108128)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday February 02 2021, @11:28PM (1 child)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday February 02 2021, @11:28PM (#1108170)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 03 2021, @02:37AM (#1108272)

      about police

      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

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2021, @07:23AM (#1111076)

    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.