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Nevada gives California “Greyhound Therapy”

Nevada gives California “Greyhound Therapy”

500 released mental patients given one-way bus ticket

Many of Legal Insurrection friends question the sanity of California voters, justifiably.

However, it seems that a neighboring state may have been contributing to our problems, at least in San Francisco:

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera is demanding that Nevada reimburse California cities and counties for treatment of about 500 indigent psychiatric patients who were given one-way bus tickets to the Golden State in recent years.

Those costs include about $500,000 that Herrera says San Francisco spent on medical care, housing and other aid for 20 people shipped here in a practice sometimes called Greyhound therapy.

In a letter to be sent Tuesday to Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, a draft of which was obtained by The Chronicle, Herrera threatened to file a class-action lawsuit accusing Nevada of misappropriating public funds from California unless the neighboring state agrees within 20 days to reimburse cities and counties and to adopt interstate transfer rules for patients.

Those would include confirming that a patient is a resident of the city where he or she is being sent, or has family there.

Herrera’s office, which subpoenaed bus company records, says it has the names of nearly 500 patients who have been discharged from a state-run psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas since April 2008 and sent by Greyhound bus to California. Of those, 24 sent to San Francisco were indigent, homeless and suffering from mental illness, according to the letter. Twenty of those received medical care or other city-funded treatment in San Francisco.

Herrera contends that staffers at Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, Nevada’s primary state mental facility, “understood and expected that the bused patients would rely on San Francisco’s public health resources.” They also directed some patients to seek care at the city’s public health clinics, Herrera said.

The potential lawsuit stems from a separate federal civil rights suit filed by James Flavey Coy Brown in Nevada, who alleges the state put him on a one-way bus to northern California after discharging him from a treatment facility. According to Business Insider contributor Paul Szoldra, Brown is seeking class-action status for as many as 1,500 others.

Truly, it looks like the only way people seem to come into blue states now is if they are disturbed and then given one-way ticket.

If Nevada wanted to really do the Golden State a favor, it would have sent its patients to Sacramento. They would have been an improvement over many state Assembly and Senate members.

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Comments

Henry Hawkins | August 23, 2013 at 11:15 am

The practice is common in a lot of places, usually for the homeless, though many of them are also mentally ill.

Hey, it worked for Castro, right?

As a California resident, I say this is an unfeeling response from a California government only interested in money. Also HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

DINORightMarie | August 23, 2013 at 11:59 am

I thought California was a “sanctuary state” – and San Francisco a “sanctuary city.”

Nevada just needs to claim these poor, suffering, under-represented people as needing sanctuary. 😉

Arizona should do this with our illegals.

Subotai Bahadur | August 23, 2013 at 12:20 pm

Any time a state [any state, including California] forces someone to stay in a certain place involuntarily by court order [a mittimus], they acquire a responsibility for getting them to where they can pick up their lives on release. You do not just throw them out the gates and forget about them. Courts frown on things like that, and every state makes some sort of arrangement, almost always by bus if someone does not come and pick up the person, to get them to where they want to go on release. If they want to go to California, why should California alone be exempt from receiving them?

Keep in mind that Californians themselves claim that their climate is such that it is worth putting up with almost any insanity from the state government to live there. And for decades, especially since Willie Brown was mayor of San Francisco, they have had a welcome mat out for the homeless; handing out welfare, forbidding “public nuisance” type charges against the homeless, giving them squatting rights on public and private property.

And they have succeeded in proving the adage that you get more of what you subsidize. Being a tourist [or resident for that matter] in San Francisco means accepting a substantial risk of robbery, theft, assault, groping, or exposure to loathsome diseases by the large population of mentally ill homeless that they have welcomed there already.

The released inmates of those facilities get to pick where they want to go. After all, they are in theory as legally free as any of us at that point to decide where to live in the country. What right does San Francisco have to decide who can or can not come to their city? If they have that right, then Colorado has the right to set up immigration stations at our borders and airports where we can turn back Californians [only a very limited amount of *sarc* there].

Subotai Bahadur

Not A Member of Any Organized Political | August 23, 2013 at 12:25 pm

No dummies, those Nevadans!

JackRussellTerrierist | August 23, 2013 at 2:00 pm

They’ll fit right in. Heck, most of them will probably wind up as sitting members of the state legislature.

I hope AZ laughs in CA’s face.

For years, CA school buses have been picking up Mexican children near border crossings and educating them at American taxpayers’ expense, for years, CA has been subsidizing the health care needs of Mexican citizens to such an extent that large numbers of CA hospitals have shut down. Why should AZ not send American citizens across the border into the land of CA which is so generous as to pay for the housing, clothing, feeding, education, and drugs of illegal aliens but so in generous as to deny the same to mentally I’ll Americans?

Equal rights for Americans, CA!

Actually, this process of shipping the mentally ill to other locations has a long history. The Wiki article on “Ship of Fools” has these excerpts:

Michel Foucault, who wrote Madness and Civilization, saw in the ship of fools a symbol of the consciousness of sin and evil alive in the medieval mindset and imaginative landscapes of the Renaissance. According to Jose Barchilon’s introduction to Madness and Civilization,

“Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then ‘knew’, had an affinity for each other. Thus, ‘Ship of Fools’ crisscrossed the sea and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.”

The ship of fools is an allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged, frivolous, or oblivious passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly ignorant of their own direction. This concept makes up the framework of the 15th century book Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant[A LAWYER!], which served as the inspiration for Bosch’s famous painting, Ship of Fools: a ship—an entire fleet at first—sets off from Basel to the paradise of fools. In literary and artistic compositions of the 15th and 16th centuries, the cultural motif of the ship of fools also served to parody the ‘ark of salvation’ as the Catholic Church was styled.

Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter

Oh stop making such a big deal out of this… Our First Lady made a career… and $300,000 a year plus… by designing plans to encourage patients to go elsewhere.

Oh, I know, HER patients were still in need of immediate care, the program involved more people, stayed within one city and was meant to make room for wealthy patients needing profitable, um, I mean expensive treatments; not patients released and no longer needing care. Not quite apples to apples, I know, yes yes. But still, this is not a new phenomenon.

It’s California. No one will even notice.

I have three words for San Francisco …
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Back in the early 80’s, San Francisco used to give one-way tickets to the homeless in San Francisco to go to Antelope Oregon (temporarily known as Rajneeshpuram), to join the followers of the Bhagwan.

Isn’t SF already known as the land of fruits and nuts? A match made in heaven.

I thought Governor Moonbeam believed in the credo of, “Give me your tired, your poor, your psychotic… etc.”

“Many of Legal Insurrection friends question the sanity of California voters, justifiably.”

Indeed. I have lived in California as a New York transplant for over 30 years, and I can testify from first hand experience on the sanity of California voters.

Item. In 1969 Nicolas Petris, Democrat Alameda Country introduced SB-778 to ban the internal combustion engine in California (including diesel engines in trucks). It passed 26-5! The bill died on the California Assembly. This item needs little comment as it speaks for itself.

Item. The California High Speed Rail Project. Passed by the voters. The original capital budget was around $35 billion, but quickly escalated to $100 billion only to get cut back to $70 billion. Now get this– the High Speed Rail Authority thinks the operating costs will amount to 10 cents per passenger mile. No rail line in the world operates so cheaply. A more realistic figure is 40 cents. Covering the capital and operating costs will put a one-way ticket from SF to LA at $400. No one would use it and that price, and by law operating costs cannot be subsidized. They were warned about the project by none other than Joseph Vranich, a major advocate for high speed rail, in a California Senate hearing 10/23/08. Vranich is not a critic of high speed rail– far from it, he’s a major advocate in general. But the people at the hearing the project was “science fiction and the costs would balloon to $100 billion. You need not take my word for it– watch the YouTube video of the hearing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeDlfIHbKxY They laughed and ridiculed him at the hearing.

Item. The kind of people Californians elect: 1. Jerry Brown; 2. Barbara Boxer; 3. Diane Feinstein; 4. Nancy Pelosi; 5; Barbara Lee, 6. Pete Stark; 7. Willie Brown and so forth. I have received emails from Barbara Boxer than are incoherent and read like they were written by a mentally challenged 8th grader. The opposition Republicans are largely stupid, disorganized, and ineffective. This now a one-party state where the Democrats have a super majority and can pass whatever they want, and they are in free run to destroy the state’s economy.

Only two states have lower average IQ’s than California. The educational level of California’s workforce is dead last in the union. With human capital like this, is it any wonder we have such politicians representing us?

Headline should be, “Nevada is shipping Democratic voters to California.”

the real story is Harry Reid did not use his ticket?

Just ask Michelle Obama. She is good at shipping her own people out.