California Gov. Gavin Newsom Vetoes Controversial Safe-Injection Site Bill
He’s totally in the mix for 2024!
Yesterday, I prepared a piece explaining some interesting moves recently made by California Governor Gavin Newsom that tilt slightly more rightward than we are used to seeing from this progressive politician.
And while many of you were not impressed, this trend is continuing. I have previously reported that California’s larger cities were planning to create “safe injection sites,” where people could legally use drugs under supervision designed to save them from dying if they overdose.
In fact, the San Francisco site injected serious controversy into the progressive city’s public programming.
Images taken by DailyMail.com show a woman slumped over in a wheelchair, her pants down around her ankles, preparing to inject a needle into her thigh. The woman sitting on the ground next to her has a needle to her neck.
Many others are sitting on the ground among trash, empty food containers and dirty blankets, as they fumble in with drug paraphernalia in the cold weather.
The center, which opened on January 18, is part of the San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s Tenderloin Emergency Intervention plan introduced last year. The linkage center is located at 1172 Market Street, in the United Nations Plaza. The supervised drug consumption area is an outdoor fenced section of the linkage center – just blocks away from the city’s court house, San Francisco City Hall and the Civic Center. Aerial footage of the area shows the city’s Pioneer Monument overrun with homeless tents. at new ‘linkage center’ in San Francisco last week show an open air illicit drug consumption site that is now littered with needles and crowded with addicts shooting up in broad daylight.
Now Newsom has vetoed a bill to establish pilot programs for safe injection sites.
The proposal would have granted officials in Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles permission to develop pilot programs for what are known as safe consumption sites.
In his veto message, Mr. Newsom said he supported harm-reduction strategies for people addicted to drugs, but said, “I am acutely concerned about the operations of safe injection sites without strong, engaged local leadership and well-documented, vetted, and thoughtful operational and sustainability plans.”
The Democrat said he was instructing his secretary of health and human services to convene local officials to discuss best practices for overdose prevention programs. He said he was willing to revisit the issue if those officials came back with what he described as “a truly limited pilot program” with plans to run them safely and effectively.
It appears that Newsom’s thinking…has evolved.
#BREAKING @GavinNewsom REJECTS the legislature’s plan to allow safe drug injection sites in Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco. @JerryBrownGov had vetoed similar legislation when he was @CAgovernor, but Newsom had expressed some openness to the idea.
— Elex Michaelson (@Elex_Michaelson) August 22, 2022
Progressives are unhappy.
Scott Wiener, the California lawmaker who wrote the bill that Mr. Newsom rebuffed on Monday, said that it might be uncomfortable for the governor to see the Biden administration advance a more progressive drug policy than his famously liberal home state.
He described the veto as a tragic missed opportunity to better address one of the state’s most pressing problems.
The proposal was “not a radical bill by any stretch of the imagination,” Mr. Wiener said in a statement on Monday. “We don’t need additional studies or working groups to determine whether safe consumption sites are effective. We know from decades of experience and numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies that they work.”
He called the veto “a major setback,” but said he and other legislators would continue to press for the state to “focus on drug use and addiction as the health issues that they are.”
However, most normal people are delighted. Perhaps a higher power was at play?
PRAISE GOD!! Excellent. We absolutely need REHAB for people, not enabling!
— TeamGod (@TeamGod786) August 23, 2022
Personally, I would like to thank Florida Ron DeSantis for his slap-down of Newsom’s Florida ad. It is helping California be a better place to live.
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Comments
Sooooo, let me get this straight. I can inject illegal drugs on the street with no repercussions, but if I vape or smoke tobacco, which is legal, in a “restricted area” of California I can be fined?
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/environmental-tobacco-smoke/california-tobacco-laws-reduce-ets-exposure
Idiocracy at its best
This guy is Kamla Harris, only taller.
So that brings to mind Willie Browns couch which makes me queasy
One must defer to his judgment on this matter because he is such a total prick.
Are the drugs illegal? Then by what reasoning has the State taken responsibility for supervising their illicit use? How does State supervision make it “legal”?
Does the State provide supervised knife fighting zones where they stand by to patch up the victims as well? No, because by doing so the State becomes an accomplice in breaking its own laws.
State funded rehab I can accept and support. State supervised law breaking is Kafkaesque..
I’m sorry, these people don’t want rehab, they want drugs
Ban panhandling, overnight tents and stop giving them money and drugs
They will leave, the 10% that really want help will take the open hand and go to rehab and start the horribly difficult but life affirming March to sobriety and real life. It ain’t easy, but the joy when you make it, well made for movies.
Unfortunately 90% of these people are lost and reviving them just puts the medical personnel In harms way and delays the absolute inevitability.
It just is what it is
This sh!t has got to stop
We use to have laws and expectations in our culture, what the hell hapened?
“And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.”
— Isaiah 59:14
This shit has got to stop? This shit will never stop wherever progressives are in power. I know quite a few coastal progressives. I’ve lived on both coasts and we get more and more of them every year in the DFW metroplex. My Japanese restaurant and bar was like a magnet for them. I never let on I was a conservative. I’d never agree with them, but I wouldn’t argue with them, so they simply assumed I agreed with them and kept talking.
They seemed like idiot savants. Most were extremely successful at what they did but they had zero common sense and were incapable of reason.
I recall one lady saying she didn’t get it; she had moved from San Francisco and simply couldn’t get how it could have such unaffordable housing, such a high rate of homelessness, high crime, etc., despite having the most progressive policies in the country.
This is the great danger they pose to the red states. Progressives really don’t get the fact that all the problems they’re trying to escape are caused by their progressive policies. The name is Orwellian as their policies are actually regressive; hence the descent of their cities into squalor and violence. Take rent control. When cities impose rent control, existing landlords are stuck. They can’t raise the rent until a tenant moves out. That tenant might stay for twenty years. Meanwhile, no new housing is built so existing rental properties shoot up in value per tax assessments due to the shortage. It isn’t like the other fixed costs for owning the building are doing anything but going up. So when a tenant moves out the landlord takes the opportunity to raise the rent so the apartment will still make money for twenty years. Or at least cover the cost.
Investors won’t buy that building. Investors need to make money, not get screwed by city councils. Developers won’t build new housing.
Progressives are constitutionally incapable of connecting the dots. Cause and effect are beyond their comprehension. Anytime rent/price controls are imposed, where ever and upon whatever is being controlled goes into short supply. Nobody supplies something that loses them money.
It’s interesting. I’ve perused several psychiatric nursing textbooks published up until 2017 and addiction and the various types of dysphoria (gender, species, body integrity, etc.) are all closely related disorders. Of course, in 2022 you can’t call them disorders anymore. But that doesn’t mean they’re not.
SF mayor London Breed announced a multimillion dollar program to address “trans/non-gender conforming” homelessness. She noted that these people are 18 times more likely to be homeless than the general population.
She, like all progressives, will never investigate why that is. I have; even though the DSM-V no longer calls gender identity disorder a disorder but rather gender dysphoria the people who suffer from it still exhibit all the self-destructive behaviors they indulged in which made it so obviously a disorder of the mind.
They simply (like addicts) can’t cope with reality. Which is why they don’t want to be who they were born as in the first place. Consequently they have all kinds of interpersonal problems, and among those is the inability to gain and keep employment.
Hence the homelessness.
Unless of course London Breed wants to insist SF and other ultra-progressive cities are hotbeds of bigotry, racism (“BIPOC trans/non-gender conforming” people suffer even higher rates of homelessness she claims), homophobia and transphobia. Which is insane. But then progressivism also is a mental disorder which prevents people from coping with reality.
Hence their inability to connect the dots between their policies and the consequences of those policies. In fact, progressives are at war with the very idea of objective truth and reality.
We’ve arrived at the point where the lunatics in charge believe if you don’t allow people to call a mental disorder a mental disorder, it’s no longer a mental disorder even if it still leads to high rates of homelessness, drug abuse, violence, other forms of criminality, and suicide. The problem, in what passes for their minds, is that society “stigmatizes” these people.
So, how long before they decide that addiction isn’t a disease either? After all, if the reason “trans” people can’t hold down jobs is because of stigma, why isn’t the same for addicts. In fact, we need to stop calling them addicts and invent some euphemism that hides the truth. How about we riff off the term they invented for pedophiles and simply call them “substance attracted persons.”
Thanks to the miracle of CRT we’ve already classified personality traits like punctuality, conscientiousness, politeness, and a desire to get the right answer as disgusting, oppressive symptoms of “whiteness.” Hence we can’t expect “BIPOC” students to display those traits in school. In fact, to expect that would be racist. “Equity” demands we address the “racial disparity” in grades by simply distributing grades by race instead of achievement.
Doesn’t “equity” demand we do the same for addicts? Let’s give them no-show jobs (the left pioneered no-show jobs; see Chicago for further examples). Now BIPOC students don’t need to show up to school anymore to get passing grades. So let’s pretend to pay addicts to work when we’re really paying them to shoot-up.
So then: you can’t fix stupid… but you can farm it.
And if you need more votes than you get from that, you diversify into farming crazy.
Holey moley! I think we’ve just solved the motive behind Democrat policies!
I wonder how much our arguments against drugs and safe places to shoot up mirror the 1800s and opium dens? Surely people then cried “this shit has got to stop” and were given the temperance movement, prohibition, Al Capone, bootlegging, etc.
“We know from decades of experience and numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies that they work.”
And by “work” we mean that they get the junkies out of our neighborhoods so we can effectively ignore the issue going forward. This isn’t about helping the addicted, this is about preserving property values for the right sorts of people.
It’s like a scene from Little Big Man, ‘So it was I entered my Conservative period.’
It’s like he’s trying to look moderate and stuff…
Safe injection site?
How about a safe ingestion site for pills?
How about a comprise? Decriminalize drug use for the property owner/lease holder of a residence. All these folks need to do is become functional members of society. Earn and keep employment sufficiently high to support normal adult life in the US. Then after work, they can shoot heroin every night as long as they show back up and are productive the next day. Functional alcoholics still do this. Those that can’t get put in a cold turkey dry out for six weeks, those that survive get released to try again.
That doesn’t address the issue of who pays for the drugs. That’s where a very high proportion of the street crime, burglaries, and carjackings are coming from, druggies funding their addictions.
Stealing that money “legally” from the taxpayers would of course be the preferred leftist solution.
The person who chooses to ingest them pays for them, I thought that was implied. They have to fund their habits through a job with sufficient wages to provide rent or a mortgage and utilities, transportation, clothing and food. Just like everyone else.
If they can’t be a functioning dug user the same way a functioning alcoholic is they go to a cold turkey dry out of six weeks. The only drug they get is a multivitamin. Those who survive then face criminal proceedings for offenses committed. Simple, low cost, effective and no need for an over aggressive LEO and overly intrusive State.
If that’s not clear then to quote Ivan Drago ‘if he dies he dies’ while in cold turkey dry out due to withdrawal then them’s the breaks.
Choices have consequences, we must stop bailing out people who continue to make bad decisions and allow them to be held truly accountable. Otherwise we become / remain a paternalistic society that treats adults like children. The folks who want that are not pushing that vision out of altruism but for power/control.
A minimum wage gig is seldom going to pay for rent/mortgage, utilities, transportation, clothing, food, and a drug habit any more serious than smoking pot.
That’s why they turn to crime.
Living beyond one’s means is foolish and carries consequences no matter what one wastes their scarce resources upon.
If they lack the disposable income to feed their addiction that’s not my problem. Round them up, dry them out cold turkey, the survivors face criminal proceedings and prison. No more BS sob stories and pleas for understanding, just consequences. Implement that and the problem gets solved.
Starting to look like Newson v. DeSantis in 2024 – if the uniparty is successful in derailing a 3rd Trump run.
I will take DeSantis in that one. Ive been for DeSantis/Tulsi with Trump as an advisor for quite some time
“The law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges” — very funny. Har de har. That’s a big part of the problem. Not enforcing the most rudimentary tenets of civilization these days. Stopping the ever-growing crime wave encouraged by this laxity will require dozens of entire prison cities… Which we have neither the money, or the manpower, or the political will, especially when a ‘disproportionate’ portion of a certain population (for the record, I do not condone any consideration of skin color, per MLK Jr) is well overrepresented, according to the race baiting industry.
Absolutely right wsot.
Here’s a shocker, most California cities already have ordinances banning illegal camping, put on the books specifically to counter the plague of homeless encampments when vagrancy statutes were nullified by the courts. Add those to the trespassing, squatting, anti-drug, hygiene, etc. regulations and laws that they refuse to enforce and it’s obvious where the real problem lies, in a twisted, elitist political view (you can be sure that the communes and gated communities of the wealthy don’t suffer these issues).
The worst part is to come. When the social contract is voided then people have a habit of taking matters into their hands. Like it or not vigilantes arise when normal people feel betrayed by authorities who refuse to hold up their end of the contract. Sooner or later it happens and it’s always ugly because people act out of desperation and anger instead of LEO and CTs acting with professionalism to enforce the law.
I vaguely recall news reports of a spate of arson in homeless encampments and violence against random bums in the mid 1980s. I was still a teenager focused on playing football and dating cheerleaders and so may have my years wrong.
The Law? The Law is a human institution.
O Brother, Where Art Thou
Looks like a continuing false-flag operation by Newsom. Everybody knows this isn’t him, and if he should be installed into Federal office this moderation will immediately cease.
He’s doing the same pre-election dance that Republicans do when they start supporting welfare and gun control bills. And it will have the same result. The people on the other side that they are trying to woo would rather eat a frog than vote for them.
Wow, its almost like after years of destruction someone finally realized rule by emergency dictator is over and an election is coming. If Cali votes for this mouth breather again then good luck. Florida’s greatest salesman is all yours and to hell with you