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.
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?
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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