Liberals have gone into overdrive to defend the latest folly from the Biden administration, whose policies bounce between absurd and ridiculous and divisive and destructive.
As The Free Press recently noted, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and 15 of his fellow Republicans introduced a bill to prevent President Joe Biden from spending taxpayer money on providing free crack pipes to junkies.
The issue arose after the Biden administration included “safe smoking kits” in a laundry list of items that will be supplied to drug addicts in minority communities as part of a“harm reduction” initiative.
Biden, as reported, would spend $30 million on this.
Rubio called the idea of issuing crack pipes to drug addicts “insanity.”
In the wake of this controversy, one tactic by Biden’s apologists is to note that the alleged “safe smoking” kits are just one small part of the overall package. But they have also tried to explain how the program would work, and consequently why the critics are wrong.
Because Rubio is from Florida, the liberal Palm Beach Post gave this a shot recently.
This matters because Rubio is up for re-election and the Post is owned by USA Today, which owns the main newspapers in every major market in Florida, except Miami, Orlando, and the Tampa Bay region, and shares content among them.
“Is the Biden administration giving out free crack pipes?” the Post asked this week.
Predictably, the answer was no, as the paper parroted the government line from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Post went on to criticize the Republicans’ criticism as based on a “misconception,” one rooted in an “inaccurately” reported story by the Washington Free Beacon. The Free Beacon broke the story of the crack pipes and has answered critics like the Post by noting the administration refuses to point out where the reporting is wrong.
The Post offered a lengthy reply from an HHS spokesman and even noted that a left-wing group that advocates legalization of narcotics seemed disappointed in the administration’s response that it was not distributing crack pipes.
But, the Post reassured readers, the “HHS’s statements suggest there was never a plan to issue pipes in safer smoking kits.”
Never. Well, maybe never say never.
The problem for the Post, and other critics of Rubio and the GOP lawmakers, is that they cannot tell the public what a “safer smoking kit” is.
In its own report, the Post admits, “The contents of the safer smoking kits were not specified.” Later in its effort to torpedo Rubio’s point, the Post says, “While the program document did not describe the contents of the kits, safer smoking kits may include a rubber mouthpiece to prevent cuts and burns, brass screens to help filter potentially harmful contaminants, and disinfectant wipes.”
Sure. OK. So, the Biden kit may just contain instruments to improve the crack-smoking experience, rather than just giving out an actual pipe.
But a two-minute Google search revealed a different side of such a program.
In May 2014, Time magazine reported on an effort by the city of San Francisco to attempt harm reduction among addicts with “safer smoking kits.” The focus was a debate over whether San Fran would give crack pipes to junkies. As Time’s headline noted, “Handing out crack pipes may not be such a crackpot scheme.”
In the story, Time reported that many crack users “fashion pipes out of whatever they can get their hands on (including broken glass, lightbulbs, vials, and other tube-shaped things), which can cause cuts and open sores in the mouth, which can then spread disease to anyone sharing that pipe.”
As the Post noted, stopping such spread was a stated goal of the Biden administration.
Continuing, Time looked at Vancouver, Canada, which had implemented a safer-smoking program. “As part of a pilot study started in late 2011, officials have been handing out 7,500 ‘safer smoking kits’ per month.”
“Each kit,” Time continued, “comes with information about detox and places to seek help as well as heat-resistant glass stems and disinfecting alcohol swabs.”
In the drug trade, those “heat-resistant glass stems” are known as, you guessed it, pipes.
In fact, also in 2014, the local TV station KALW reported, “There’s a plan circulating in San Francisco to make using crack cocaine safer: give away free crack pipes. It might sound farfetched, but it’s supported by science.”
Biden always says we’ve got to follow “the science.”
By the way, when Time and KALW reported this program, the vice president of the United States was Joe Biden.
Interestingly, the city passed on implementing such a program. That decision was denounced in 2020 when progressive groups slammed San Francisco for not providing clean crack pipes as COVID-19 spread.
Yet as the San Francisco Examiner reported back in 2014, a private group called the Urban Survivors Network “began handing out kits containing clean glass tubes and alcohol wipes to drug users.”
In the drug trade, those glass tubes are called, you guessed it, pipes.
As even the Palm Beach Post acknowledged, the Biden initiative included “disinfectant wipes” in its safer-smoking kits.
In 2015, Reuters reported on a program by The People’s Harm Reduction Alliance in Seattle, which handed out “free bubble-ended pipes” to meth addicts. The same group had five years earlier launched a campaign “to hand out crack pipes with extension tubes to prevent the hot glass from blistering addicts’ lips, on the theory that disease could spread between pipe-sharers through open wounds.”
Again, as the Post reported, Biden’s safer smoking kits may include a rubber mouthpiece to prevent cuts and burns.
The problem for the Post and the rest of the left-wing media is that while they claim Biden is not giving away crack pipes, they cannot explain what the administration’s “safer-smoking” kits are.
Meanwhile, the historical record on this issue suggests that the Biden program, which would provide money to local groups but not distribute “safe smoking” kits directly, closely resembles what the Urban Survivors Network and The People’s Harm Reduction Alliance actually did – private groups that gave out crack pipes to injured-lip druggies in the name of “harm reduction” and slowing the spread of communicable diseases.
Once again, the liberal media’s lack of curiosity, or worse, willful partisanship, is making a mockery of the news industry.
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