I’m sure that at least some of you have seen the documentary film, Seattle is Dying. I recently shared it in the Daily Discussion thread, and recommended it highly. It documents the growing homeless population, and the related problems with drug addiction, mental illness and crime in the city of Seattle. If you haven’t yet seen it, here it is:
Today I was reading an article about this documentary film, and the reaction to it by Seattle residents and city officials in City Journal. Seems that a majority of Seattle residents pretty much agree with its contents, but city officials are doing their best to convince them that they can’t believe what they see before them on a daily basis, and that the reporter who produced this documentary, veteran Seattle reporter Eric Johnson of KOMO, is hate mongering and spreading fear.
Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.
Despite this growing consensus, the activist class is pushing back. According to leaked documents, the City of Seattle and its allies have retained a crisis-communications firm to discredit Johnson and insist, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, that “Seattle is making progress to end homelessness, and proven solutions are working.” It’s quite a strategy: Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan is using taxpayer resources to attack a respected local journalist and convince taxpayers that they shouldn’t trust their own experience.
The city’s nonprofit and academic partners—mainstays of the homeless-industrial complex—have also launched coordinated attacks against the critics. Timothy Harris, director of Real Change News, has argued that grassroots neighborhood groups like Speak Out Seattle and labor unions like the Iron Workers Local 86 who opposed the city’s head tax are “alt-right” white supremacists, bigots, and fascists. Catherine Hinrichsen, director of the Project on Family Homelessness at Seattle University, accused Johnson of “hate-mongering” and spreading “fear.”
I was shocked to learn of the spike in property crime in the city, which is thoroughly covered in “Seattle is Dying”. Researching city crime records, the reporter found that 100 of the street people in Seattle are responsible for 3,500 criminal cases. Most of this is driven by drug use and mental illness within the homeless population.
He makes the case – a good one – that by ignoring what is happening on the streets of Seattle, the city is not expressing compassion, but allowing these addicted and mentally sick persons to suffer. He presents many examples of these people on the streets, ranting to passing citizens, screaming and crying, passed out on the streets, urinating and defecating in public, and other unacceptable and sad behavior.
Police are not allowed to do their jobs. If they do arrest someone, more often than not the person is back on the streets the same day. No punishment. No jail time. Rather than policing drug use, the city officials reacted to the problem by decriminalizing possession of a larger amount.
The activist class, the social justice warriors, are ruining a beautiful city as they have ruined so many others, and continue to do so. Los Angeles. Portland. San Francisco. Chicago. Detroit.
Maybe Seattle citizens have finally had enough and will fight back to protect their families, businesses and homes. Or maybe they will just sell up and move away. I hope it’s the former.
Stella's Place 
Sad.
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It largely goes back to the drug problem in that the City has handcuffed the police and is slowly decriminalizing drug possession and use. Long before marijuana was made legal for recreational use and gang violence spiked as they rushed in to supply the huge open market.
Seattle’s the more civilized of the progressive disaster areas and thWe don’t live in cey’ll do and say whatever they have to to prevent your seeing this fish rot from the head. Even the most ardent Cold War Marxists spouted free love and free drugs but never even came close to practicing it. Crime is directly related to drug use, not all of it but most of it. Homelessness, once you shake out the drugs and mentally ill, is nowhere near as bad as it is with them included. You have the liberals saying that the mentally ill should not be in facilities, they should be free and take their meds on their own. Ask any cops about how the mentally ill take their meds without supervision.
We don’t live in the city no mo’, but when we go into t\he large bedroom city to our south most corners around the freeway have ‘homeless’ with signs begging cash. A lot now are ‘working’ for a service that houses/feeds them and drives them out to spots daily, their job to beg cash they in turn hand over to their ’employers’. Can’t say if they are off the drugs and booze and taking their meds but it’s good to see that American enterprise has managed to find a way to monetize homelessness.
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Wow, I have no idea what happened but that’s “they’ll do and say whatever it takes”, I have no idea what happened. Add the ‘I have no idea’ to the other bloopers too, guess that’s what happens when you fall asleep in the middle of a post.
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There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop the drugs and the resulting crimes from it’s use. The demand for them is here, so the supply will continue.
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That’s it, it’s ALL about demand. Those same dumb kids between 16 and 21 that use those drugs,,,the Democrats want to add them to the voting idiot over 21s who use drugs too. Those heroin addicts whose habits can cost them hundreds of dollars a day we let vote AND waste taxpayer dollars on trying to detox, 90% of heroin users ‘dried out’ relapse. Estimated costs from substance addiction/abuse in the US is about $740-BILLION a year.
Yup, D-E-M-A-N-D, but then we’re decriminalizing drug use as it’s a victimless crime.
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At the end of the video I posted, they talk about a program being used in Rhode Island (?) that seems to have had some success, at least for those who really want to get away from drugs. It substitutes other drugs that aren’t debilitating (such as methadone), and they also do follow up. Seems that they usually start the program while the addicts are in prison.
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Oh yeah, I’ve seen programs come and go. We had junkies looking for prison diversion on methadone, it’s like how morphine was used to treat opium addiction, now they sub methadone and more than a few take both, using the methadone to cut the amount of heroin they need and making their habit a bit cheaper. Than you have the ones who become addicted to methadone and the market for illegally diverted methadone pills.
I’m just bitter and burned out. The availability of heroin over the last 40 years has soared and, to my opinion, certain segments of the US Government are complicit. We had Khun Sa during Vietnam, Golden Triangle baron. We have growing and processing centers in Mexico and Columbia and then the rise of the Afghani area production – temporarily halted when the Taliban took power but put right back in business by the Northern Alliance when the US invaded. Now China’s into it with fentanyl though just days ago China says it banned all types of fentanyl production – we’ll see.
Hollywood’s notoriously silent on damning drug abuse outside of a few pro forma attempts to make it look as if they are anti-drug but drug rehab in the entertainment world is not only a growth industry but a career enhancer. The stars usually have some ‘agreement’in place that quietly limits the drug enforcement by LEA when local LEA provide security on shoots. W also have a lot of reports of drugs being passed around like drinks at Hollyork parties and those deaths by drugs of Hollyork notables whose deaths are treated like stage plays all on their own. With the entertainment industry’s attitude toward drugs we’re going to fight this how?
I could go on, and at times I have, but I don’t think enforcement of laws and and diversion programs at the highest levels are real. Amounts of illegal opiates, despite billions spent ‘preventing’ their importation, has increased and prices reasonable enough to where you can find them even in rural areas and at an affordable price. We have great detailed maps of growing and production areas and sites, transportation routes and distribution networks. We have detailed info on US distribution systems AND full knowledge of the cartels infiltrating its workers in using the legal and illegal immigration system. All this and yet the flow of opioids and meth continues while increasing. Even DEA admits it catches way less than 50% of the drugs coming in.
Treatment is another false flag, it diverts from the real problem, the fact that for whatever reasons the programs designed to stop the importation don’t work. With somewhere around (guesstimates vary) 700,000 opioid abusers in the US and between 150 and 200 dying a day treatment’s a pin prick at best.
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It offers something to people who truly want to clean up their lives, which is something. It won’t make the drug problem in the USA go way. Personally, I would like to see insane asylums make a comeback. At least we could get the mentally ill off the streets into a clean, warm, environment.
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Yeah, but the courts, staffed by judges who live in gated, secure communities, says ya can’t do that. The mentally ill can’t take care of their own problems yet we can’t force them to be ‘normal’ until they injure or kill someone.
If the program works, bless it, but I’ve seen many wonder programs over the years and most (damn near all) fail unless the junkie comes into the program with a very high desire to pull thru and stay clean. Problem is most are there because the court ordered it, they want someone else to cure them or they’re looking for a respite as the costs of addiction are too high.
Our job was more dealing with the huge wake of damages they leave behind them, they’ll do anything to anyone to get the money to get that fix. And I always focus on they made a conscious decision to take that 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc hit.
I’m just an inflexible ******* on this issue.
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Oh, I understand completely about the laws as they stand now, compared to what they once were. I would like to see a return to the old days, frankly. Better for the community, and better for the mentally ill.
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I obsess with this issue as the truth runs deeper than the government lets on. Remember Nancy’s ‘Just Say NO!’ program? As soon as that came out everyone from the Feds to Hollyork ridiculed it and heroin then, as now, was a chic inside thing for the glitterati. She hit the nail on the head, EVERY ONE of those with ‘opioid abuse’ issues today could have ended the problem before it began with a simple ‘no’. Now we have an entire industry based on excusing and mollycoddling them.
Louisiana was one of the last to privatize its mentally ill program, turning it from a Federally oversighted state-run program to a privately-run for-profit warehousing. Governments at all levels are washing their hands of them.
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https://www.statnews.com/2017/08/03/opioid-treatment-prisons/
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OK, let’s see the total results in 10 years including recidivism rates.
I’ve seen prison programs to deal with addiction before and it works on a few who don’t have long sentences and are rather serious about kicking the habit, especially as the price of heroin inside of prison is high…another problem.
One of the big issues is that criminals with heroin histories have a really difficult time getting employment after release though more and more city, county and state governments are getting around to hiring all sorts of felons (they’re in good company with the pols…couldn’t let that one go by) as they are less concerned about liability and insurance issues than businesses are. They get out, can’t find employment, the pressure builds and it’s right back to drugs.
This is a huge game with a lot of moving pieces and the only way I can see rehab working is a penalty for sliding back from sobriety that’s bad enough to make sobriety preferable. Good luck to them all.
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PS: If you haven’t watched the video, at least fast forward through it.
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No disrespect but I sort of lost all interest in anything involving addicts, ESPECIALLY opioid addicts, a long time ago. My idea of an ideal rehab program would involve one chance and then on relapse a phaser set on disintegrate. Ya gotta be face-to-face to appreciate the entire crew and cast.
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I think the numbers are far higher than the guesstimates of 700,000. It’s probably millions.
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The government that has an interest in drugs being used has an interest in the real numbers not getting out.
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I can’t speak for anyone else, but from where I am and what I have seen? It’s millions. All they do is wreak havoc and they truly don’t care who they hurt. I have zero sympathy for them based on that, I feel for the ones left standing. Addicts are far different from someone who is mentally ill. I have no problem with Rhode Island’s program, it’s actually pretty good as they go, but for whatever reason, they just can’t seem to kick it. Very few anyway.
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The city is a major conduit for one of the Mexican drug cartels. Doubtless the city council and other city officials plus King County trough eaters are becoming rich off bribes and “looking the other way” on drug enforcement. Tying the hands of police and sheriff goes hand in hand with that.
Washington state citizens say they don’t want the lawlessness, but they keep voting in the people who enable it. The average Dem votes for anyone with a D behind the ballot name; and the cycle of lawlessness continues.
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I did watch the video when you posted it. I was appalled at the city council (I think that’s who it was). What a mess they have created.
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Right now on Rush Limbaugh’s show, he’s talking about this video and story. If the city wanted to suppress the vid, they sure didn’t succeed.
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No, that’s true. They are trying to discredit the source, though.
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