A Seattle-backed homeless shelter, using tax dollars, is instructing addicts to smoke heroin and inject drugs rectally.
If you read the George Floyd piece carefully, you learned that a hip new way to do drugs is insert them anally, like a suppository. Floyd called it “hooping,” but the City of Seattle is calling it “booty bumping.”
Seattle’s Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) has passed out heroin pipes and so-called “booty bumping” kits. The DESC has also posted several flyers at their Navigation Center location on 12th Avenue South.
DESC is an independent non-profit, but officials with Seattle’s Human Services Department (HSD) say they back DESC’s method because it “reflects the varying needs of those experiencing homelessness in Seattle.” DESC’s Executive Director, Daniel Malone, confirmed on the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH that the DESC uses “funds from our contract with the City of Seattle to purchase clean syringes and other harm reduction supplies.”
The DESC is a self-described “social justice organization,” but what is “just” about degrading people and encouraging them to continue a lifestyle that will lead only to their demise?
DESC claims that giving users pipes and telling them how to insert drugs rectally is “harm-reduction techniques and evidence-based practices” i.e., they want their homeless charges to be safer and more efficient addicts. Except that, as we have seen in the George Floyd case, “hooping” or “booty bumping” can lead to fatal overdoses, especially when addicts are unfamiliar with the greater bioavailability of that method, and hence use too much.
One flyer is focused on smoking heroin, because “smoking is a lower-risk alternative to injection. Give it a try!” The second flyer promotes “booty bumping” kits, which encourages people to insert drugs into their rectum using a syringe with no needle. A rectum is very efficient at absorption, so the high is described as more intense and longer-lasting. The flyer says this method is a “good choice if your veins are hard to hit,” and that it “doesn’t leave tracks.”
“The efforts we make are focused on reducing risks to people engaged in risky behaviors, and helping people make use of treatment that can be helpful to them,” Malone told the Jason Rantz Show.
This is called a “harm reduction model.” Most of us have heard of similar programs that provide clean needles to addicts. Supplying pipes and “booty-bumping kits” falls “on the continuum of helping people to decrease risk by avoiding the use of needles to inject drugs,” says Malone, “because intravenous injection of drugs can produce complications such as phlebitis, vasculitis, cellulitis, vein scarring, abscesses, and systemic infections related to IV injection.”
There is a curious moral obtuseness in “harm reduction” thinking. In the first place, it does not always reduce harm; just ask George Floyd. More importantly, the harm of “getting high” is not contained by the physiological problems of “phlebitis, vasculitis, cellulitis, vein scarring, and abscesses”; rather the harm is that the addict is not in his right mind. He is less than completely human, less than God created him to be, because his mind is clouded, his consciousness profoundly altered.
The same thing is true of alcohol. The problem with alcohol isn’t its long-term physiological effects, such as various types of liver damage, or hepatitis, or cancer or high blood pressure, or stroke. The problem with alcohol is its immediate mental (and arguably spiritual) affects: disinhibition, the loss of critical judgment, and the impairment of the higher moral center of the mind.
“When the appetite for spirituous liquor is indulged, the man voluntarily places to his lips the draught which debases below the level of the brute, him who was made in the image of God. Reason is paralyzed, the intellect is benumbed, the animal passions are excited, and then follow crimes of the most debasing character. How can the user of rum or tobacco give to God an undivided heart? It is impossible. Neither can he love his neighbor as himself. The darling indulgence engrosses all his affections. To gratify his craving for strong drink, he sells reason and self-control. He places to his lips that which stupefies the brain, paralyzes the intellect, and makes him a shame and curse to his family, and a terror to all around him.” Christian Temperance and Bible Hygiene, p. 36.3
The same is true of drugs. The problem with drug abuse is not that it scars your veins, but that you destroy your own humanity and scar the society around you.
At the DESC downtown Seattle location on 3rd Avenue, Seattle Police responded to 253 reports of assault and 174 theft reports in 2019. Other offenses included, this location saw an average of seven police response calls per day in 2019, according to KOMO TV.
“Crimes of the most debasing character,” indeed, encouraged and subsidized by your tax dollars.
Below: Tucker Carlson interviews Seattle radio host Jason Rantz on the new frontiers of “harm reduction”
Tucker Carlson interviews Seattle talk-radio host, Jason Rantz