Joe Biden's Health and Human Services Department will distribute crack pipes to inner city communities in the name of equity. Fox News. The department will prioritize "underserved communities" and will distributed the pipes to users of crack, methamphetamine and other drugs. Underserved communities are defined as non-white, LGBT and disabled. HHS said the claim was misinformation but documents say that money was reserved to distribute the pipes in the name of safety.
The document can be found here, with the mention of "safe smoking kits" found on page 8.
My Comment:
This story is so ridiculous that when I saw it trending on Twitter I thought it was a joke about Biden's son Hunter, who was famously shown with a crack pipe/meth pipe. But after reviewing the document it does appear to be real. It's to the point where parody is indistinguishable from reality.
To be fair the idea isn't completely stupid. The idea is that if you give people free crack pipes they won't get injured by them or transmit disease to their fellow crackheads. They would also be encouraged to smoke crack and meth instead of injecting it. Injecting any drug is dangerous due to the risk of spreading disease like Hepatitis and HIV.
With that being said, giving people crack pipes isn't a good idea in the least. The health concerns are negligible as not that many people actually inject crack. Some do inject meth but not many compared to other drugs like heroin. There might be some addicts that will be helped on the margin but not many.
Another point is that crack pipes are easily obtainable or makeable by drug addicts. Pretty much every inner city store sells those glass pipes that have fake flowers in them. Users throw away the flower and use the glass as pipes. And if they can't find them they will use whatever is at hand.
It's also assuming that crack users will use fresh pipes when given the opportunity. Crackheads are not known for making good decisions and they actually have reasons to reuse pipes. You get more bang for your buck if you reuse crackpipes because you aren't just smoking the crack you have in the pipe, you are getting the residue from previous times as well.
The worst part of this is the optics for the Biden administration. Biden got into the White House in part because he promised minority communities a better life. Instead he is giving them crack pipes. A brief look on twitter seems to show that the black community especially is pretty offended by this.
This seems like a policy that nobody asked for and nobody will like. Liberals will assume that it is racist. Conservatives will think that it's utterly ridiculous to give criminals help in committing crime. And the crackheads aren't going to care in the first place. It just seems like a major own goal.
I am guessing that some functionary in the Biden White House approved this without ever running it by anyone who understands the real world. It was buried deep within a Biden executive order document and they assumed that nobody would ever notice, but the conservative media did.
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