Let us help you kill yourself safely

The White House version of "Jackass 2.0" is providing cover for all sorts of things. Elon Musk is the new "Look! A squirrel!"

Here in Oregon I did manage to notice the other day, and it made me mad, that Governor Kohoutek, for whom I've never had nor will I ever have any use, was pushing to spend all the money that the state gets from the opioid settlement on the almighty "harm reduction." This is the handing out of free drug paraphernalia, overdose kits, and God knows what-all else to every drug addict on the street.

A state board overrode a request from Gov. Tina Kotek to spend the entirety of Oregon’s national opioid settlement money over the next two years on harm reduction services and supplies, preserving funding for drug treatment and prevention programs.

That means Save Lives Oregon, a state-funded program that provides harm reduction resources, training and items such as clean syringes, Narcan and fentanyl test strips to local organizations, will get $5.1 million instead of $21.6 million in opioid settlement funding through 2027.

Several members of the 18-person Opioid Settlement Prevention, Treatment and Recovery Board, established in 2022 to allocate state funds from legal settlements with national pharmaceutical companies, said the board’s decision Wednesday aligned with its previous funding formula.

I'm glad somebody's saying no to the governor. There's so much wrong with "harm reduction," not the least of which is the message it sends to junkies everywhere that if they come out to the West Coast cities, they'll be free to kill themselves right out in the open, and assisted by the government in doing so. 

Normalizing drug use and life in a tent on a sidewalk is not humane, nor it is helping anyone. The options need to be treatment, jail, or a bus to somewhere else. That's where all the public money should go. If some do-gooders think otherwise, let them hold a bake sale for the free needles, tourniquets, and boof kits for the doomed.