Opiate Addiction License to do Crime

Ok, call me insensitive but we’ve been dealing with this opiate addiction in whatever form for decades now. As a community we’ve demanded ways to remove drug dealing from our streets. We’ve asked for tools and followed thru with those tools to assist law enforcement in tackling this menacing problem. We’ve taken pictures, we’ve created logs, we’ve created online forums and community pages, and documented the trafficking by people and by vehicle. We’ve set up networks to advise neighbors near and nearer and we are still dealing with this problem. We diligently take time to do this so that our police can do their part just to have these criminals face our criminal system just to be put back in our communities doing business as usual.

So now we have made this big humane issue of these poor addicts that need all the help we can provide them so that they can overcome their addiction as defined as a disease. So now we are saying that since they have a disease it’s okay that they robbed 5 houses on the street so they can walk to the corner drug house to get their “next fix”. It’s ok that since they have a disease it’s ok that they killed two people in an automobile accident. Perhaps it’s finally been identified along the way somewhere that you can’t incarcerate an addict in hopes of “rehabilitating” them to not be an addict when they return to our neighborhoods.

In short I see leniency towards the drug dealers so that they can continue the cycle of selling to addicts; I see empathy and compassion towards the drug users that are not responsible for their actions and therefore should not be held accountable for their crimes. So now that we’ve established that no-one is to blame, perhaps we need to look towards our doctors and pharmaceutical industry for creating three generations of people addicted to opiates, pain pills, antacids, OTC pain, and everything from staying hard to keeping pimples off your ass.

Meanwhile our communities, the victims, continually absorb the ever increasing drug trade, drug users, crime, vandalism, decay, prostitution, stealing, and finally being the absolute victims of being stuck in all this because even though with all our efforts to make a better community, we’ve condemned ourselves to living in the continual squalor, the squalor intensified by the many used needles on our streets (of course provided for by our city), the freely available naloxone (of course provided for by our city), to assist our drug addict friends, and now discussions of non-criminal offenses for this disease.

I have a disease myself, I believe you’d all call it unempathetic or non-humane. Perhaps someone can help me and my community friends by finding ways to cure this disease. I think the treatment is realizing that we are victims too, we tend to be the ones fighting up front to get help in combating this drug epidemic and although we aren’t the ones reported dead in the media, shown strung out in the streets, or showing pictures of the drug addicts families trying to recover from the loss of an addict; we seem to be the ones that are pushed aside, neglected and although thanked for our dedicated endeavors in bringing a drug dealer to trial we are rewarded by seeing them back on our streets continuing where they left off and now we feel the progression of the disease by now being afraid to walk in our own neighborhoods because that drug dealer knows who we are and although the courts had mercy on them with lenient sentences, those dealers sure won’t have leniency on us!

So pish for posh, I really don’t want to hear about those “poor” addicts who cannot control their actions without equally hearing about how we can combat the drug selling and discussing how a community can protect itself from both the addicts and the dealers.

http://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/franklin-co-coroners-office-hosting-opiate-crisis-summit