guilty till proven?....???
Without going into great deal of detail about anything. resently pulled over doing nothing wrong other than driving around on a friday afternoon.
The Chronicle will be back next year, er, next week.
Your ink-stained wretch of a Chronicle editor spent this past week relocating from the frigid steppes of the Dakotas to the friendlier clime of Northern California's Sonoma County, the land of milk and honey. Once I made it over Donner Pass on I-80 with the help of tire chains, it was all downhill from there...
Next week, in honor of the coming of the new year, I will put on my best Janus face(s), and the Chronicle will look back at the big news of '08, as well as looking forward at what should be/could be the big news of '09, so stay tuned for that pair of features a week from today.
I've also got a pile of drug policy-related books that are begging to be read and reviewed. I'll be working on that in the next few days as well, so you can expect to see some reviews dribbling out in the coming weeks.
Now, it's the day after Christmas, and I have to venture out to the shopping malls in search of a router for my new Internet set up. See you next year, and next week.
Bush Endorses Harm Reduction Groupâ¦Sort Of
President Bush did a photo-op today in which he delivered used coats at the headquarters of Pathways to Housing and praised the organizationâs efforts to help the homeless. Of course, thereâs nothing surprising about the President doing charitable appearances during the Christmas season. Whatâs interesting is that Pathways to Housing offers a quite unique and forward-thinking approach to the problem of homelessness:
This is basically a harm reduction approach to homelessness, in that active drug users receive services (including an apartment) in order to stabilize their situation and connect them to opportunities for treatment and health care. Itâs a fantastic program that is achieving remarkable success, which is exactly why Iâm surprised to see the President associate himself with it.
Bushâs White House has vehemently pushed an abstinence-first approach to drug treatment, even going so far as to oppose overdose prevention kits on the theory that overdosing would teach users a lesson. Pathways to Housingâs approach to drug addiction is just the complete opposite of everything Bushâs drug policy has stood for. Thus todayâs appearance illustrates once again the gaping disparity between what actually works and what his priorities have been for the last 8 years.
Founded in 1992, Pathways to Housing, a not-for-profit organization, works with individuals who have been turned away from other programs because of active substance use/abuse, refusal to participate in psychiatric treatment, histories of violence or incarceration, or other behavioral problems.
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Pathways to Housing separates housing from treatment. It treats homelessness by providing people with individual apartments, and then treats mental illness by intensive and individualized programs that seek out and actively work with clients as long as they need, in order to address their emotional, psychiatric, medical, and human needs, on a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week basis.
This is basically a harm reduction approach to homelessness, in that active drug users receive services (including an apartment) in order to stabilize their situation and connect them to opportunities for treatment and health care. Itâs a fantastic program that is achieving remarkable success, which is exactly why Iâm surprised to see the President associate himself with it.
Bushâs White House has vehemently pushed an abstinence-first approach to drug treatment, even going so far as to oppose overdose prevention kits on the theory that overdosing would teach users a lesson. Pathways to Housingâs approach to drug addiction is just the complete opposite of everything Bushâs drug policy has stood for. Thus todayâs appearance illustrates once again the gaping disparity between what actually works and what his priorities have been for the last 8 years.