SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Do Seattle leaders think voters are too stupid to vote?

Oct 12, 2017, 7:13 PM

safe injection site, insite, injection sites...

Injection booths at Insite, a safe injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

(Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

On Friday in Seattle, there will unfold an incredible occurrence: a group of monarchists, joined by a group of statists from the city, will press a lawsuit that contends only they should be allowed to vote on government-funded heroin dens.

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The actual thesis of the people who brought the suit — lead by a career bureaucrat with an MD — is that only people they deem worthy should have any say over what they claim is a public health issue. The question before the judge: do these monarchists get to erase your vote against government-funded heroin dens? The long-term precedent that a decision in their favor would set, is clear and distinctly un-American. If these monarchists succeed, they will have opened a door we fought a revolution to close: that door leads to the theory that you are far too stupid to vote on certain topics. In this case, whether you want to follow in the foot steps of Vancouver B.C. and erect government-funded heroin dens. In the long run, monarchists can apply that same precedent to decide you are too dumb to vote on tax policy. As I said, this is an incredible occurrence.

There are ways to allows doctors to prescribe heroin as medicine while people come down — read “Chasing The Scream,” as recommended by Ron Upshaw — but, the government-funded heroin dens are decidedly not that way. It seems that monarchists either haven’t bothered to read the data on the Vancouver program, or simply think Canadians are too dim to run government-funded heroin dens in the proper way.

In Vancouver B.C, overdoses are up to record levels, death from overdoses are up to record levels, the area around the heroin dens are packed with people shooting up on the street (not in the dens) and with MS13 gang members standing by to sell more heroin and to threaten aid workers who try to help people get off of the drug. This data is so clear that I can only conclude the monarchists who want to steal your right to vote believe you are also too dumb to read it and Canadians are too simple minded to somehow create a good program that subsidizes heroin users and serves the interests of drug addicts. There’s is the way to invite more users, more dealers, more gang enforcers, more sex traffickers and more crime.

The biggest crime, though, is the attempt to steal your right to vote. If these monarchists succeed in judge-shopping well enough to find a jurist who will erase your right to vote on this so called “public health” issue — it’s actually a crime issue, as none of their proposals are about treatment or health — then the precedent is this: on some subjects, only special people get to decide. That can extend to tax policy; only Berkeley economics professors who insist raising the cost of labor does not effect hiring can vote on minimum wage laws. Only naturalists from the Sierra Club can vote on public land issues, and only police officers on issues of policing … oh, wait, I should say only criminologists from Evergreen State. These monarchists would never let working men and women make important decisions like crime policy.

The next time Ed Murray, Dan Satterberg or their mutual friend Kshama Sawant yells about how checking someone’s ID before they are allowed to vote is racist suppression of the vote, remember, they were all partners in the crime of conspiring to erase your vote against government-funded heroin dens. They contribute to the theft of your vote in the long-run.

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Do Seattle leaders think voters are too stupid to vote?