Dori: E-cigarettes, sports betting bad, but heroin death dens ok

Seattle is considering following San Francisco and becoming one of the first U.S. cities to ban sales of e-cigarettes.

San Francisco banned e-cigarettes on Tuesday, and Jenny Durkan has said that it’s time to discuss a similar move in Seattle.

What makes this so bizarre? Jenny Durkan supports heroin death sites in Seattle and King County. She supports the government spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up heroin dens where addicts can go inject poison into their veins under the watchful eye of local government.

So she wants to set up a formal heroin injection location, but ban e-cigarettes. Does that make any sense to you?

There is nothing ‘safe’ about injection sites

I’ll give you another example of the hypocrisy of our region. Last year, the Supreme Court said that states can engage in sports gambling. It was previously only legal in Nevada, for the most part. Did you know that last month, New Jersey did more business in sports betting than Nevada?

There are around 20 states that have legalized or are in the process of legalizing sports betting. Is Washington among them? No — Washington isn’t even considering it. No one in the Legislature is even proposing it.

Why not? It’s a voluntary tax. And it’s not like we’re prudes when it comes to gambling. The tribal casinos do very well for themselves. We’ve got horse racing, we’ve got Bingo. The Washington State Lottery runs the biggest rip-off gambling game there is. We’ve got all kinds of gambling. But the one we will not tolerate is sports gambling.

We’ve legalized personal possession amounts of hard drugs, effectively, in King County. Yet if you want to place a $10 bet against the Mariners — or on the Mariners, if you don’t need the $10 — that is a felony. That is because the gambling interests that are already entrenched in our state don’t want the competition.

This is a vast pot of available revenue for our state. Right now, there are a lot of people who gamble on sports — they just do it on offshore accounts. All that money flows out of the state. Washington could make a fortune, and the best part is, it’s a voluntary tax. If you don’t want to be taxed for sports betting, don’t make a sports bet.

We remain one of the most bizarre states in the union. Small amounts of heroin are acceptable, but e-cigarettes are not. Small amounts of meth are fine, but sports betting is not. If you can make any sense of that, please let me know, because I’m having trouble making sense of how ridiculously liberal we are when it comes to drugs, and how regressive we are when it comes to things like sports gambling.

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