Bureaucracy

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San Francisco bureaucracy focuses on the wrong things. See this article for the backstory.

A San Francisco woman was faced with a $1,400 bill to keep her “Little Free Library” in front of her house after one complaint, even though it’s been there for years. I love these little library boxes that dot the city. There’s one on my block. They’re a great community addition.

I love San Francisco. But in a city that suffers from the ongoing drug epidemic and struggles with too many fentanyl overdoses, stories like this illustrate where the city bureaucrats focus on the wrong things.

Marijuana

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President Biden has announced that he will pardon all people convicted of federal offenses for simple marijuana possession. This isn’t drug dealers and traffickers, but people who simply had small amounts or used marijuana on federal lands.

He also will try to influence governors to do the same at the state level, and work to reclassify marijuana so it’s not considered the same as heroin and other hard drugs.

It’s a good step that is bound to help millions who can’t get a job or housing due to simple marijuana violations.

It’s time for our country to recognize that the War on Drugs has done more harm than good and move ahead with decriminalization of marijuana.

Fear Mongering

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Everything old is new again. Whether it’s remakes of old horror movies like Friday the 13th and Scream, or rehashing old irrational panics.

According to polls by the non partisan Public Religion Research Institute, ~1/4 of Republicans believe Satan-worshipping pedophiles running a global sex-trafficking operation control the U.S. government, media and financial institutions. It’s not just a replay of the old 1980s “Satanic Panic,” it’s a core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

But not just that- we’re also getting an encore of the 80s fear mongering that some stranger will slip drugs into your kid’s Halloween candy! This time it’s fentanyl in brightly colored pills, called “rainbow pills” or skittles. While the rainbow fentanyl pills are real, we’ve yet to see drug dealers or users eager to give it all away at the front door. But that didn’t stop RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel from stoking those fears.

The Satanic Panic and Drugs in the Halloween Candy fears have come before and they weren’t true. But a lot of people were tricked into believing they were true.

There are things to watch out for in the world. But all told, the vast majority of people are good and America is a much safer place than it was 30 years ago (crime statistics support the trends).

Don’t give in to these fears. They’re no more threat to you than Jason or Ghostface. They’re all equally fictional.