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Posts Tagged ‘fentanyl’

GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl – POLITICO

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2023

Republicans suggest everything from terrorist labels to an invasion to decimate drug cartels in Mexico.

I suspect Mexican civilians, you know – women/children, will be the primary victims.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/10/gop-bomb-mexico-fentanyl-00091132

A growing number of prominent Republicans are rallying around the idea that to solve the fentanyl crisis, America must bomb it away.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants.

“We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said in a short interview.

Not all Republican leaders are behind this approach. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser who’s weighing his own presidential run, said unilateral military operations “are not going to solve the problem.” And House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-Texas), for example, is “still evaluating” the AUMF proposal “but has concerns about the immigration implications and the bilateral relationship with Mexico,” per a Republican staff member on the panel.

But the eagerness of some Republicans to openly legislate or embrace the use of the military in Mexico suggests that the idea is taking firmer root inside the party. And it illustrates the ways in which frustration with immigration, drug overdose deaths and antipathy towards China are defining the GOP’s larger foreign policy.

Nearly 71,000 Americans died in 2021 from synthetic-opioid overdoses — namely fentanyl — far higher than the 58,220 U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam War. And the Drug Enforcement Agency assessed in December that “most” of the fentanyl distributed by two cartels “is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemicals sourced largely from China.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are allergic to the Republican proposals. President Joe Biden doesn’t want to launch an invasion and has rejected the terrorist label for cartels. His team argues that two issued executive orders already expanded law-enforcement authorities to target transnational organizations.

“The administration is not considering military action in Mexico,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said. “Designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would not grant us any additional authorities that we don’t already have.” Instead, Watson said the administration hopes to work with Congress on modernizing the Customs and Border Protection’s technologies and making fentanyl a Schedule I drug, which would impose the strictest regulations on its production and distribution.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, told Defense One in an interview last month that invading Mexico was a bad idea. “I wouldn’t recommend anything be done without Mexico’s support,” he said, insisting that tackling the cartel-fueled drug trade is a law enforcement issue.

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Lessons from Fentanyl

Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2022

The moral of the fentanyl overdose epidemic story is not that prescription opioids should never have been legally prescribed, nor that advertising should be prohibited, but that individual patients should be more vigilant as they consider which course of treatment to undergo.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/lessons-from-fentanyl/

by Laurie Calhoun

pexels karolina grabowska 5207322

The use of drugs is sometimes characterized as a victimless crime, since the person who ingests them will bear the negative consequences should something go awry. Supporters of prohibition, who wish for the government to regulate and limit sales and distribution, are typically concerned with not only the moral effects on individuals themselves but also what might be called the “collateral damage”: the family and community members affected by the user who succumbs and loses “the plot” of his life, so to speak. This concern with “collateral damage,” however, applies to drug (including alcohol) use more generally, whether or not the substance in question is illegal. In fact, as both Prohibition and the War on Drugs illustrate, the crimes committed by users and suppliers multiply in tandem with laws enacted to prevent people from obtaining the substances which they wish to ingest.

If no one in the United States who sold drugs was committing a crime, then there would be no witnesses to worry about and possibly eliminate. There would be no need for armed cadres of contract killers to deal with the rival gangsters attempting to control sales over makeshift domains. No one would be in prison for drug possession or sales, including the parents of children rendered homeless or wards of the state as a result. The purchase of drugs would be rendered safer for consumers themselves, who would no longer have to gamble in deciding which criminal to patronize, having no idea what the source of the substances was and whether and with what they may have been cut. When drug use is criminalized, addicts in search of a needed but expensive (because illegal) fix may be driven to commit other crimes, generating even more collateral damage, only because of the illegality of drug use. It may seem axiomatic to libertarians that laws create crimes, but all of these empirical hypotheses, previously tested by the Prohibition, have been more recently confirmed by Portugal in the years since 2001, when the government of that country decriminalized recreational drug use.

The drug scene has transformed significantly over the course of the past three decades, as a result of the sudden appearance and spread of synthetic substances. Throughout much of the twentieth century, most of the street drugs which people were peddling had natural origins: marijuana, hashish, cocaine, opium, morphine, heroin, et al., are all derived from plants. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is a potent synthetic drug, but it is not addictive and, aside from the hippie era, it has never been as popular as any of the aforementioned natural drugs. Today, however, for reasons peculiar to the explosion of synthetic drug production in the late twentieth century, including the never-ending quest of pharmaceutical companies to discover and market profitable molecules, many popular street drugs, too, are synthetic. Drug trends come and go, but among the substances which have taken off in recent years, fentanyl stands in a class all its own. Fentanyl is not only inexpensive to produce but also highly addictive and so potent that even a tiny dose can be deadly. At first glance, it might seem to some that the fentanyl crisis itself constitutes a cogent argument for prohibition. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as an examination of the etiology of the current overdose epidemic reveals.

The use of fentanyl as a synthetic heroin surrogate became widespread after millions of people became addicted to prescription pain medications such as Vicodin, Hydrocodone, and Oxycontin, and turned to the streets for their needed fixes.

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Tucker Carlson Announces George Floyd Fatally Overdosed with Fentanyl and A Lawsuit Is Brought to Force Release of HCQ to the Public – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on August 7, 2020

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/08/06/tucker-carlson-announces-george-floyd-fatally-overdosed-with-fentanyl-and-a-lawsuit-is-brought-to-force-release-of-hcq-to-the-public/

Paul Craig Roberts

Related Double-Header Today

Tucker Carlson on Fox News Announces What I and  John-Paul Leonard Told You Almost 2 Months ago—George Floyd Fatally Overdosed with Fentanyl

A Lawsuit Is Brought to Force Release of HCQ to the Public

The rest of the media continues to lie to protect the anti-white agenda and Big Pharma’s profit agenda.

Here is Tucker Carlson’s report:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eg4vfcdITw

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the censoring Nazi media have been protecting the official lie on Floyd, just as they do on everything else, such as HCQ, Russiagate, 9/11, Iranian nukes, peaceful protests, Russian invasions, so watch Tucker before the “free American media” cancels him.  Note that both Tucker and his guest are sufficiently intimidated by the media claim that Floyd was murdered to make it clear that they are not claiming that the police had no responsibility in Floyd’s death, but they don’t identify what the responsibility is. When even Tucker Carlson can be intimidated, you can see the power of the lie.

As Minnesota’s black attorney general, Keith Ellison, clearly admits on Tucker Carlson, he withheld the police video of their encounter with Floyd in order to aid his prosecution of the police officers who he falsely indicted.

In other words the video does not support the indictment or the official story that the despicable lying presstitutes have beat into your heads by endless repetition and misrepresentation.

The video clearly reveals an agitated and uncooperative Floyd complaining of difficulty breathing long before the infamous knee-on-neck, a routine restraint part of police training.  The police did not use excessive restraint. They eventually realized that Floyd was in distress. They accommodated Floyd’s request to be taken out of the squad car and allowed to lay on the ground.  You might remember that a large number of presstitute scum misrepresented Floyd’s being removed from the squad car and put on the ground as police brutality.  A number of Internet idiots screamed: “they had him safely in the car and took him out so they could kill him!”

The police realized Floyd was on drug overdose and called for medics.  Floyd was being held still so as not to exhaust his restricted oxygen capability in agitation. Floyd died because the ambulance did not get there in time.

When the top law enforcement official in Minneapolis withholds exculpatory evidence in order to frame and convict innocent police, and the law enforcement official is black and the police are white, it puts a different color on the lies we have been told.

Here is one person’s analysis of the police video: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/no_author/newly-released-george-floyd-body-cam-footage-should-make-keith-ellison-nervous/

Here is a link to the video of the police trying to get Floyd into the car:  https://www.rt.com/usa/497006-george-floyd-leaked-bodycam-footage/  Notice that RT is so intimidated that RT warns “disturbing video.”

Notice that Floyd is very agitated and very confused. He was sitting in a car with the windows up, but refuses to get in the police car because he is claustrophobic. The police assure him that they will roll down the window and stay with him.  He is too confused to comply with police instructions to show his hands, put his hands on the steering wheel, put his hands on his head.  Instead, he gives non-relevant replies.  Note that the police do not taser him or strike him. One officer keeps Floyd covered with a pistol until he shows his hands.

Note that Floyd complains of breathing problems following his resistance to being put in the police car. The breathing problem associated with fentanyl overdose is beginning to set in. Fentanyl’s effects include confusion, problems breathing, and unconsciusness. “An overdose occurs when a drug produces serious adverse effects and life-threatening symptoms. When people overdose on fentanyl, their breathing can slow or stop. This can decrease the amount of oxygen that reaches the brain, a condition called hypoxia. Hypoxia can lead to a coma and permanent brain damage, and even death”  — https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/fentanyl .

The lessons to be learned from the George Floyd tragecy are these:  A black state attorney general withheld exculpatory evidence in order to falsely indict police officers. The presstitute media is so totally devoid of integrity that a sustained campaign of disinformation was used for the purpose of convicting the police in the minds of the public.  To find an unbiased jury is probably impossible.

When will  Americans ever learn to stop listening to the media?

The presstitutes have done the same thing to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which is proven to be the most successful and safe treatment for Covid-19.  The media–print, TV, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google–have covered up the safety and effectiveness of HCQ and have stricken from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Internet searches evidence provided by doctors treating Covid-19, and by virologists, epidemiologists and immunologists attesting to the safety and efficacy of HCQ.

I was, perhaps, the first to give you the true information about HCQ.  I also reported that CDC, NIH, WHO, and FDA are in cahoots with Big Pharma which does not want the information out that a cheap cure for Covid exists, because Big Pharma and its shills at the public health agencies want to sell you Big Pharma’s expensive vaccine and “cure.”  For them, Covid is a money-making opportunity.  In pursuit of this opportunity, they are jointly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.  There should not only be class action suits against these criminals, but also murder indictments.  If officer Chauvin can be indicted for Floyd’s death, Fauci, Redfield, Big Pharma, and the rest can be indicted for murder not merely of one person but hundreds of thousands of people.

Here is an explanation of why and how Anthony Fauci has blocked HCQ as a treatment for Covid:  https://thenationalpulse.com/news/leaked-hydroxychloroquine-memo/

Here is an account of how the CDC’s Redfield survived fraud in AIDS research to rise to the head of CDC:  https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/jon-rappoport/cdc-director-robert-redfield-the-letter-that-should-have-destroyed-his-career/

You might wonder how such a compromised individual can rise to such a responsible position.  The answer is that Redfield is the kind of person Big Pharma wants in the position.

The Assoiation of American Physicians and Surgeons has filed a lawsuit to compell the release of HCQ to the public.  We will see if Big Pharma also owns the federal courts, as well as NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO, and Trump’s Department of Health  Human Services — https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/two-charts-put-dr-fauci-prison/

Information about Fauci’s corruption is beginning to get around:  https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/disease/why-is-fauci-not-in-prison/

Once again, the HCQ accurate information:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/08/03/hydroxychloroquine-one-more-time/

And this from a friend who grew up in Africa:

“I am a child of hydroxychloroquine. I spent my childhood using it against Malaria. I have used it for many, many years, one tablet a week. It kills Malaria in the blood. A pill a week works as prevention, if we were bit by Malaria mosquito, the hydroxychloroquine instantly killed the Malaria. In Eastern Congo, the Belgians farm it. Miles and miles of farming of the hydroxychloroquine trees.  The medicine is made from the bark layer of the stem, they just cut the bark, dried it and made it into pills. Which even makes it organic, at least the type we used.”

Once again, the information on Fentanyl: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/07/31/should-we-be-protesting-about-george-floyd-or-julian-assange/ 

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Cancelling America – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on June 23, 2020

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/22/cancelling-america/

Paul Craig Roberts

The presstitutes’ story is that George Floyd died from asphyxiation—“I can’t breathe”—from a police officer’s knee on his neck.  This story is not supported by the autopsy and toxicology reports.

The autopsy report says Floyd died of a heart attack and that no life-threatening injuries were inflicted by police restraint.  The medical examiner found no physical evidence to “support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” The toxicology report says that the concentration of Fentanyl in Floyd’s blood was more than three times the fatal dose. Fentanyl is a dangerous opioid.  Reports that the coroner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide are incorrect. The word “homicide” does not appear in the report.  https://www.scribd.com/document/464269559/George-Floyd-Autopsy-FULL-REPORT#from_embed?campaign=VigLink&ad_group=xxc1xx&source=hp_affiliate&medium=affiliate

As for Floyd’s neck, the autopsy report states there are “no areas of contusion or hemorrhage . . . The cervical spinal column is palpably stable and free of hemorrhage.”

Excited Delirium Syndrome (EXD) typically results from fatal drug overdose. The condition results in breathing problems and cardiopulmonary arrest. These were the symptoms that Floyd showed.

John-Paul Leonard provides an analysis here:  https://www.unz.com/article/or-did-george-floyd-die-of-a-drug-overdose/

Did you hear about this in the news?  No, of course not.  And neither did billionaire Chick-Fil-A owner Dan Cathy.  Cathy assumed responsibility for white racism  by humbling himself on his knee and polishing the shoes of a black rapper. https://www.rt.com/usa/492337-cathy-shines-shoes-black-rapper/

Whether this was a well-scripted public relations move to save Chick-Fil-A fast food restaurants from being burned down or a genuine act of self-deprecation by an uninformed Christian is beside the point.  What Cathy, celebrities, and public authorities have done by assuming white responsibility for the rioting and looting is to hand blacks carte blanche.  Violence and theft are now justified responses to alleged white racism.

Corporations are racing to atone for white racism by removing black images from food packaging. Suddenly long established  famous brand names such as Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, Uncle Ben’s rice,  the black chef on the Cream of Wheat package, and Eskimo Pie, have become signs of “systemic racism.”

It seems to me that the real racism is removing pictures of black people from packaging.  Does this mean we can only have images of white people on packaging?  Wouldn’t that be racist? How can we reconcile the woke idea that images of blacks are racist with the long-time push to have more black models and more black actors on TV?  Would it be racist to have an image of an Asian on a package?  How did Eskimo,  an indigenous people inhabiting cold regions and a language, become racist?

It seems so mindlessly silly.  It reminds me of Stanford University students in 1971 demanding that the name of the football team, the Stanford Indians, be changed (currently the Stanford Cardinals). Stanford’s honoring the memory of Indians was given an unintended meaning of racism or mockery, whereas in fact the university wanted its team associated with the fighting prowess of native Americans.

Blacks were associated with good home cooking.  Their images on food products was an effort to associate goodness with the food products.  I am certain that Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were never intended as racist images, but by removing pictures of blacks corporate PR hacks have accepted the assertion that black images are racist. The external costs of these corporate PR hacks are high. By accepting the charge that its packaging is racist, corporate public relations is enabling the rewriting of American history as a story of white racism. Everything American is racist, even packaging.

Public authorities and celebrities everywhere are taking a knee and apologizing for George Floyd’s death as if they are responsible for him overdosing on narcotics.  These apologies reinforce the idea that whites are the reason all blacks aren’t multi-millionaires. Guilt by association is also rampant. The stepmother of the Atlanta policeman, who shot the intoxicated black man who grabbed a taser from the police and aimed it at police, was fired from her job as human resources director at Equity Prime Mortgage as proof that EPM supports “communities of color.” https://www.rt.com/usa/492374-mortgage-fired-shooting-cop-guilt/

The country music group, Lady Antebellum, has announced a name change to Lady A.  The definition of antebellum is “existing before a war,” but the music group thinks the word has racist connotations like the movie, Gone With The Wind.

All of this can only end by making the United States a country without a history.  America is being cancelled.  According to the New York Times, the US is a country based on white racism. Therefore, American history is entirely racist and more disturbing than Aunt Jemima or a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Indeed, Western culture, being offensive, is itself being cancelled.  How can our cancellation be reconciled with the neoconservative claim that Americans are an exceptional and indispensable people entitled to hegemony over the world?

White liberals have taught black and white Americans that slavery is what whites do to blacks.  This is a lie. Slavery has nothing to do with race. Black slavery originated in Africa in the slave wars of the black king of Dahomey. Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, concludes from his research that from 1500 to 1650 more white Christian slaves were taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas. https://news.osu.edu/when-europeans-were-slaves–research-suggests-white-slavery-was-much-more-common-than-previously-believed/

This fact-based information is kept under wraps. Consequently, neither black nor white Americans have a clue that whites were enslaved by people of color.  This allows blacks to claim to be the only victims of slavery, just as Jews claim special privileges as the only people to experience holocaust while they inflict holocaust on Palestinians.

The evidence is clear. George Floyd was not killed by racist police. But try getting that fact acknowledged.  The agenda is to cancel America, and facts are not permitted to get in the way. 

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Ann Coulter: On the Other Hand, There’s Rodney King…

Posted by M. C. on June 4, 2020

It turns out, for example, Floyd didn’t die of asphyxiation according to the medical examiner. According to the Hennepin County medical examiner’s report cited in the criminal complaint charging Officer Derek Chauvin with murder, he died of a heart attack. The autopsy also found Floyd had fentanyl in his system, had recently used methamphetamine, had coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease.

Maybe…but who does the medical examiner work for?

When chunks of video are missing it should make one wonder. Will they magically show up later?

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/03/ann-coulter-on-the-other-hand-theres-rodney-king/

Why is this case the one inciting mass protests? Ninety-nine percent of the country is denouncing the Minneapolis police in the most damnable terms possible over the death of George Floyd. The 99 percent are demanding that the 1 percent “hear their voices”?

The arrest certainly looks awful. Everything is going along relatively peacefully as Floyd is walked to a police van, then there’s some commotion out of sight of the camera –- and suddenly you see Floyd pinned to the ground, an officer’s knee on his neck. How did that happen?

One reason some of us are waiting for all the facts is that we suspect the media may not be extra scrupulous in cases that give them the opportunity to wail about “systemic racism.”

It turns out, for example, Floyd didn’t die of asphyxiation according to the medical examiner. According to the Hennepin County medical examiner’s report cited in the criminal complaint charging Officer Derek Chauvin with murder, he died of a heart attack. The autopsy also found Floyd had fentanyl in his system, had recently used methamphetamine, had coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease.

According to Nexis, these official autopsy findings have not been reported at all on MSNBC and only briefly — to be explained away — on CNN. (The family’s private autopsy concluding Floyd’s death was caused by strangulation has been widely reported.)

There also hasn’t been loads of reporting on Floyd’s five years in prison for armed robbery. I know the guy has just died, and he seemed to have turned his life around, but the media isn’t holding a memorial service. They’re supposed to be reporting news. How about an interview with Floyd’s victims? Wouldn’t that be a newsy segment?

Again, according to Nexis, Floyd’s armed robbery conviction has been fleetingly mentioned only once on ABC News and once on Fox News.

The other reason some of us are waiting for all the facts can be summed up with two words: Rodney King.

That arrest looked pretty bad, too. The jury forewoman on the first trial said that when she saw the King video on television, “I was revulsed. … I thought they were hitting that poor man too hard and too long.”

But at the trial a year later, she got to see the 13 seconds of video that had been deliberately edited out by the media: the 6-foot-4, 240-pound King rising like a phoenix and charging at one of the officers.

The video that played on an endless loop on TV showed only the tail end of the encounter, when officers were whacking King with their batons.

In fact, however, the beating was the officers’ last resort for subduing King, who’d just led them on a high-speed car chase, at times reaching speeds of up to 115 mph, drawing several police cars and a police helicopter.

Once stopped, King’s two (black) passengers exited the car and got on the ground, as instructed. They went home without a scratch that night.

But King leapt out and began dancing and babbling, crouching, kneeling, laughing and waving to the police helicopter overhead. Both the officers and King’s passengers believed he was high on angel dust.

The senior officer, Sgt. Stacey Koon, ordered the officers to back away and holster their guns. He didn’t want to risk a fatal encounter.

Four officers tried swarming King — he threw them off his back like rag dolls. A dart from a Taser gun did nothing. Then another — also nothing. King lunged at an officer and got hit with a baton, but kept on raging. The police were running out of options that would allow everyone to stay alive.

That’s when three officers began hitting King with their metal batons, under the supervision of Sgt. Koon. If King moved, they whacked him. Finally, they managed to double-cuff him — the procedure for suspects on PCP — and put him in an ambulance to the hospital.

When Sgt. Koon first heard that the arrest had been captured on video, he was ecstatic. “This is great!” he said. “They got it on tape! Now we’ll have a live, in-the-field film to show police recruits. It can be a real-life example of how to use escalating force properly.”

Not only the jurors, but nearly everyone who saw the first trial ended up supporting the acquittal, including Roger Parloff, a liberal legal reporter who sat through most of the trial for the American Lawyer, and Lou Cannon, who covered it for the Washington Post. The renowned (black) economist Walter Williams was shocked by “the news media’s dereliction and deception” in their editing of the tape.

All this is detailed in my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, but at the time, the public knew none of it, thanks to our activist media.

The endlessly played Rodney King video hid the same part of Floyd’s arrest that’s being withheld today. Doesn’t anyone else wonder how Floyd ended up on the ground? Where are those videos?

Nah, it’s much easier — and cost-free! — to Speak Truth to the 1 percent.

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IAN BIRRELL on how tech giants have turned San Francisco into a dystopian nightmare | Daily Mail Online

Posted by M. C. on February 3, 2020

Considering the city’s wealth, it smacks of callous and uncaring hypocrisy.

I had just passed dealers selling drugs beside a police car parked outside government offices

As one local resident says: ‘Are they really being progressive to that poor guy in the street with a needle in his arm who is going to die tomorrow?’

Here is a thought. Raise the minimum to guarantee these poor people will never get a job.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-7956517/IAN-BIRRELL-tech-giants-turned-San-Francisco-dystopian-nightmare.html

By Ian Birrell for The Mail on Sunday

Gilles Desaulniers moved to San Francisco 40 years ago, settling in the ‘friendly, quaint and affordable’ city after running out of cash while driving from Canada down the West Coast of America.

Today he runs a grocery store filled with fresh fruit, vegan snacks and organic wines typical of this famously liberal Californian city.

But Gilles has shut one outlet and would sell up entirely if anyone wanted this one, his remaining shop.

Each day, up to 30 people stroll in and openly steal goods, costing him hundreds of dollars.

A street cleaner showed me a box filled with used syringes that he had collected, then I met two charity workers picking up needles from the pavement. How many do you find a day, I ask? ¿Between 300 and 600, depending on the weather,¿ one replies. A homeless man is pictured second left using a syringe to inject drugs in the city in June 2018

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A street cleaner showed me a box filled with used syringes that he had collected, then I met two charity workers picking up needles from the pavement. How many do you find a day, I ask? ‘Between 300 and 600, depending on the weather,’ one replies. A homeless man is pictured second left using a syringe to inject drugs in the city in June 2018

He has been bitten twice recently by people in his shop and he also found a woman turning blue in the toilet after a drugs overdose, a hypodermic needle still stuck in her leg.

He showed me a metal door that is corroding due to people urinating in his doorway, then spoke of finding a man relieving himself in full view of infants playing in a child centre next door.

‘Our society is falling apart,’ says Desaulniers.

‘If people do not play by some rules, society does not function. But it feels like there is no order, there is no shame.’

He uses two apocalyptic movies to illustrate the state of his adopted city: ‘Living here feels like A Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner have both come true.’

I could grasp his despair. I had just passed dealers selling drugs beside a police car parked outside government offices, and seen their customers openly smoke fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin, then collapse on the street…

Yet true to form, San Francisco has just elected as district attorney a radical called Chesa Boudin, whose parents were infamous militants from a far-Left, anti-war group. They were jailed for triple murder when Chesa was a toddler, leaving him to be adopted by the founders of the organisation.

The 39-year-old, who studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and later worked as a translator for Venezuela’s former leader Hugo Chavez, a Fidel Castro acolyte, campaigned on moving away from prosecuting ‘quality of life’ offences to focus on serious and corporate offences.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association spent heavily campaigning against Boudin, saying he was the choice for ‘criminals and gang members’.

But Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the charity Coalition on Homelessness, argues city residents should get angry over ‘systemic neglect’ that sparked this crisis rather than blaming people on the streets.

‘No one wants to live like this,’ she says. ‘We’ve tried locking people up before but that didn’t work.’

Friedenbach insists that the problems stem from a lack of affordable housing, a significant reduction of emergency shelters and the slashing of spending on treatment programmes.

She says, rightly, that issues of homelessness, mental health and addiction are often linked.

The city’s mayor, London Breed, whose younger sister died of a drug overdose and elder brother was jailed for robbery, declined to comment.

In her inaugural speech, Breed said the ‘twin troubles of homelessness and housing affordability’ were the big challenge.

She is boosting grants for shelters, treatment and street cleaning. Yet those desperate sights staining this one-time hippy nirvana are ultimately the sign of abject political failure.

Her new fiefdom is, after all, so populated by millionaires in their exclusive enclaves that it is the second richest city in the world’s richest nation.

Considering the city’s wealth, it smacks of callous and uncaring hypocrisy.

As one local resident says: ‘Are they really being progressive to that poor guy in the street with a needle in his arm who is going to die tomorrow?’

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The beautiful city by the bay, where Tony Bennett famously left his heart and which poses as a beacon of progressiveness, has more billionaires per capita than any other on the planet. Not long ago, a seven-bedroom home here recently sold for $38 million (£29 million), while at the Michelin-starred Saison restaurant, the ¿kitchen menu¿ starts at $298 a head and reservations require a $148 deposit

 

 

 

 

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