https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/10/biden-smoking-kits-pipes-addiction/6724719001/

I’m not trying to bash Biden and Harris, and will be voting for them a second time soon… The White House appears to have used misdirection and some fancy pants doublespeak to publicly deny it. Here’s how it really works:

We provide “safer smoking kits” to drug users at no cost to them. What the funding bill and resulting grants said is that we, the harm reductionists who run programs, get to decide what goes in to our kits. Technically, they’re not lying. So yeah, let me tell you how the White House is able to honestly say that they don’t fund crack pipe distribution.

Our crack kits don’t technically contain assembled crack pipes… In order to make a crack pipe, a user has to put the screen or Brillo pad (we provide both) in the glass stem in order for it to meet the legal definition of “crack pipe”. It takes about ten seconds to assemble one, and we give them out usually about 5 at a time, depending on how much crack a person smokes. The max I’ve ever given out was 50, to a guy who had an eighth a day habit and was pretty damn wealthy. They get to choose, and they understand that our stock is limited, so they only take what they need. We don’t ask for names or IDs. It doesn’t matter if you’re broke or a millionaire, we serve all drug users and the people who surround them.

Our kits aren’t just EZ-Build crack pipes; we give them lip balm (as crack pipes can get very hot with obsessive use or if it’s being used by multiple people), little wood pusher sticks which help them use crack more efficiently, rubber mouthpieces which prevent burns and disease spread, new lighters, and a few other knick nacks.

We give everyone narcan as well, so they can save their opioid user friends should one get a bag of dope that’s heavy on the fentanyl. Or if they somehow find pure heroin, which was hard to come by when I was using fifteen years ago. In those days, only paramedics carried narcan! Now your friendly neighborhood crackhead carries it as well, thanks to democrats like me!

But what about meth users, you might ask? What about people who smoke fentanyl? Do they get government funded pipes too???

Yes. Totally taxpayer funded, although we do have other grants and donations. The meth kits are pretty much the same, only with taxpayer funded meth pipes instead of crack pipes. For fentanyl smokers, we have hammerhead pipes. We also have clean sheets of aluminum foil with fresh straws for folks who smoke heroin.

We also do needle exchange… Until a few years ago, it was a one for one syringe exchange, but now we give out boxes of a hundred along with sharps containers to anyone except the diabetics trying to get free medical supplies from us… Hell, even then we give them out even though our grants specify drug users as recipients. We dispose of sharps containers, and we make our clients promise to use them to minimize needle stick injuries. We have contracts with a medical waste company, as do all other needle exchange programs.

My ultimate point here is that HELL YES WE GIVE OUT CRACK PIPES THAT ARE FUNDED BY TAX DOLLARS, and we save lives by doing it. That’s not just a bold claim; harm reduction has been studied, a lot (in part because young liberals going in to allied or public health hear the bizarre and ostensibly false things that some ultraconservatives say about harm reduction and love proving them insane using actual large sample scientific studies), and continues to be studied at the most reputable colleges you can find.

So yeah, AMA. And no, I’m not going to send you pipes or syringes. We only distribute to residents of the city I’m in!