Seattle’s Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) has passed out heroin pipes and so-called “booty bumping” kits. The DESC has also posted several flyers at their Navigation Center location on 12th Avenue South.
DESC is an independent non-profit, but officials with Seattle’s Human Services Department (HSD) say they back DESC’s method because it “reflects the varying needs of those experiencing homelessness in Seattle.” DESC’s Executive Director, Daniel Malone, confirmed on the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH that the DESC uses “funds from our contract with the City of Seattle to purchase clean syringes and other harm reduction supplies.”
The DESC is a self-described “social justice organization,” but what is “just” about degrading people and encouraging them to continue a lifestyle that will lead only to their demise?
DESC claims that giving users pipes and telling them how to insert drugs rectally is “harm-reduction techniques and evidence-based practices” i.e., they want their homeless charges to be safer and more efficient addicts.
One flyer is focused on smoking heroin, because “smoking is a lower-risk alternative to injection. Give it a try!” The second flyer promotes “booty bumping” kits, which encourages people to insert drugs into their rectum using a syringe with no needle. A rectum is very efficient at absorption, so the high is described as more intense and longer-lasting. The flyer says this method is a “good choice if your veins are hard to hit,” and that it “doesn’t leave tracks.”
This is called a “harm reduction model.” Most of us have heard of similar programs that provide clean needles to addicts. Supplying pipes and “booty-bumping kits” falls “on the continuum of helping people to decrease risk by avoiding the use of needles to inject drugs,” says Malone...." Fulcrum7
