A CRACK IN THE STORY –

Feb. 15, 2022 – It started with a story in the Washington Free Beacon that falsely said a federal Department of Health and Human Services grant was handing out free “crack pipes” to Black people. It wasn’t true. The six-month-old grant program, which included the same sort of needle-exchange services pushed by Rehder in the Missouri Legislature, also offered “safe smoking kits,” which similarly reduce the spread of HIV and hepatitis. The grant said nothing about pipes. But the controversy — which soon became labeled by critics as President Joe Biden’s free crack pipes — did real damage to the cause of harm reduction. Sabora went to the social media platform TikTok to create a video to decry the racial division that has often been used to harm serious efforts to decrease drug abuse in America’s cities.

“They have been using crack cocaine to villainize people of color since the 1980s,” he said. “You fell for it again. And now we’re at each other’s throats. They win.” While the federal program didn’t advertise the giveaway of glass pipes, Sabora wishes it would have. He further wishes the federal government had done a better job standing up to the misinformation and making the case for harm-reduction programs.

“If we could get people to use clean anything, it’s going to reduce the cost to taxpayers much more than this grant is paying, and it has all sorts of other benefits, including increased treatment,” Sabora said. “There are a bunch of people who fought for years to get this funding so we could help all communities. We have full bipartisan support.”

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