Having friends living in Harrisburg when Agnes hit it's stunning to me that personal protective equipment emergency medical supplies are stored in a flood zone.
"Pennsylvania is looking for a new home for the huge stockpile of emergency supplies the state acquired to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic — and the next pandemicto come down the pike.
Boxes upon boxes of personal protective equipment now sit inside the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex — and that is becoming an increasing concern to both lawmakers and tourism advocates."
"Pa. General Services Secretary Curt Topper said his department needs $6 million in next year's state budget to cover the cost of relocating the state's stockpile of PPE to a leased facility."
"Topper is the first to admit the Farm Show Complex is not the ideal location for any long-term storage of the PPE.
It’s in a flood zone, although administration officials said the stockpile is placed in an area of the facility not prone to flooding...."
Anonymous officials said, "The stockpile is placed in an area not prone to flooding." Them sounds like weasel words, tergiversation.
Grove, along with two other House committee chairmen, found that just walking into the complex is not always possible. On Wednesday morning, they arrived for what they said was a pre-arranged 9 a.m. visit to inspect the stockpile only to find the doors locked. Security officers inside didn’t let them in.
Kensinger, Wolf’s spokeswoman, said that’s because the lawmakers were advised the day before that their visit needed to be rescheduled. Grove said he didn’t get the message.
So instead of inspecting the stockpile, they held a news conference to complain about a lack of transparency by the Wolf Administration and its interference with their ability to carry out their duties."
Grove and House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee Chairman Dan Moul, R-Adams County, also objected to being asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, to keep what they saw in the facility confidential.
“It’s the constitutional duty of the legislative branch to provide legislative oversight of executive agencies,” Grove said. “If we were to see something in here and not report it, we’re not doing our jobs.”
Seth Grove is from York County Pa. Having lived in York County in the 1960s, when the election of a Catholic, John F. Kennedy, revived the JBS, I assume an active Republican from York County is a John Birch Society extremist.
Fearful conspiracy people attracted to the John Birch Society and QAnon are a small segment of human population. On November 22, 1963 when JFK was assassinated the streets of the City of York PA were silent. We were in a state of shock.
There is a constant re-supply of hardwired fearful conspiracy believers that we now call "social conservatives" in each new generation. Some politicians take advantage of their fear:
"Placing blame on conspiracies is seductive to social conservatives because of the way their brains are hardwired, says Colin Holbrook, an evolutionary psychologist and research scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s not a pathology, nor because they’re less intelligent,” Holbrook tells me.
Holbrook co-authored a 2017 study for the journal Psychological Science, in which subjects were presented with a series of false statements such as, “Terrorist attacks in the U.S. have increased since Sept. 11, 2001,” and “Hotel room keycards are often encoded with personal information that can be read by thieves.”
In Holbrook’s study, social conservatives were more credulous about claims of danger in the world, and the phenomenon has roots in evolutionary psychology—being hyper-aware of threats could potentially save your life. But that evolutionary advantage also makes social conservatives more susceptible to claims about things that could potentially hurt them, according to Holbrook. “That’s what you’re probably seeing with the John Birchers in Texas and the conspiracies they fear,” he says."
Bircher ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s GOP and espoused by friends in high places. And the group is ready to make the most of it.
"Administration officials said on Wednesday the non-disclosure agreement grows out of security concerns.
'It’s important to note that nothing that was requested of the legislators would have impacted or interfered with their oversight,' said Wolf spokeswoman Elizabeth Rementer.
Nevertheless, a day later, the administration backed off the confidentiality requirement. Topper said during the Senate hearing on Thursday lawmakers touring the facility would not be required to sign the non-disclosure agreement.
Grove said he had yet to receive any information from the administration about rescheduling the tour but said he looks forward to it.
Schwank, who was given a tour Wednesday afternoon, said she saw no need for the Republican House members to turn their inability to access the facility into a political skirmish.
She said she happily signed the non-disclosure agreement. She said her purpose in going to the facility was to gain a better understanding of how full the facility was and why reopening at least portions to event organizers hasn’t been allowed.
The senator came away learning “the issue is somewhat complicated and it needs to be resolved but it’s going to take a little time,” she said. “We have to work with the administration to resolve. So let’s get at it.”
Shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, state officials moved to consolidate its emergency supplies inside the expansive facility
April 23, 2021 | 12:00 PM
By Jan Murphy/PennLive
***
In colonial America waterways were the best travel & commercial transportation. Most of our towns & cities grew up on confluences of waterways. So flooding is normal in our older municipalities.
Just seeing and hearing the ocean or a river is mesmerizing and puts you at peace. It’s human nature to live near water and to build something on land that was underwater a decade before. It’s why we have stormwater regulations.
Incidentally, Bob Adams, Director of Stewardship at WISSAHICKON VALLEY WATERSHED ASSOCIATION INC was a planning commission member in Sellersville. He objected to putting the Sellersville Fire Department in a major flood zone of the Perkiomen Creek. Bob is a professional in floodwater management. The Sellersville Fire Department is often underwater with trucks moved to high ground. Additionally flooding on the Perkiomen splits Sellersville/Perkasie into two separate road transportation zones.
I lived in Schwenksville, PA when the Perkiomen flooded in 1996. A guy parked his pickup truck beside the Graterford Inn and went in for libations. When he came out his pickup was gone. We found it 2.5 miles downstream.
Wall Street's interest in hemp could bite into the profits of international drug cartels, gunrunners and cut down or eliminate our "border problems."
PROFITING OFF THE COMING MARIJUANA BOOM:
"California, for example, represents the largest market for recreational marijuana, with approximately $3.1 billion of legal sales in 2019.
However, recreational marijuana was legalized more recently than in neighboring locales and in 2018 the illegal market still accounted for approximately 80% of recreational marijuana purchases."
Keeping marijuana in the same category as heroin generates extreme international profits on both sides of drug trafficking, the drug cartel side and the law enforcement side. This is the obvious and true reason to keep hemp a schedule 1 narcotic.
The technical, but bullshit, answer to why hemp is a schedule 1 narcotic in the same category as heroin:
"A drug's schedule sets the groundwork for the federal regulation of a controlled substance.
Schedule 1 and 2 drugs face the strictest regulations. Schedule 1 drugs are effectively illegal for anything outside of research, and schedule 2 drugs can be used for limited medical purposes with the DEA's approval — for example, through a license for prescriptions.
The DEA even sets strict limits on the production of schedule 1 and 2 drugs, although the limits vary from drug to drug. Only one place in the US — a University of Mississippi farm — is currently allowed to grow marijuana under federal regulations, and the pot is limited to research purposes. By comparison, several private companies produce oxycodone, a schedule 2 substance, and use the drug for prescription painkillers.
“A drug's schedule can interfere with state laws”
A drug's schedule can interfere with state laws. Marijuana's schedule 1 status is one reason banks are reluctant to open accounts for pot shops and growers in Colorado and Washington, even though the businesses are legal under state law.
Federal tax law also prohibits businesses from deducting many expenses related to the trafficking of schedule 1 and 2 drugs, which can cause state-legal marijuana businesses' effective income tax rates to soar as high as 90 percent.
The DEA sometimes uses marijuana's classification to pressure physicians, hospitals, and pharmacies into not working with medical marijuana operations that are compliant with state law. If these medical providers don't comply, the DEA threatens to take back licensing that lets doctors prescribe drugs, such as prescription painkillers with oxycodone, that contain scheduled substances.
What does it take to reschedule a drug?
Congress could pass a law that changes or restricts a drug's schedule. But Congress mostly leaves scheduling to federal agencies like the DEA. (One exception: Congress previously passed the Hillory J. Farias and Samantha Reid Date-Rape Prevention Act of 2000 and added gamma hydroxybutyric acid, a date rape drug, to the scheduling system.)
The US attorney general can also initiate a review process that would look at the available evidence and potentially change a drug's schedule. The review includes several steps:
Although very rigorous, this process has been successfully carried out in the past. For example, the DEA in 2014 announced it had rescheduled hydrocodone combination products, or opioid-based prescription painkillers, from schedule 3 to schedule 2.
"Almost 7 million Americans abuse controlled-substance prescription medications, including opioid painkillers, resulting in more deaths from prescription drug overdoses than auto accidents," former DEA head Michele Leonhart said in a 2014 statement. "Today's action recognizes that these products are some of the most addictive and potentially dangerous prescription medications available.”
Can a drug be unscheduled?
It's possible, but it's much more difficult than simply rescheduling a drug.
One big hurdle is international treaties. The US is party to international agreements that effectively require some drugs, including marijuana, to remain within the scheduling system — and possibly schedule 1 or 2.
Proving that a drug has no potential for abuse is also very difficult, if not impossible. An American Scientist analysis, for instance, found even relatively safe marijuana has some potential for dependence; it's less addictive than heroin, meth, cocaine, nicotine, and alcohol, but more addictive than hallucinogens such as LSD, which doesn't cause much, if any, dependence. And since pot is widely used recreationally, that makes it a sure lock-in for "high potential for abuse.”
The two major recreational drugs not on the scheduling system — alcohol and tobacco — required a specific exemption in the Controlled Substances Act. Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert, argues both would be marked schedule 1 if they were evaluated today, since they're widely used recreationally, addictive, detrimental to one's health and society, and deadly.
Why is marijuana still schedule 1?
When marijuana's classification comes under review, its schedule 1 status is consistently maintained due to insufficient scientific evidence of its medical value.
Specifically, the scientific evidence available for marijuana doesn't pass the threshold required by federal agencies to acknowledge a drug's potential as medicine. No studies proved the drug's medical efficacy in controlled, large-scale clinical environments. No studies established adequate safety protocols for marijuana. And marijuana's full chemical structure has never been characterized and analyzed.
There have been some studies showing marijuana has medical benefits, particularly for pain and muscle stiffness. But these studies haven’t been large enough to meet the threshold the DEA and other federal agencies, such as the FDA, require to prove a drug has medical value — by proving its worth in controlled, large-scale clinical trials.
“Changing marijuana's schedule is a bit of a Catch-22”
But one reason there isn't enough scientific evidence to change marijuana's schedule 1 status might be, in fact, the drug's schedule 1 status. The DEA restricts how much marijuana can go to research. To obtain legal marijuana supplies for studies, researchers must get their studies approved by HHS, the FDA, and the DEA.
Changing marijuana's schedule, in other words, is a bit of a Catch-22. There needs to be a certain level of scientific research that proves marijuana has medical value, but the federal government's restrictions make it difficult to conduct that research.
To address those issues, the DEA hopes to allow much more research into pot in other ways. For one, it’s increased the amount of pot grown for research over the past few years, and it plans to continue doing so. Crucially, it also plans to let more people and facilities grow marijuana for studies — aside from University of Mississippi, the only federally legal grower right now.
That could significantly open up research access to pot — including potentially higher-quality marijuana and different strains of the drug, which the University of Mississippi doesn’t currently meet demands for. But the effects of the changes remain to be seen.
While a reclassification would be a symbolic win for legalization advocates, Kleiman says it wouldn't have much practical effect.
Schedule 2 substances typically require a prescription to be distributed, and the state-legal marijuana dispensaries and retail outlets don’t work through traditional prescriptions (they distribute "recommendations" for medical marijuana) — so even rescheduling may not open up access. (Cocaine and meth are schedule 2, and they’re definitely not easily legally available, after all.)
Still, if the federal government acknowledged pot’s medical value through a schedule 2 classification, advocates hoped it would make federal agencies far more receptive to paying for and approving medical research into pot. But the DEA hopes its other steps will unlock far more research instead.
There would be some effects on policy, such as allowing state-legal marijuana business to deduct certain taxes, if marijuana was reclassified to schedule 3 or lower. But that’s extremely unlikely: Schedule 3 and lower drugs need to have some medical value and not meet criteria for "high potential for abuse." Since marijuana is widely used recreationally, it’s a lock-in for "high potential for abuse," keeping it at schedule 1 or 2."
"How has the war on drugs changed the US criminal justice system?
The escalation of the criminal justice system's reach over the past few decades, ranging from more incarceration to seizures of private property and militarization, can be traced back to the war on drugs.
After the US stepped up the drug war throughout the 1970s and '80s, harsher sentences for drug offenses played a role in turning the country into the world's leader in incarceration. (But drug offenders still make up a small part of the prison population: About 54 percent of people in state prisons — which house more than 86 percent of the US prison population — were violent offenders in 2012, and 16 percent were drug offenders, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.)
Still, mass incarceration has massively strained the criminal justice system and led to a lot of overcrowding in US prisons — to the point that some states, such as California, have rolled back penalties for nonviolent drug users and sellers with the explicit goal of reducing their incarcerated population.
In terms of police powers, civil asset forfeitures have been justified as a way to go after drug dealing organizations. These forfeitures allow law enforcement agencies to take the organizations' assets — cash in particular — and then use the gains to fund more anti-drug operations. The idea is to turn drug dealers' ill-gotten gains against them.
But there have been many documented cases in which police abused civil asset forfeiture, including instances in which police took people's cars and cash simply because they suspected — but couldn't prove — that there was some sort of illegal activity going on. In these cases, it's actually up to people whose private property was taken to prove that they weren't doing anything illegal — instead of traditional legal standards in which police have to prove wrongdoing or reasonable suspicion of it before they act.
Similarly, the federal government helped militarize local and state police departments in an attempt to better equip them in the fight against drugs. The Pentagon's 1033 program, which gives surplus military-grade equipment to police, was created in the 1990s as part of President George HW Bush's escalation of the war on drugs. The deployment of SWAT teams, as reported by the ACLU, also increased during the past few decades, and 62 percent of SWAT raids in 2011 and 2012 were for drug searches.
Various groups have complained that these increases in police power are often abused and misused. The ACLU, for instance, argues that civil asset forfeitures threaten Americans' civil liberties and property rights, because police can often seize assets without even filing charges. Such seizures also might encourage police to focus on drug crimes, since a raid can result in actual cash that goes back to the police department, while a violent crime conviction likely would not. The libertarian Cato Institute has also criticized the war on drugs for decades, because anti-drug efforts gave cover to a huge expansion of law enforcement's surveillance capabilities, including wiretaps and US mail searches.
The militarization of police became a particular sticking point during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown. After heavily armed police responded to largely peaceful protesters with armored vehicle that resemble tanks, tear gas, and sound cannons, law enforcement experts and journalists criticized the tactics.
Since the beginning of the war on drugs, the general trend has been to massively grow police powers and expand the criminal justice system as a means of combating drug use. But as the drug war struggles to halt drug use and trafficking, the heavy-handed policies — which many describe as draconian — have been called into question. If the war on drugs isn't meeting its goals, critics say these expansions of the criminal justice system aren't worth the financial strain and costs to liberty in the US.
How has the drug war contributed to violence around the world?
The war on drugs has created a black market for illicit drugs that criminal organizations around the world can rely on for revenue that payrolls other, more violent activities. This market supplies so much revenue that drug trafficking organizations can actually rival developing countries' weak government institutions.
In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have leveraged their profits from the drug trade to violently maintain their stranglehold over the market despite the government's war on drugs. As a result, public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of ruthless drug cartels. As many as 80,000 people have died in the war. Tens of thousands of people have gone missing since 2007, including 43 students who vanished in 2014 in a widely publicized case.
But even if Mexico were to actually defeat drug cartels, this potentially wouldn't reduce drug war violence on a global scale. Instead, drug production and trafficking, and the violence that comes with both, would likely shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up — particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.
In 2014, for instance, the drug war significantly contributed to the child migrant crisis. After some drug trafficking was pushed out of Mexico, gangs and drug cartels stepped up their operations in Central America's Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
These countries, with their weak criminal justice and law enforcement systems, didn't seem to have the capacity to deal with the influx of violence and crime.
The war on drugs "drove a lot of the activities to Central America, a region that has extremely weakened systems," Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America explained. "Unfortunately, there hasn't been a strong commitment to building the criminal justice system and the police.”
As a result, children fled their countries by the thousands in a major humanitarian crisis. Many of these children ended up in the US, where the refugee system simply doesn't have the capacity to handle the rush of child migrants.
Although the child migrant crisis is fairly unique in its specific circumstances and effects, the series of events — a government cracks down on drugs, trafficking moves to another country, and the drug trade brings violence and crime — is pretty typical in the history of the war on drugs. In the past couple of decades it happened in Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Ecuador after successful anti-drug crackdowns in other Latin American countries.
Ironically, the shift is partly a by-product of a drug-war success story, Plan Colombia. In a little over a decade, the U.S. spent nearly $8 billion to back Colombia's efforts to eradicate coca fields, arrest traffickers and battle drug-funded guerrilla armies such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Colombian cocaine production declined, the murder rate plunged and the FARC is on the run.
But traffickers adjusted. Cartels moved south across the Ecuadorean border to set up new storage facilities and pioneer new smuggling routes from Ecuador's Pacific coast. Colombia's neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is now the departure point for half of the cocaine going to Europe by sea.
As a 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime explained, "one country’s success became the problem of others.”
This global proliferation of violence is one of the most prominent costs of the drug war. When evaluating whether the war on drugs has been successful, experts and historians weigh this cost, along with the rise of incarceration in the US, against the benefits, such as potentially depressed drug use, to gauge whether anti-drug efforts have been worth it."
That's how long it took for several of Coatesville's community leaders to get to the crash scene on Wednesday night. They stayed past midnight. Cool heads prevailed.
In thousands of communities across the world people and police are bracing for the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white former police officer charged with murder in the death of Mr. Floyd.
“Last week, thousands of Minnesota National Guard troops began deploying throughout the city, taking up armed positions along commercial corridors and in residential neighborhoods alongside police officers as part of what city and state officials describe as a deterrent to potential looting and violence in response to the Chauvin verdict.
The unprecedented level of security includes more than 3,000 National Guard troops and at least 1,100 officers from public safety agencies across the state as part of a joint effort known as Operation Safety Net. The massive show of force, officials say, is aimed at preventing a repeat of the violence that erupted across the city last summer, including the burning of a police station and an estimated $350 million in damage to buildings and businesses.
But the wartime posture has alarmed some residents and elected officials who have repeatedly complained in recent weeks that the heavily militarized approach ignores the community’s trauma over the events of last summer, when mostly peaceful protesters were tear-gassed and injured by police action. Many elected officials think that aggressive response resulted in the subsequent violence and destruction, lessons that some believe were ignored in Brooklyn Center.
Last week, Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott and the city council called on law enforcement to dial back their response, including their use of chemical irritants.
‘We have to approach policing in a different way, in a more humane way,’ Elliott said. He and others also criticized the mass arrests of mostly peaceful protesters, including 136 people on Friday night.”
That's how long it took for several of Coatesville's community leaders to get to the crash scene on Wednesday night. They stayed past midnight. Cool heads prevailed.
I recorded this at the Community Information Meeting on Saturday May 8, 2010 at the Second Baptist Church in Coatesville. The occasion was an open discussion between the City of Coatesville community, law enforcement officers, community leaders and church leaders concerning the accidental death of a 13 year old Coatesville youth driving a stolen vehicle and pursued by Coatesville Police the previous Wednesday. It contains his speech on made at the dedication ceremony of Zachariah Walker Memorial in 2006 on prejudice.
Pastor, Harris, “Well, I’ll answer, I’ll try to answer. I’ll try to answer your question. There are some of us who are out on the streets. There are some of us who are involved in the community. There are some of us who are really concerned about the welfare of our community and our children.
One of the things that I do find out is that I have to throw some things back on you. You ask to us where we are. Where were you? You send your children to us for maybe two, three hours a day. We only have the time to mentor them while we are in the confines of this district. We try to teach them morally. We try to reach them spiritually. We even teach them on a level of being brothers and sisters.
We know we can’t reach everybody. But the ones that we can reach we do. Some of us are in the trenches trying to save our children, your children. And when they hurt we hurt. Some of you don’t know that up on Coates Street; I have many children that come to me for community service. And I teach every last one of them, whether they’re black children or white children. I tell them it takes 10 seconds to make a better choice. But I can’t be mom and dad to them 24 hours a day. That’s not my job. That’s our job. That’s your job. They’re your children too. So we can’t start blaming the church for everything that goes on in the community.
