by Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse at PUBLIC
In Hunter Biden’s 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, he recounts the day his parents staged an intervention to save him from his addiction. He stormed out of the house as his daughters tried to block him from getting into his car. President Joe Biden chased him down the driveway. “He grabbed me,” recounted Hunter, “swung me around and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time.”
Perhaps more than any president in US history, Joe Biden understands addiction’s awesome and awful power. Nobody should be more sensitive to the issue of addiction than he. For years, he and others in the Biden family struggled to get Hunter into treatment and recovery. The President knows, better than most Americans do, that many hard-core drug addicts require an intervention, not enabling.
And yet President Biden’s Justice Department is actively considering legalizing government-funded drug dens, which would enable addiction, not recovery. In early December, the DOJ told a Philadelphia judge that it would decide within two months whether to grant the city a waiver from federal law so it could operate a government-funded drug site.
Supporters of government-funded drug dens say they will save lives lost to overdose. The drug addiction crisis is the worst public health crisis in the United States. Illicit drug deaths rose from 17,000 in 2000 to 107,000 in 2021.
Government drug sites are modeled on…
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