Category Archives: drugs

Another one bites the dust: The North-Face closing hometown San Francisco store

San Francisco is failing. Due to progressive policies (soft-on-crime DAs, open-air drug use, Defund the Police movement, Prop 47, etc.) many businesses have shutdown their stores in San Francisco.

Now goes another:

The North Face is closing its only store in its hometown of San Francisco that’s situated in dying downtown area

From Daily Mail:

“San Francisco shoppers receive another shocking blow as another major retailer is all set to move away from the crime and drug ridden city. 

The North Face officials have announced that they will be closing the doors of their Union Square store on March 31.  Although the rock climbing and camping supply company was founded back in 1964 in this city, the Union Square store is the only location to exist. 

Hailey Albright, a spokesperson for the company said in a statement: ‘The North Face was born in San Francisco, and we have cherished the time spent here, building roots and creating lasting memories.’

The retailer has not provided a clear reason for the closure of the 180 Post Street store.”

Read the whole story here.

No “clear reason” is required on behalf of The North Face.

Earlier this week voters in San Francisco passed two ballot measures to take steps to curb homelessness, drug addiction and crime. The initiatives require drug screening for welfare recipients and give police more surveillance power and less oversight

But it may be too little, too late. After 60 years of democrat rule, it will probably take DECADES to undue the damage progressive polices have created for that city. Y’all learn too late:

DCG

Defund the Police activist meets reality

Oakland, California is a democrate-run city that is failing. From The Daily Mail:

“Police data shows the city now has the second worst 911 response time in California, while the number of homicides has jumped by 79 per cent from 2018 to 2022. In the year to date, violent crime is 22 per cent higher than last year, motor vehicle theft is 51 per cent higher and robbery is 36 per cent higher.”

Seneca Scott ran for mayor of Oakland last year and lost. He had called for ‘shifting budgets away from the police’ and a ‘complete overhaul of how we want our communities to interact with law enforcement.’

2022 Oakland Mayorial candidate Seneca Scott

After a recent incident, he’s had a change of heart. From The Daily Mail:

Black activist ditches his progressive beliefs after being arrested for defending himself against homeless knifeman in his Oakland garden

Details of the incident:

“At around 10pm on October 30 2021, Scott discovered two men were trying to steal the water heater from his garden. He went down to confront them, taking his gun for protection, and found they had set up a tent and laid out drugs on his picnic table. 

He told them to put down the water heater and one of them pulled a knife. Scott showed them his pistol and again told them to put down the water heater. 

At this point one of the men fled, but the other flagged down a police car and told them Scott had pulled a gun on him. Police arrested Scott on charges of brandishing a weapon and carrying a concealed firearm.

The charges have all since been dropped.

Seneca says now he is vehemently anti what he terms the ‘woke left’ and ‘phony “progressives”‘ who he says are ‘dismissive towards black and brown people’. (I would argue that they are dismissive towards law and order.)

Scott told The Free Press that he changed his views when he realized ‘how deep the damage was’ and how ‘the people we had put in place were just complete frauds’.

Read the whole article here.

Better late than never to realize what disasterous democrat policies are doing to his city.  Now we just need about another 250,000 Oakland residents to wake up and change their voting habits.

DCG

Seattle, failed city (part 4)

Democrat policies are killing once-great American cities. Seattle is a prime example.

The lawlessness allowed in Seattle has led to an increase in cime, open-air drug use, repeat offenders and decreased public safety. This can be directly attributed to democrat policies that include their Defund the Police Movement as a capitulation to BLM and the Saint George riots.

Remeber CHOP (Capital Hill Occupied Protest)? In June 2020, then mayor Jenny Durkan allowed Antifa/BLM/various thugs to take over six blocks of the city for 23 days and had the Seattle Police abdicate their responsiblities and vacate a precinct building. Shootings occured there and a teenage boy was killed.

Seattle democrat leaders haven’t learned much about policing crime and adequately punishing criminals since that event as they have now set a record for homicides, the highest level of homicides the city has seen in nearly three decades.

The criminals have now set their sights on new targets: middle and high school students at/around schools. Jason Rantz at KTTH reports the following:

“The Seattle crime crisis is now finding middle and high school students. A group of armed and masked thieves are targeting students after school and there aren’t enough officers to proactively police the neighborhoods. They’re committing the crimes in broad daylight.”

Yahoo News reports that Ballard High School and Whitman Middle School parents are on edge after a number of muggings, some of which turned violent. Since September 15, there have been five attacks where teen boys on their way home from school were jumped for their iPhones. Guns were used in some of the robberies.

KTTH also reports that there will be minimal consequences for the minors committing these crimes, as is to be expected in democrat-run cities.

“Following the nationwide trend in Democrat-run cities, the thieves appear to be teens. In Washington state, teen criminals seldom suffer meaningful consequences. Washington Democrats passed legislation preventing officers from talking to teen suspects until they have a lawyer present, even if the suspect’s parents consent. When teens do get caught, they seldom see jail time. Instead, they’re pushed into restorative justice programs run by police and prison abolitionist groups. The county provides little oversight.”

Read the full KTTH story here.

Seattleites should embrace the suck. Y’all voted for this yet never remember this key item:

DCG

San Francisco, failed city part 3

We all know that democrat-run San Francisco is a failed city. The homelessness, crime, locked up store shelves, open-air drug use, poop-covered streets, stores closing, and the list goes on and on.

Yet I never did expect this headline:

San Francisco Bay boaters forced to fight off ‘pirates’ as seafaring bandits ravage community

Thieves are getting very creative in California. From the Fox News story:

“Residents living on houseboats and yachts in the San Francisco Bay resorted to physically fighting off seafaring bandits who are ransacking their ships, former harbor master Brock de Lappe said.

Another woman said she rescued a man whose sailboat drifted into the bay without a motor or any way to get back to shore after one of the “pirates,” which is what the resident call the burglars, cut his boat line during an argument. 

“The open shoreline of the (Oakland-Alameda) estuary is littered with sunken wrecks and derelict, end-of-life vessels, and crime has risen to truly intolerable levels,” de Lappe said during a municipal meeting. 

Since the summer, burglars have been using small boat homes to raid yachts and houseboats in the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, which is populated by marinas with over 3,000 slips, to steal anything of value.  Then they either sink the ships or dump whatever is left of the boats miles away in the Oakland Harbor or along its shorelines. 

Mary Spicer, who founded a group of volunteers that has been cleaning the estuary since 2017, canceled their cleanup this year “because of safety concerns” from a particular homeless encampment, where she said there have been violent incidents. “Unfortunately, I don’t feel comfortable bringing children to the site until those are addressed by the city of Oakland,” Spicer said.”

Read the whole story here.

I sound like a broken record:

DCG

America in decline: CVS to close 900 stores due to rampant increase in shoplifting

America is in decline, particularly in democrat-run cities. As a result, our nation is facing the folowing:

  • Increased inflation and interest rates
  • Increased debt (both for the nation and many individual households)
  • Disasterous “Defund the Police” policies
  • Increased crime with soft-on-punishment policies
  • Open borders with thousands of illegal aliens arriving daily as well as drugs (particularly fentanyl) pouring into our cities

The disasterous policies of this administration and democrats (I’d also include The Swamp in the blame game) have led to this:

CVS says it will close NINE HUNDRED stores by the end of 2024 – 10% of all its shops – as it moves to online strategy amid rampant increase in shoplifting

From the Daily Mail:

“CVS is set to close hundreds of stores across the country as it undergoes a complete retail overhaul – as more outlets move towards online sellers amid rampant increases in crime.

The major drugstore chain is coming to the end of a policy launched in 2021 which will see 300 stores closed each year – meaning 900 will have shuttered by 2024. 

In the announcement, which has hit headlines again recently amid rampant shoplifting at the chain, bosses they said that they were undergoing a new ‘retail footprint strategy.’

CVS and other retailers across the US continue to adjust to post-pandemic footfall, with COVID helping turbocharge the popularity of online shopping. More shoppers are turning to buying online in the wake of the pandemic, as well as rocketing levels of shoplifting affecting sales in stores.

CVS claims that ‘local market dynamics, population shifts, and a community’s store density’ are some of the aspects it has looked into when deciding which stores to shutter.”

Read the whole story here.

Locked up goods: What many Americans now see when shopping at their local stores.

Things are so bad in democrat-run Oakland, California that over 200 businesses are staging a strike today to protest over crime that has “gotten out of hand” and are demanding better public safety.

San Francisco’s retail area is turning into a ghost town due to crime and homelessness. Stores are closing in Seattle due to crime. Philadelphia convenience stores are closing due to brazen thefts. This is pattern in many other democrat-run cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Washington DC, New York, and Los Angeles.

Local and national elections matter. The health and prosperity of our American cities matter. Remember folks:

DCG

New York City, failed city

Another democrat-run American city going to the rats. Literally.

Professional virtue-signaling expert NYC Mayor Adams

New York City has many, many problems: An influx of illegal aliens sleeping on the streets (they are a sanctuary city), a dangerous subway system, open-air drug use and large numbers of drug overdose deaths, as well as other issues that affect our large, democrat-run American cities.

The city also has a major rat problem. So much so that in April of this year Mayor Adams appointed a “rat czar,” Kathleen Corradi (earning a salary of $155,000/year), to reduce the rat population and “help deliver an equitable quality of life experience for all New Yorkers. ”

NYC Rat Czar Kathleen Corradi

So seven months later how’s that lofty equitable goal working out?

Turns out it’s working very well for entrepeneurs who are finding a way to make a buck by offering tour guides of NYC’s rodent-infested areas. There are also tens of thousands ‘RatTok’ – TikTok channels taking viewers through the city showing how many rats are living alongside New Yorkers. Read about the rat tour guides (and see photos from “RatTok”) here. Or watch below:

New Yorkers must be so proud.

DCG

Philadelphia, failed city

Another story of a failed, democrat-run American city…

Philadelphia democrat mayor Jim Kenney

Philadelphia hasn’t had a republican mayor since 1952. The current mayor, Jim Kenney, has been in charge of Philadelphia sincee 2016 and was re-elected in 2019. Kenney was caught on video dancing and celebrating the city’s sanctuary city ruling in 2018. The drugs flowing across our open southern border have contributed mightily to Philadephia’s opioid addiction failure.

Crime is high in Philadelphia, of course. As of July 3, there was over 900 shootinngs in their city. Last year the mayor addressed citizens’ concerns over violence by saying, “We know residents are afraid, afraid to attend cookouts or go to basketball courts, afraid to let their kids play outside. I heard it on my corridor tours, I hear it at community meetings, I read your emails. I hear you and it truly breaks my heart.”

Here’s what the good mayor’s city looks like these days:

Not only should residents be afraid to attend cookouts or let their kids play outside, they should be afraid to walk their dogs. Case in point: Navy veteran brutally beaten while walkinng his dog in Philadelphia. Read the story at the link or watch this:

The victim, Scott Harris, has served multiple years on deployment overseas, but his tours were uneventful compared to his walk last weekend. “I did a year in a war zone in Iraq, did two years in Ukraine, and would not have expected this to happen in my own neighborhood,” he said.

No surprise that Philadelphia is ranked as one of the worst cities in America.

American voters in these blue cities better wake up. Our towns are crumbling before our very eyes. It truly breaks my heart that so many voters have yet to learn the most important factor when voting:

DCG

Los Angeles, failed city (part 2)

Hollywood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, is another democrat-run area that is failing its citizens.

We all know that Los Angeles is a mess: Homelessness, increased crime and open-air drug use are the norms in that city. It flows into the city’s neighborhoods as well. Check out the streets of Hollywood:

The Daily Mail shared more  information about what is happening on the streets of Hollywood:

“As rampant homelessness continues to plague the streets and neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a new video sheds light on the issue as it impacts LA‘s iconic Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The video, taken earlier this summer, shows dozens and dozens of homeless people collapsed and prostrated on the streets of Hollywood, laying on public benches, and lining the streets with makeshift tents

‘Hidden between the glitz and glamour, homelessness has cast a shadow over the streets,’ says the video’s narrator, as he walks around the neighborhood.”

Read the whole story here.

These problems in Los Angeles (which hasn’t had a republican mayor since 2001) have plagued them for years. So what have the voters done about it? Last December they elected democrat Karen Bass, the first woman to serve as mayor and the second black person to serve in that capacity.

Less than eight months later, the citizens are booing the new mayor they elected:

Maybe that’s because despite allocating a $609.7 million budget for the Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative, there was a 9 percent rise in homelessness in Los Angeles County between 2022 and 2023.

Before the mayor was booed at the August meeting, she said this in June: Bass announced a lofty goal of ending street homelessness in LA by 2026.

Don’t. Hold. Your. Breath.

DCG

Portland, Oregon, failed city

Homelessness runs rampant in Portland, Oregon.

Democrat-run Portland (for over four decades), Oregon is a failed city. Since defunding the police, crime is up.

Open-air drug use and fentanyl is rampant, so much so that there are open-air fentanyl markets. Measure 110, approved by voters in 2020, was suppose to be the magic cure-all by decriminalizing drugs and establishing a drug addiction treatment and recovery program (funded in part by the state’s marijuana tax revenue and state prison savings). That isn’t working as in Multnomah County, fatal opioid-related overdoses saw a fivefold increase between 2018 and 2022,

This year the mayor’s budget calls for spending over $43 million to address homelessness.  Yet between the decriminalizing of drugs, drug addiction treatment services and millions dedicated to the homeless, those afflicated with drug addiction do not seem to want the taxpayer assistance. Case in point (from The Daily Mail):

“Portland’s first sanctioned homless ‘park’ has just NINE residents despite having room for 55 a month after it opened – as shocking images show drug-addled people taking over the sidewalks”

Unused Portland homeless shelters.

Details from the article:

Portland‘s first sanctioned homeless ‘park’ is less than 20 percent full a month after opening as shocking new images show drug abuse and illegal campsites continue to plague its streets.

Oregon‘s largest city is in the midst of a devastating humanitarian crisis, with its homeless population up almost 50 percent since 2019 to more than 5,000.

The uber-woke local government is pinning its hopes of reversing the trend on a raft of costly new shelters. (Which cost $27 million for three official homeless shelters.)

But when DailyMail.com visited earlier this month, two of its flagship sites sat largely empty, with the majority of its drug-addled homeless population preferring to remain in unsanctioned campsites across the city.”

Read the whole story here.

I don’t claim to have the best solution(s) to end homelessness and open-air drug use. How about instead of decriminalizing drug use, maybe the City should arrest individuals and as part of their punishment they be mandated to attend drug addiction treatment as an alternative to fines/jail times?

I do know that decades of democrat solutions to end homelessness and drug addiction aren’t working. I also know that democrats are famous for their dedication to spending millions of taxpayer dollars that never achieve their stated goals. There’s a saying for that:

DCG

Los Angeles, failed city

Los Angeles is run by democrats. It therefore has the pleasure of being one of the worst cities in America. In other words, another demorat-run failed city.

The streets of Los Angeles

It’s a combination we typically see in blue cities: high crime (some data suggests that Los Angeles is more dangerous than before the Wuhan virus outbreak and lockdowns), rampant homlessness (despite spending billions of dollars), and open drug use on the city streets (in particular, fentanyl pouring across our open southern border).

LA County DA George Gascon (demorat)

Throw into the mix a Soros-funded district attorney, George Gascón. There was a second effort to recall him last year, which failed due to 27% of the signatures being invalid. (Funny how demorats care about signature validation when it affects one of their own).

The final touch? Proposition 47, which basically allows shoplifting $950 worth of merchandise with no consequences. Also, Los Angeles has a zero cash bail policy now, too. You’ve got the perfect recipe for a failed city!

And there are plenty of criminals willing to take advantage of the democrat policies that plague Los Angeles. Case in point:

Gascon speaks at the 0:48 mark: “…and we will use every tool available under law when there is an arrest made.”

Quite the qualifier there. LAPD says that last year, only about one quarter of these “smash and grab” robberies led to an arrest. Again, they are very careful with their statements. How many of these arrests actually led to a prosecution and conviction?

I sound like a broken record here but when are voters going to realize the obvious?

DCG