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New Drug Possession Ordinance Takes Effect
In a recent post on Facebook, the Aberdeen Police Department bragged about one of it’s officers conducting the first arrest for simple drug possession since the City’s new ordinance targeting drug users went into effect August 15th. As explained by APD, the new law allows officers to arrest on the first such offense, rather than them having to refer out to treatment for the first two offenses. Previously, people found in possession of controlled substances were diverted to treatment services. Now, they will be able to arrest people and impose a sentence of 364 days in jail, a $5,000 fine, or both. Somehow this is supposed to help them provide a “path to treatment” through the criminal justice system. They have yet to figure out that part, but they can at least arrest people for a recognized medical disorder.
This disgusting display of callous disregard for the medical nature of substance use disorder is thrown into sharp contrast with the language of the new ordinance itself which states:
So apparently the police and the City think that arresting people for medical disorders is “encouragement and care”. Health professionals would beg to differ. The health profession has developed many effective treatments for this disorder. One thing that makes it so difficult is that treatment is a highly individualized process, requiring a high level of attention to specific needs. Many people need different types of treatments at different times. All administered by qualified health care professionals in a health care setting.
One overwhelming observation has been that treatment often requires continuing care to be effective, as SUD is a chronic condition with the potential for both recovery and relapse.
As people with SUD often have co-occurring mental health conditions, treating them together rather than separately is generally better.
The three main forms of treatment include:
- Detoxification.
- Cognitive and behavioral therapies.
- Medication-assisted therapies.
There are also several different types of treatment settings, including:
- Outpatient counseling.
- Intensive outpatient treatment.
- Inpatient treatment.
- Long-term therapeutic communities, such as sober living communities.
Clearly none of these include incarceration or fines. So why would the City impose such a sentence on drug users? Their professed concern is for the size of the drug market, and the time honor tradition of going after dealers by going after users. A ploy that has never worked in the long War On Drugs in this country.
The true reason for their actions is again to punish and harass people they have targeted for exclusion from their future society. The people who sit on the City Council have never wanted anything approaching treatment for drug users, they want to force people into sobriety in a cell, without any proper treatment. They want to be able to stock the jails and prisons with inmates based on low level drug offenses, another failed policy from the War On Drugs. This actually increases the market for drugs, as many people are exposed to hard drugs in prison, and once released selling drugs is often the only job opportunity open to a felon.
This is another in a long line of targeted ordinances aimed at making the lives of the poor, addicted, and unhoused in this City as miserable and shirt as possible. Rather than focusing effort and resources on the proven medical interventions of the present, the City has taken a step back in time to a period marked by ruined lives, and mass incarceration.
Full text of ordinance here.
Current elected officials such as Kacey Ann Morrison have built their career off of protesting against traditional treatment centers, and proven harm reduction measures. For example, her and her group SOAP (Save Our Aberdeen Please) was responsible for a weekly protest of the local needle exchange, every week for months. They showed up and harassed and demoralized the people walking up to and leaving the exchange. This resulted in many people choosing not to return to the exchange, despite needing its services.
Grays Harbor Sees Highest COVID rate in WA
The rate of COVID-19 transmission in Grays Harbor County is the highest of any county in Washington state, according to the most recent data from the Washington State Department of Health. The department’s COVID-19 data dashboard shows Grays Harbor County had a seven-day case rate of 73 cases per 100,000 during the last week of July, which amounted to 55 actual cases during that time period. The case rate didn’t breach 20 per 100,000 until the end of June, then steadily rose to about 50 by mid-July.
Grays Harbor is the only county in the state with a “substantial” COVID case rate, meaning greater than 50 but fewer than 100 cases per 100,000 people. Behind Grays Harbor is Thurston County with 46 cases per 100,000 people. The average state-wide is only 24.
“We’ve had way higher rates in the past, we’ve also had way lower rates, but it’s a spike from what we’ve been seeing,” said Emma Manley, epidemiologist with Grays Harbor County Public Health, in an interview with The Daily World.
This is reminder to still wear masks in large group settings. Test yourself if you feel sick, and take proper sanitation care such as handwashing and sanitizing. The Public Health Department supplies free COVID tests through the local Timberland Libraries. They also mentioned trying to increase access for the unhoused to vaccination services. The stats on Grays Harbor vaccination rates show us at 63%, below the statewide average of 71%.
While people would like to think that COVID is over and we are done with having to protect each other through simple precautions like masking up, this data demonstrates that we are still in this. We need to continue getting vaccinations as well. Just because Joe Biden declared an end to the state of emergency, doesn’t mean that the pandemic is over. It still affects the poor and vulnerable among our society.
It’s sobering to think about: 6,927,378 people have died of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic that we know about. The real number is far higher.
While the death rate has dropped significantly from its peak in January 2021 — when more than 102,000 people died in a single week — thousands of people still die of COVID-19 every week.
Trail Derailments in Aberdeen Cause For Concern
For the second time this year a train was derailed here in Aberdeen, a town crossed by train tracks at many vital and busy junctions. One of the most dangerous places to be in regards to possible train derailments is the homeless encampment under the Chehalis River Bridge, being at most 10 feet away from the tracks. They were placed here by the City in an attempt to find a spot for them to go after evicting them from their longtime River Camp in 2019, due, in part, to it being to dangerous and close to the train tracks. This location was set back a good 100 yards from the tracks as compared to their current location not evens a train cars width away from the tracks.
On August 8th at 9 p.m., a Puget Sound & Pacific train derailed in Aberdeen near West 1st Street, blocking the crossing there. The engine and five cars carrying soy meal derailed, but no injuries were reported, said Tom Ciuba, vice president of communications for PSAP’s parent company, Genesee & Wyoming Railroad Services.
“One of the derailed rail cars overturned and spilled roughly 500 pounds of soy meal on the ground,” Ciuba said in an email. “A contractor will be onsite this morning to begin the clean-up and re-railing process, which is expected to go through Saturday morning.” The cause of the the derailment is unknown at this time.
On May 17, 2023 another Puget Sound & Pacific Railroad train carrying soy meal experienced a derailment in nearby Central Park.
Eight cars came off the tracks around 5:20 p.m., said Tom Ciuba, vice president of communications for PSAP’s parent company, Genesee & Wyoming Railroad Services, Inc.
No injuries were reported as a result of the derailment. The initial investigation indicates the cause of the derailment was thermal misalignment of the tracks, Ciuba said in an email —high heat, which can cause the tracks to buckle.
Neither of these specific train derailments happened to be carrying hazardous materials or hurt anyone in their derailments, thankfully. But this calls to memory the train disaster of East Palestine, Ohio. Where the train was carrying incredibly hazardous materials. It is concerning to think that something similar is bound to happen here in Aberdeen, with the amount of train traffic we see coming to and from the Port of Grays Harbor. If anything like that were to occur, we couldn’t sit by and say the warning signs weren’t there, as this type of thing has been happening with increasing frequency here locally. What will the next cargo be? Where will the next train go off the rails? Will it crush the unhoused beneath the bridge? Will it explode like in East Palestine? We cannot know at this time, but Genesee & Wyoming Railroad Services, Inc need to conduct a thorough examination of their rail lines, and we here in town need to consider what types of cargo we want to be transported through our town.
In East Palestine, independent university researchers have found 80% of residents they surveyed say new symptoms experienced since the wreck – headaches, rash, coughs, eye irritation, diarrhea – are still present six months later, and about 40% said they suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. If we want to avoid this fate, then we need to be proactive in determining what exactly gets transported on the local rails, and have our say if something is deemed to be too dangerous or hazardous. We cannot rely on the goodwill or even mere competence of the railway companies.
365 Acres To Be Cleared For Seabrook Expansion
On the coast of Grays Harbor lies a strange little town, a town created by one development company, Seabrook. Seabrook is a private company, not an incorporated municipality, that owns land in Grays Harbor County. It caters exclusively to the wealthy in both it’s offerings of homes and services. Similar to other fabricated towns in the area like Oyehut Bay. It has a creepy and off-putting vibe, as though you have stepped into the movie ‘Stepford Wives’, where everything has the appearance of perfection but everything also is fully manufactured and fake. Towns like these are a part of a larger trend for the ultra rich to segregate themselves away from the economies and housing markets of local cities. They create their own corporate towns out of whole cloth, building everything from the ground up to be as exclusive as possible.
Seabrook currently has 34 acres, and has built 600 homes, the vast majority sold to wealthy white Seattle techies, only 130 of whom live there full-time. It is, essentially, what gentrification wants to do to every small town in the area. Who ever said the rich don’t live glamorous, extravagant lives surrounded by beautiful things?
Now Grays Harbor County has approved a pair of development deals with Casey Roloff, Seabrook’s founder and CEO. Over 20 years, Roloff wants to develop two large neighborhoods straddling the current town. This would add a maximum of 1,100 new lots.
“We were running out of land to develop and build houses on,” Roloff said in an interview with The Daily World. “This assures the county that we’re going to be building out here for the foreseeable future and it’s not just going to run out.”
This is the land of the Coast Salish Tribes, namely the kʷínayɬ /ˈkʷinajɬ/ or Quinalt tribe. We acknowledge our collective responsibility to abolish the settler colonial states occupying Turtle Island.
The Quinault Treaty was a treaty agreement between the United States and the Native American Quinault and Quileute tribes located in the western Olympic Peninsula north of Grays Harbor, in the recently formed Washington Territory. The treaty was signed on 1 July 1855, at the Quinault River, and on 25 January 1856 at Olympia, the territorial capital. It was ratified by Congress on 8 March 1859, and proclaimed law on April 11, 1859.
Signatories included Isaac Stevens, superintendent of Indian affairs and governor of Washington Territory, and representatives of the Quinault and Quileute, as well as the Hoh tribe, which was considered a subset of the Quileutes. The Quinault Indian Reservation was established under the terms of the treaty. Indian signatories included the Quinault Head Chief Taholah and Sub-chiefs Wah-kee-nah, Yer-ay-let’l, and Kne-she-guartsh, the Quileute Head Chief How-yat’l and Sub-chiefs Kal-lape, Tah-ah-ha-wht’l, along with other tribal delegates.
The Quinault Treaty was one of the last of several signed during Washington Territory’s first decade. Acquiring land cession from the Native Americans was one of Isaac Stevens’ primary goals as the first governor of the territory. Other similar cession treaties Stevens negotiated in the 1850s include the Treaty of Medicine Creek, Treaty of Hellgate, Treaty of Neah Bay, Treaty of Point Elliott, and the Point No Point Treaty.
The Quinault Treaty continued Isaac Stevens policy of consolidating tribes, often requiring tribes to move far from their homeland to a reservation to be occupied by several unrelated tribes. While not taking this policy as far as the Treaty of Point No Point did, the Quinault Treaty resulted in the establishment of the Quinault Reservation in the Quinault homeland but required the Quileute and Hoh to move there, although few did.
The treaty negotiations were conducted in Chinook Jargon, which, according to Paul Prucha, was “a lingua franca along the Pacific Northwest coast but hardly an effective tool for sensitive negotiations, for it had a vocabulary of only about 500 words, and a single word might be used to translate a number of different English words.”
Roloff also secured an exemption to the recent short-term rental regulations that limit AirBnb-type rentals in the County, due to their destructive nature.In the current town of Seabrook, between 300 and 400 out of about 600 total homes are currently operated as rentals by Seabrook’s hospitality department.”Short-term rentals in Seabrook generate more lodging tax revenue than any other source in the county” said Vickie Raines, county commissioner for District 3, which includes Seabrook. “I’ve always been pro-growth and development,” Raines said. “I appreciate people that want to come to Grays Harbor to vacation here, spend time here, and of course spend their money here.”
The County will always do anything for rich corporate interests, if there are laws that need exemptions, they have them. If there are environmental reviews to rubber stamp, no problem. Meanwhile, the poor are being pushed out of the last few places they can go by an increasingly erratic and hostile public, who see any sign of poverty as an excuse to dehumanize and degrade a person. Our City politicians want hostile architecture and more policing, and Seabrook wants more land to turn into short-term rentals for the ultra rich. Both will get what they want because the same people making the rules are the same people benefiting from them.
Aryan Freedom Network Continues To Spread Hate In Grays Harbor
On the night of Monday June 5th, members of the Aryan Freedom Network, a neo-Nazi group that is based in Texas and has chapters in 25 U.S. states, drove around town throwing flyers with their Nazi inspired logo, the 14 words of white supremacy, and a link to their website. The flyers also had a disclaimer at the bottom reading, “Distributed randomly without malicious intent”. They were sealed inside plastic bags with rice to weigh them down.
They have been discovered several times since, including August 24th, when the above video was taken and sent to us. This has been the overwhelming response by residents of Grays Harbor to finding these flyers on their doorsteps. The police told people to simply throw them away and that there was nothing to worry about. They claimed that there was no such activity seen around here and they believed that it was out of towner’s coming in to spread hate.
Yet, the facts beg to differ.
Not only have these exact flyers been showing up regularly ever since, but we have documented previous white supremacist activities both stickering and actual organizing. For example, below are some photos that were snapped of some white supremacist propaganda from White Lives Matter. The White Lives Matter movement was formed by several white supremacist groups, including the Aryan Renaissance Society and the Traditionalist Worker Party.
In terms of actual organizing let us present you to Joshua “Cache” McCallum, founder and leader of The Pacific North West Wolf Pack (PNWWP), a neo-Pagan white supremacist organization that has been actively recruiting and networking for years. They have grown since this reporting done by comrades at Chehalis River Antifascist Social Support (CRASS), and now have multiple different groups throughout the Pacific Northwest. Not only does this man lead this white supremacist group, he also is in a management position in the largest social service provider in the county, Coastal Community Action Program (CCAP). He has been known to flaunt his white supremacist beliefs while employed there including wearing an “88” jersey to work. 88 is a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.” H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 = HH = Heil Hitler. One of the most common white supremacist symbols, 88 is used throughout the entire white supremacist movement, not just neo-Nazis.
A common method of white supremacist organizing is to infiltrate social service institutions to provide aid and comfort to their friends and family at the expense of others in the community who they despise. While there is no direct evidence that Cache has been abusing his position to benefit his friends, the closeness of a monster like this to such a vulnerable population, charged with ethically administering aid without regards to marginalized identities, is extremely concerning. Whether its the police, the City Council, or some other local institution white supremacists have a habit of recruiting through their job, offering positions to people willing to make the move to their town. This is a method of concentrating white supremacists into areas where they can exert more control. The Pacific Northwest, and Grays Harbor in particular, have been the focus of the white supremacy movement for decades. This has been called the Northwest Territorial Imperative. According to it, members of these groups are encouraged to relocate to a region of the Northwestern United States—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana—with the intention to eventually turn the region into an Aryan ethnostate.
The idea that we have this history of concentrated effort to move white supremacists to this area, combined with the recent upturn in propaganda littering the streets is alarming. Antifascist need to take note of these trends and organize to counteract them in their neighborhoods. Take a walk with friends to check for flyers, make sure to have plenty of anarchist literature to hand out should anyone ask what you are doing. Keep an eye on the most vulnerable in your neighborhood as well, white supremacists often target the most marginalized people for their violence. We cannot wait until the violence starts, we must be meeting and discussing proactive solutions to this threat. We cannot afford to simply “throw them out” and forget about them like the police want. Despite what the flyers themselves say, this is direct threat against us and our communities.