People in Baltimore have been dying of overdoses at a rate never before seen in a major American city.
The city was once hailed for its response to #addiction. But as #fentanyl flooded streets & ofcls shifted priorities, deaths hit unprecedented heights.
This is the first part in a series exploring #Baltimore’s overdose crisis.
In the past 6 yrs, nearly 6k lives have been lost. The death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly DOUBLE that of any other large city, & higher than nearly all of Appalachia during the prescription pill crisis, the Midwest during the height of rural meth labs or New York during the crack epidemic.
A decade ago, 700 fewer people here were being killed by drugs each year. And when fatalities began to rise from the synthetic #opioid#fentanyl, so potent that even minuscule doses are deadly, #Baltimore’s initial response was hailed as a national model. The city set ambitious goals, distributed #Narcan widely, experimented w/ways to steer people into treatment & ratcheted up campaigns to alert the public.
I have just discovered that the Baltimore Rock Opera Society exists, its current show is A Computer That Loves: And Why Not To Build One, "a original universe-spanning sci-fi rock opera epic with a big (and heavy) heart."
Spurred by climate protests in art museums, #Baltimore Museum of Art unveils sustainability plan
"The climate plan, expected by year’s end, could evaluate how the museum could relax its stringent indoor climate controls to reduce energy use, ways to implement composting for food scraps and strategies to reduce waste associated with packaging artwork and setting up exhibitions, Naeem said."
"If we had a healthily functioning regulatory system, if we actually had a society that did not allow corporations to do whatever the hell that they want, those things would not happen in the first place. That is the problem"
Body of third #Baltimore bridge victim has been recovered
Authorities said Fri they have recovered the body of another one of the construction workers presumed to have been killed in the Baltimore bridge collapse.
Dive teams recovered the body of 38-yr-old #MaynorSuazoSandoval at about 10:30 AM Fri, acc/to Unified Command, the group of agencies managing the response to the #KeyBridge collapse.
President #Biden is heading to #Baltimore on Friday to survey the wreckage from the Francis Scott #KeyBridge that collapsed last week. In an addition to an aerial tour, Biden will get an operational update on #work being done to reopen the #PortOfBaltimore & will meet w/ #family members of those who died during the collapse, the White House said.
"One of the ugliest features of MAGA politics is the eagerness to seize on large scale accidents, disasters, and pandemics to spread conspiracy theories, invent new culture-war obsessions, and pit one region of the country against another. ...
It is not a new thing for Republicans to treat disasters in blue areas as less deserving of our collective attention than disasters in red areas."
"But Trump supercharged these tendencies. Brian Beutler urges us to remember that during Covid, Trump didn’t merely neglect blue areas of the country; he used the pandemic to actively threaten retribution against parts of the country that didn’t support him.
This kind of thing has become a feature of MAGA politics, as opposed to an incidental by-product of a particular governing vision."
"Trump flaunted his treatment of blue America as a zone of disease and debauchery that all but deserved to be abandoned to a fate of mass death and suffering by dint of its moral inferiority to MAGA America. Make no mistake: His very public relishing in his power to do this was central to this performance and, one imagines, to its appeal to the MAGA masses."
Responders have currently found ‘no immediate threat’, but 14 of at least 56 containers carrying #contaminants were destroyed
by Dharna Noor in Baltimore
Sat 30 Mar 2024
"In the meantime, more containers could fall into the water, including ones the NTSB says contain corrosive chemicals and #Lithium-ion batteries – materials that could leak #toxic#HeavyMetals into the water. And as long as the ship remains in the water, the possibility of the ship’s fuel container rupturing remains."
"In the past days, we have learned that the six maintenance workers killed when the bridge collapsed were all immigrants, natives of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Around 39% of the workforce in the construction industry around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., about 130,000 people, are immigrants, Scott Dance and María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post yesterday."
"Some of the men were undocumented, and all of them were family men who sent money back to their home countries, as well. From Honduras, the nephew of one of the men killed told the Associated Press, 'The kind of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do. People like him travel there with a dream. They don’t want to break anything or take anything.'"
"In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, journalist Will Bunch castigated the right-wing lawmakers and pundits who have whipped up native-born Americans over immigration, calling immigrants sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers, and even 'animals.' Bunch illustrated that the reality of what was happening on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed creates an opportunity to reframe the immigration debate in the United States."
"When the Dali cargo ship demolished that bridge support on Tuesday, it also obliterated all the ridiculous lies and myths our demagogues have been spreading around immigration. There were no sex traffickers aboard the Key Bridge that night. Nobody was dealing fentanyl."
"They were not 'animals,' but fathers and husbands like Suazo and Luna, whose wife occasionally showed up in her food truck to bring the men tacos and pupusas. They were filling potholes so their children could have an even better life.
These six workers who perished were not 'poisoning the blood of our country,' they were replenishing it."
"As of this writing, Trump has said nothing at all about the Key bridge collapse. And why would he? It can not after all be blamed on the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, or the Democratic governor of Maryland, or the Democratic president of the United States. The men killed in the accident were immigrants, rather than blue-collar white men. So as far as Trump is concerned, it merits no comment."
"No condolences to the families of the dead; no assurances to the affected communities that he intends to be their president, too.
Left to his own devices, Trump will either continue to ignore the incident, or he’ll respond only when prompted by an ally in right-wing media. Extrapolating from his response to every other tragedy, he might assert monomaniacally that the accident simply wouldn’t have happened if he’d been president."
"Immigration is Trump’s sweet spot. He can dehumanize brown people and advocate for harsh deportation policies that would require a rabid MAGA police state to implement. Immigration is also the one issue where Trump has most shaped the GOP into his own image."
“While we’re being talked about as like this invading horde that’s coming to destroy the country, what does this story actually show us? That immigrants are filling our potholes at night so that we can have a smooth drive to work in the morning.”
~ Maximillian Alvarez, editor-in-chief of the Baltimore-based Real News Network
"All of those missing were immigrants, outsiders who had come to the US from Mexico and Central America for a better life. Their stories and aspirations mirrored the lives of millions of new entrants to the United States. They are far more representative of the migrant population than the extreme and misleading picture often spouted about migrants by Donald Trump."
"Baltimore mayor rips right-wing 'DEI mayor' attacks. Right-wingers smear Brandon Scott, who was elected with over 70%, as a diversity hire after Key Bridge collapse."