A homeless shelter backed by the city of Seattle is encouraging their homeless population to ingest illegal drugs up their anus, in a process referred to colloquially as boofing, as a safer way to get high.
The logic behind the measure is that drug addicts are less likely to spread disease by avoiding needles. However, as KTTH radio host Jason Rantz notes, the effect is to promote the use of illegal drugs and keep homeless people in a never-ending cycle of dependency.
One advertisement tells homeless Seattle residents to use “booty bumping kits” and claims ingesting drugs up the anus is a “good choice if your veins are too hard to hit,” has “less risk of infection or abscesses,” has “less damage to skin and veins,” and “doesn’t leave tracks.”
Another advertisement from the homeless shelter urges for addicts to smoke their dope instead of injecting it. It reads: “Smoking is a lower-risk alternative to injection. Give it a try!” They offer “bubbles, stems and hammers,” three different types of glass pipes, for homeless individuals to get loaded.
These fliers come from the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), which is funded in part by Seattle’s Human Services Department (HSD). The director of the program defends the measures as promoting harm reduction in the community.
“The efforts we make are focused on reducing risks to people engaged in risky behaviors, and helping people make use of treatment that can be helpful to them,” DESC Executive Director Daniel Malone said during an appearance on the Jason Rantz Show.
Malone maintains that this controversial technique falls “on the continuum of helping people to decrease risk by avoiding the use of needles to inject drugs, because intravenous injection of drugs can produce complications such as phlebitis, vasculitis, cellulitis, vein scarring, abscesses, and systemic infections related to IV injection.”