Following last week’s revelation by the Washington Free Beacon that the Biden Administration had provided free crack pipes and “safe smoking kits” to drug addicts in San Francisco and elsewhere, it appears two Republican lawmakers have proposed a new bill dubbed “Hunter’s Act”, which aims to prevent the Biden administration from spending taxpayer dollars on crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia.
Penned by Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Dan Bishop of North Carolina and submitted on Feb. 10, the act’s name is an apparent reference to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who admitted to struggling with crack addiction in his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.”
According to the original report from WFB, the federal government had been planning to use some of a $30 million grant program to purchase crack pipes and other items for a ‘safe smoking kit’. Since the news broke, the White House has denied that the program existed.
The federal government should NEVER be funding crack pipes with our hard-earned tax dollars.
That’s why I’ve just introduced the HUNTER Act with @RepDanBishop.
Enough craziness!https://t.co/hrdKRNTbol
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) February 11, 2022
Speaking during a recent interview, Rep. Boebert said that she and Bishop were “standing up and saying, heck no” to the “ridiculous” funding allocation by the Biden Administration. She added that “our tax dollars should not be funding the death and destruction of crack addicts.” While “Republicans just want to give people in need a good job” their rivals from the Democratic party “want to give them crack pipes.”
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki insisted that crack pipes “were never a part of the kit” and accused the WFB of “inaccurate reporting.” She added that smoking kits may have included “alcohol swabs, lip balm, other materials to promote hygiene and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis”, but not crack pipes.
Despite all the official denials, the Biden administration has also caught some flak from nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, which lamented the removal of “pipes from safe smoking equipment” as “deeply disappointing,” calling it a “missed opportunity to be preventative of more deaths due to overdose.”
As we noted when the reports of the Biden Admin doling out crack pipes first broke, we couldn’t help but share the following (heavily edited) video:
Joe Biden & Hunter Biden on crack pic.twitter.com/wwWZfSeN64
— The Master Plan (@MasterPlan216) January 3, 2022