On Monday, Patrick Hauf of the Washington Free Beacon reported: “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity’”.
On Tuesday, Snopes “fact checked” a few blog posts that picked up the Beacon story and confirmed* the original Beacon report but nevertheless handed down a “Mostly False” rating:
It’s Mostly False because it’s completely true. pic.twitter.com/FRvqTUMfCJ
— Josiah Neeley 🤔 (@jneeley78) February 9, 2022
If you read the original Beacon report and the Snopes “fact check,” you’ll see that by “Mostly False,” Snopes really means “True, but We Think the Program Is Good.”
Funding for the program was provided by the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” that congressional Democrats passed on a party-line vote in March 2021.
*Update: After my post was published, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a statement—more than two days after the original Beacon report was published—denying that crack pipes would be included for the “safe-smoking kits” for methamphetamines and crack.
The Drug Policy Alliance issued a statement accusing HHS of “backtracking on providing critical evidence-based resources that could greatly improve the health of people who consume drugs through smoking.” And a spokesman for the Drug Policy Alliance told the Washington Post: “It would seem pointless to distribute these kits without” pipes because they “are the main part of the smoking kit to prevent the transmission of disease.”
The New York Times reports that HHS “did not respond when asked by The New York Times if glass pipes were ever allowable under the grant provisions.”
There is nothing in the $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill, which funds the grants in question, that would have prohibited the funding of glass pipes, and there is every reason to believe that glass pipes would have been included in these kits had they not received scrutiny in the media this week.
The original Snopes “fact check” of the Free Beacon article did not question whether pipes were part of the “safe smoking kits” for crack; Snopes merely asserted that the kits were a “small part” of the program, so it was wrong to focus on them.
The original Free Beacon article reported that HHS “told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance,’” and the same article also reported: “An HHS spokesman declined to specify what is included in the smoking kits. Similar distribution efforts provide mouthpieces to prevent glass cuts, rubber bands to prevent burns, and filters to minimize the risk of disease.”
As Andrew Egger reports in his run-down, emails show that HHS never explicitly said glass pipes were part of of the kits. So it was not correct to say, as I originally did, that the Snopes fact check confirmed “all the major details” in the Beacon story. The Free Beacon editors respond here.