I've said before that Democrats aren't good at solving problems. It would be easy to believe they simply can't, that they just don't know how, and there's plenty of reason to believe that. But a group of volunteers cleaning up needles from Seattle's streets just got a strange thank-you note from the government, and it made me reconsider everything. What if the truth is even worse?
Andrea Suarez founded We Heart Seattle in 2020 as a one-woman operation. Seven years later, she's built an army of hundreds of volunteers who have logged more than 50,000 hours picking up drug paraphernalia from the city's streets, parks, and playgrounds. Needles. Pipes. Foil. The debris of a crisis King County's own government won't clean up itself.
Now her organization is under state investigation.
The Washington Department of Labor and Industries is investigating We Heart Seattle following a complaint alleging "improper handling and collection of hypodermic needles and fentanyl paraphernalia," according to documents sent to Suarez and viewed by Fox News Digital. It's the same paraphernalia King County hands out through its "harm reduction" programs, no strings attached.
"One of the biggest advocacy work I have done is that I go to the needle exchange and I get what they call the 'party kit,' and I demonstrated that our King County 'Health' Department is handing out cookers and tourniquets and glass pipes and paraphernalia to do drugs," Suarez told Fox News Digital.
Suarez denies any wrongdoing. Her group uses gloves, grabbers, and proper sharps-disposal procedures, and We Heart Seattle's own website instructs volunteers to wear long pants, long sleeves, and closed-toed boots before ever touching a needle.
It gets worse.
After learning she was under investigation, Suarez did something the county apparently never bothered to do: she went to a harm reduction site herself. She asked staff for specific guidance on handling "fentanyl foil" and other dangerous supplies. She says she got nothing.
That's the double standard in a single sentence. The government hands out the drug supplies for the addicts. The government offers no safety training. And when a private group volunteers to clean up the mess, the government sics investigators on them.
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"We have been out here for... going on seven years every day, every weekend we're out there picking up needles and trash. And for my 'thank you' letter from the government, it was this letter saying, 'You're under investigation for allegedly improperly handling this very equipment that they hand out with no instructions,'" Suarez said.
As far as I'm concerned, that letter says everything about how the left views private citizens solving problems government created.
"You have to look at the optics of a state, a county, a city level that allows people to openly use lethal and illegal narcotics like methamphetamines and fentanyl, and they give you the paraphernalia to use those drugs on our taxpayer dime, to use in public spaces with no consequences... and then I'm over here trying to manage the problem, clean up our dog parks, clean up our children's merry-go-rounds, ensuring our playgrounds don't have needles and foil sticking up through the grass, and I'm the one under investigation," Suarez said, adding: "The optics are egregious."
They are. This is a public health problem a private group solved because local leadership wouldn’t. The question isn’t whether the local government can solve the problem; it’s whether they even want to. And the fact that We Heart Seattle now faces a state workplace-safety investigation for cleaning up what the county itself distributes to drug addicts, well, that answers that question.
For the modern Democrat Party, there's no problem the government isn't supposed to fix. And if the government doesn't want to fix it, apparently no one else is allowed to either. Why? Because you cannot have private citizens showing up the government.
