Washington did not sue Andrea Suarez. It did something pettier. After her privately funded group, We Heart Seattle, hauled more than two million pounds of trash out of parks the city had given up on, the Department of Labor & Industries opened an inspection because an anonymous referral said the volunteers were holding the needles wrong.

The needles, mind you, that King County hands out. Syringes, foil, the full harm-reduction gift basket, distributed to drug addicts on the taxpayer dime in the name of public health, then left in the grass for joggers, dogs, and the occasional idealist with a grabber. 

The agency that helped stock the park is not the one answering a 48-hour demand for training logs. The woman with the sharps container is.

No one has produced a stuck volunteer. No one has named the complainant. Suarez is the only employee; the rest are people who showed up for free. The state’s reply is a six-month occupational-safety file, the threat of fines, and a request for disciplinary records from an outfit whose only employee is the founder. 
It is not a ban. Bans are honest. This is a tollbooth on the way to the dumpster.

As always, follow the money. Who loses if the bags keep filling? (“Follow the incentives” repeats the previous sentence. Cut it.) The advocacy shops that spent a decade calling sweeps violence and calling the litter proof that housing needs another appropriation. 
And the contractors who bill the city millions to discover, at union rates, the same foil a volunteer can lift with kitchen tongs. A good Samaritan is a competing business model. She does not need a grant. She does not need a study. She makes the mess look optional.

The process is the punishment. Time, lawyers, forms, and a fine the file is built to find. A punishment for daring to compete with the government unions. 

The rational response is why bother. Leave the needles for the agency that issued them. Leave them for the contractor who bills to lift them. 

Then the precipitate. Decent people move somewhere that treats a cleanup as a favor instead of a regulated worksite. 

Blue cities have perfected the sequence. Make the hazard, license the hazard, lose the argument to a woman with a red wagon, then investigate the wagon.

I don’t wish you luck blue denizens, the writing is on the wall, the projector is playing your future, and you keep voting and marching towards the gulags.