NYC allows pot smokers to light up at quarantine hotels at taxpayer expense

Further proof the left wants people locked in their homes, high on something, and listening to all their fearmongering the media manufactures, out of touch with the real world.

It shows how phony this thing is… number one organ system targeted is lungs.

NYC allows pot smokers to light up at quarantine hotels

New York City’s COVID-19 quarantine hotels are dope.

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By Melissa Klein, NY Post, January 1, 2022:

Anyone staying — at taxpayer expense — at one of the city’s quarantine hotels is welcome to bring their weed, which an on-staff nurse will bag, weigh and distribute for sanctioned smoke breaks. Cigarettes are also allowed.

The lodging is meant to give New Yorkers a place to recuperate from the coronavirus without sickening family or roommates or to stay safe from infection. The city started the program at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to help stop the spread of the virus by keeping people apart.

When The Post visited the LaGuardia Plaza Hotel in East Elmhurst Thursday, one of the guests was just outside the hotel entrance puffing on a bong as staff kept an eye on him from inside the lobby.

Jonathan Martin, 21, who held the orange, traffic cone-shaped bong, said he was asked if he had any pot when he arrived at the hotel on Christmas Day. He said staff put his stash in a plastic bag and took it from him, handing it back to smoke during three designated 15-minute outdoor breaks in the day.

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“They allow you to bring marijuana to quarantine with you, but they don’t let you bring alcohol,” said Martin, 21, a coffee shop manager who is from Astoria and at the hotel so as not to infect his roommates.
LaGuardia Plaza Hotel
The city is paying to put people infected with COVID-19 up in the LaGuardia Plaza Hotel.
J.C.Rice

He said a staffer scrutinized his bottle of pomegranate juice to make sure it was sealed and didn’t contain booze.

Martin said he was grateful he could still smoke.

“It’s nice to relax when I’m stuck in a room … by myself for five days,” he said.

The East Elmhurst hotel is run by the city’s Test & Trace Corps, which is part of the public Health + Hospitals system. The city could not immediately provide the cost of the program.

The city once considered serving drinks to guests who were alcoholics so they would not reject the free housing.

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An insider said about 65 percent of the 420 or so guests at the hotel, and at a nearby Holiday Inn, were pot smokers.

The source said nurses had to weigh the pot after some guests claimed their weed was stolen from the holding area, which is monitored by nurses and site directors. The nurses also have to accompany smokers outside on breaks.

“I think it’s a shame. Nurses go into the field to care for patients, this is not care. Rather than offer patients help for addictions, it’s being supported,” the insider said. “Nurses are told it’s part of the job when they attempt to refuse to accompany patients to smoke marijuana or cigarettes.”
Jonathan Martin“It’s nice to relax when I’m stuck in a room … by myself for five days,” Martin said.J.C.Rice

There were 732 calls to 911 for the LaGuardia Plaza from Jan. 1 through Thursday including 694 for an ambulance; 14 for disputes; and 10 for larcenies.

The city offers the free accommodations at the hotels for up to 10 days and also provides transportation in car services or taxis to get there and three meals a day.

Nurses at the hotel check the temperatures and oxygen saturation levels of guests during the day.

One recent LaGuardia Plaza guest said the city gave her food that contained gluten, that she couldn’t eat, and sent her home in a car with another recovering COVID-19 patient who refused to wear his mask properly and still seemed to have symptoms, according to a copy of a complaint she wrote which was obtained by The Post.

The woman said she did not leave her room for fresh air breaks during her stay because the elevators were always crowded with other patients.

“It really felt more like Corona jail than a healthcare facility,” she wrote.

A spokesman for the Test & Trace Corps. would not address the woman’s complaints or the marijuana use other than to say that clinical assessments were done for guests to determine what support they needed.