Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>This is not what a solution should look like.

I'm not necessarily a supporter of suboxone / methadone / whatever , but this NIMBY rhetoric isn't helpful, either.

It's rare for the down-turn of an area to have one extraordinary cause.

I guess that the suggestion is that methadone clinics create crime where there otherwise wasn't -- but I don't see it that way in my community.

What I see these clinics provide is a centralization of potentially bad actors for authorities to keep tabs on while they seek guidance or pay court-ordered time to the system otherwise.

What's the alternative here? Cease these communal style clinics? If one believes in these treatment options whatsoever then it must be realized that cessation of these clinics would take that care option away from many people who may find legitimate use.

I don't have alternatives to the clinics , but I do have insight into what one should pay attention to when an area begins to struggle:

Income, education, and general upward mobility within society.

> It's rare for the down-turn of an area to have one extraordinary cause.

no it's not. he's talking about a single store. in my town it's the homeless shelter and halfway house that causes a 5 block radius around it to be a terrible place to live.

we're not talking about building more housing, or zoning for high density commercial/residential mixes, or building public transit, or eliminating cars from downtown cores, or building more bus routes, or bikeshares, or uber, or any number of things that people actually want. we're talking about methadone clinics and halfway houses next to where affluent people live.

if you pretend like it's hard to understand why people don't want those things in their residential/shopping neighborhoods, you're just going to alienate everyone you communicate with. you can't just invoke the magic 'nimby' and get people to change their minds. __they don't want these things next to where they live__.

> __they don't want these things next to where they live__.

Which is the precise definition of Not In My Back Yard...

yeah, and good luck convincing anyone, anywhere that building a methadone clinic in their back yard is a good idea.

here's another turn of phrase you might find handy: choose your battles.

I know some people complaining about the noise from child care in their neighborhood.

why should it be a problem? in the UK, methadone is normally dispensed from a regular pharmacy, just like any other prescription you might get from your doctor. I wonder if what you are seeing is that the clinic has been placed in a neighbourhood that already had high crime/homelessness/etc. since that is where the addicts who need its services are? it just seems odd that a clinic would be placed in an affluent area, where property costs are probably high, and the service users have to travel to get there, but maybe it's an american thing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com