Mapping San Francisco's Human Waste Challenge
forbes.com
forbes.com
Step 1: People start shooting up in public bathrooms, and then passing out on the toilets
Step 2: Public bathrooms are closed due to the drug problem found in step 1
Step 3: Now everyone begins shitting in the street because public bathrooms are no longer available. And those people shooting up in the bathrooms are also shooting up on the street.
In those public bathrooms that remain, you typically see needle disposal containers; sometimes in every stall. In Seattle on Sunday, I went to the bathroom in Macy's and every stall had them and I'm pretty sure 3 of the stalls were occupied by people doing drugs.
The obvious answer is supervised injection sites where people can safely shoot up, which would then allow public restrooms to reopen and not be constantly occupied by people with needles. Unfortunately, the republican party at the national level has worked to actively prevent SF from opening these sites. So, the author, a prominent republican, should maybe consider telling his party's national apparatus to get out of the way of SF fixing their local problems rather than his weird nonsensical admonition at the end.
It isn't reasonable to shoot up in a public bathroom even if a city doesn't provide supervised injection sites any more than it is reasonable to have sex in the street if a city doesn't provide free love hotels. At some point antisocial behavior is and ought to be considered criminal.
Also, since they're not busy burglarizing homes to get money to buy drugs, they could also be employed for tasks like street cleaning.
I think many people have issue accepting that drug addicts are part of society. Criminalize them, and the whole underworld evolves but it won't affect their numbers much. Put death sentence on drug use, and there will still be healthy population of addicts.
So with your 'drawing line' approach and misleaded comparison to sex trade, you just give ammo fodder for far right-wing populist politics, polarizing society and law enforcement, increasing crime and making it more organized, while achieving very little positive impact. Something like famous US screw-up called War on drugs.
The difference in the swiss city of Geneva at the central station in the late 80s and early 90s is hell and heaven. While it does not solve all problems the methadone heroin replacement system does solve the vast majority of negative issues. Petty crime and robbery dropped significantly, whores for drugs disappeared, needle reuse is non existent. And in the 80s I was warned with reason to look out for drug needles and not touch them. This is not a worry anymore, either in the Netherlands or Switzerland.
Both Amsterdam and Geneva suffer these days from organized street crime. But the risk of being attacked by a junky for your wallet is minimal. Organized street crime prefers to steal from you without you noticing and are quite skillful. Junkies needing money for a hit are more like dogs with rabies. The remaining junkies are rather fragile and slow, and not dangerous as long as they get their regular hit. Which they do in a safe and controlled environment.
Having been to San Fransisco and Amsterdam these are no longer comparable at all. 25 years ago I can believe but 15 years, no.
In my city people are clamouring so hard to get a safe consumption site just this week a dispute over where to host it was dropped out of fear we wouldn't get a site up and running at all. The mayor and some councillors wanted to use an empty lot along a major street on the edge of downtown, but that would require building a facility and all necessary funding hadn't been secured. Everyone on the ground involved in fighting homelessness and addiction wanted another location which has been vacant for a while. It's not too far from city hall and in a much more walkable location, but that places in near some other community centres. This location could be up and running in just a few months from the word go. Community leaders organized to convinced the mayor (who to his credit changed his mind) that approving an unfunded site risked not having a safe consumption at all. Every single person opposed to the more central location does want a safe injection site and also agreed to drop their opposition to the central site. Long term the best location may be the empty lot, but everyone involved didn't let perfect be the enemy of good. I've never been prouder to live in this city
If you want to be an anarchist, that's your right. But you don't get to mischaracterize people that think we should have laws as 80s style drug warriors.
This is not even close to what I was suggesting. Talk about being dishonest.
Why would you complain about being mischaracterized, and then blatantly do the same?
Talk about an approach that hasn't worked so far.
I'm open to legalization or anything that minimizes damage, but unfortunately most people don't seek help until they've hit some kind of bottom. It's a complicated issue, and just making it easier for them to use seems as simplistic as "just say no".
> Step 3: Now everyone begins shitting in the street because public bathrooms are no longer available. And those people shooting up in the bathrooms are also shooting up on the street.
I am having difficulties following. How did you get from step 2 to step 3? Since when does lack of available public bathrooms lead to public defecation? Is this really a thing somewhere? I cannot wrap my mind around it. Are people really this incapable of controlling themselves? Do they just let it go wherever they are when they get the urge? Horrible. This is not really the case in the country where I am, so "everyone begins shitting in the street" certainly depends on where you are, what the culture is, and so on. It sounds really alien to me. We already do not have available public bathrooms in many areas, but public defecation is certainly not a thing. People are taught to hold it back in until they get to a bathroom...
Edit: we also have fecal collecting bag dispensers, which is basically a bin (+ bags) specifically for collecting feces, usually dog. They are emptied on a daily basis. Take a fecal collection bag, put your feces inside the bag, throw it away into the bin specifically designed for collecting feces. No bathroom required, and no feces on the streets!
"People are taught to hold it back in until they get to a bathroom..."
For these people, there isn't one.
The city has started to roll out public sanettes. Like a stripped down version of what you would find in Paris. I'm hoping they deploy more of them, quickly. They are useful to everyone.
A person in the right mind does not shit in the middle of a street or sidewalk, they'll shit in an alley or something. Or over a storm drain.
It's not like it's tourists urinating in public because there are so few public bathrooms.
We have mental people here too. (And homeless mental people, it's not like all of Europe is some social democratic paradise.)
I think the root cause in SF is the crisis of homelessness which seems massive compared to what I have seen elsewhere.
As long as they're located in the parts of town where the rich/upper class live, I say go for it.
Yo guys, I know this may sound crazy to you, but have you thought about imprisoning those junkies? If you're so humane, maybe give them treatment AFTER you take them off the streets? While you're at it, might as well get the name of their supplier and imprison him too -- doesn't sound like a rocket science to me.
I don't buy that police is doing a good job right now -- I've been living in NYC in 2011-2015 and for whole 3.5 years every Friday and Saturday there was a guy standing at the intersection outside my work at 15th & 9th peddling coke and molly (the guy was standing there, sometimes walking crosswalks and saying out loud "coke, molly, weed"; not yelling, but loud enough that passerby's could hear him).
That's too flagrant to be legit. Did he spend Monday through Thursday listing "solvent traps" on eBay under the username "TotallyNotATF"?
I could understand a dealer "advertising" in the open like that in 70s Detroit or somewhere else where the primary mechanism of "law" enforcement is getting paid by a tax on his profits and not by the city but saying "yo I got drugs for sale" is on a whole different level than standing around.
edit: to be fair -- this may be an act to lure in regular people who may think they have a chance against a tweaker. They don't. Those guys are crazy good.
I hate to break it to you, but there are people other than drug addicts who are willing to jump your mother/girlfriend in the women's restroom.
I am pushing back on the implication that people who are in the act of shooting up are uniquely dangerous people who need to be kept out of the bathroom. I could easily believe that, as a group, IV drug users are more likely to commit violent crimes out of desperation than the average citizen, but there are plenty of other people like this, including people who are just very poor.
the most ridiculous part is that you can fix this by not letting them shoot up in the bathroom. even if they can't do drugs in there, they still have to pee sometimes, and then your mother/girlfriend is in there with a Dangerous Drug User again.
On this I agree, I personally am against legalizing drugs, but I am also against criminalizing drug use. Public safe places to use drugs that are not used as bait from the police are essential (IMO) to solve drug problems when they are already widespread.
However I agree that it is not wrong to be scared of drug users, especially just after use and when you or the people you know are not prepared to handle someone under influence.
Why do you think this approach hasn't worked so far? Do you think if we only arrested more drug users the war on drugs would finally be over?
Because you are not actually jailing people, duh. GP has written about 3 stalls being used by drug addicts at the same time! Where the fuck is police watching? Drugs are ridiculously easy to come by, hence why I believe the police isn't doing it's job.
> Do you think if we only arrested more drug users the war on drugs would finally be over?
Yes. Currently USA is doing absolute jack shit and wondering why the war on drugs is being lost. It seems that everyone but the police knows about dozen of celebrities who are doing drugs on an industrial scale. There are people whose identity and fame are revolving around drugs, for example Snoop Dogg, why the fuck he's not in jail already? The guy was smoking lifetime sentence worth weed per week way before it was decriminalized. I'm not going to believe that you guys are actually having war on drugs until you actually start jailing high profile public drug users.
Strict and actual enforcement of drug laws works. Period. Singapore and Japan are effectively drug free. Off top of my head more recent examples are Georgia (the country) and Davao city, which have eradicated rampant drug use in matter of years.
For the record: I have absolutely nothing against the drugs and am 100% for legalizing majority of drugs. But I'm very against saying that US is actually doing something about the drugs -- it's like hearing a fat kid who is eating a cake right fucking now claiming that he's on a diet and has been dieting for a long while and the fact that he is still fat proves that diets don't work.
The United States has 2 million prisoners. 6 million people are under supervision of other phases of the "criminal justice system." This is the largest imprisonment regime in the history of the planet in sheer numbers, and the largest present today in sheer numbers or per capita. How many do you propose jailing?
> Snoop Dogg, why the fuck he's not in jail already
The answer to this is simple: the government does not have the power to do this and yet continue stay in power (this is sometimes called "political capital"). Cannabis prohibition has never enjoyed anywhere near consensus support among Americans, and hasn't even enjoyed majority support for a decade now. Jailing Snoop Dogg for smoking cannabis will result in nothing short of a general strike (or worse) among young people, especially young people of color.
It is not an exaggeration to say that an event of this magnitude, conducted in the public eye against an articulate public figure, effectively turning that person into a political prisoner, is likely to result in the total collapse of the US political system.
As you rightly point out, the government enforces the law with a great deal of "discretion", sometimes carefully choosing to tread in places that won't result in this sort of revolt. The drug war is already on a razor's edge. And I think that the state has already shown a willingness to imprison (in 13th amendment terms, to enslave) a huge mass of Americans.
The reason that more is not done is because it is politically impossible.
> Strict and actual enforcement of drug laws works. Period.
Your use of the sentence "Period" indicates to me that you don't actually take your own position particularly seriously.
And you are unambiguously incorrect on this point, at least if you take every academic expert seriously.
Moreover, you seem to be under- and mis-informed about the facts surrounding drug policy, and this appears to be hampering your argument. If you are interested in gaining knowledge in this area, I suggest Mike Gray's book, Drug Crazy, in which he very convincingly shows the futility of prohibition in a world historical context. [0]
I think that Drug Crazy is a very effective refutation, made by someone who is a deeply compelling author, a lauded drug policy expert, and cannabis consumer, to the assertion that "Strict and actual enforcement of [drug prohibition] works."
> Singapore and Japan are effectively drug free.
I think that it has been reasonable to assume sincerity on your part until this statement. But now I'm not so sure. Do you really mean this? Are you just totally unaware of these reality of these societies?
First of all, declaring a particular political region "effectively drug free" requires that you first adopt a contrived definition of what a "drug" is. Both regions you have chosen have cultures that celebrate intoxication from alcohol, a drug whose toxicity profile is similar to heroin and withdrawal from which is a far more dire medical episode than withdrawal from heroin. Japan in particular embodies this phenomenon as much as any place on the planet.
So before we even talk about the actual prevalence of addiction in these societies - rates of which are extremely difficult to ascertain due in part to drug prohibition - we have to recognize that this ostensible achievement has come only by choosing to allow the vast majority of drugs, again including alcohol, which is perhaps the most intoxicating and debilitating drug among those widely consumed by humans, to remain legal and then handling the consequences of their unhindered consumption.
The fact that Singapore and Japan have purportedly reduced consumption of a tiny few drugs out of the pharmacopeia of thousands is not impressive, nor touted as a success by any serious drug policy expert.
> I'm very against saying that US is actually doing something about the drugs
Fine, I can understand this position. I think that you need to educate yourself on the history of political capital as it is consumed by prohibition, from the opium wars to wrangling over the Southern border of the USA today.
For this, I recommend Jim Gray's (unrelated to the other author I suggested) book [1] or Michelle Alexander's book [2].
If books are not your thing, let me know what kind of media you prefer to consume and I will dig some up for you.
0: http://drugcrazy.com/ 1: http://www.judgejimgray.com/whyourdruglawshavefailed.php 2: http://newjimcrow.com/
How many street shitters do you have? How many people do you have who are shooting heroin publicly on the train station? Starting with those sounds like a nobrainer to me.
> first adopt a contrived definition of what a "drug" is
Sure, my statement would be incorrect if you change the definition of words I'm choosing. But you very well know that in this context I've meant drugs that are defined by the UN as illegal: https://www.unodc.org/documents/scientific/Terminology_and_I...
Sorry, I don't understand how can you claim that drug prohibition doesn't work when you have countries where it in fact it does successfully work. Without resorting to redefining words, how do you explain Japan or Singapore? Is X prohibited in Japan? Yes. Is the prohibition enforced? Yes. How easy would it be to acquire X there? Very very hard. Did the prohibition work in this case? Yes. Substitute X with weed, LSD, or heroin, or your ILLEGAL drug of choice. If the prohibition can't possibly work, how do those academics explain that? Why is that prohibition of alcohol was successful in Kuwait? You'll probably argue with word "successful", but for the sake of argument lets count drunkards on the street or talk about drunk-driving related stats: there are effectively 0 of those. Do I agree with alcohol prohibition? Fuck no. Do I agree with drug prohibition? Fuck no too. Would prohibition always fail? No.
I haven't read the exact books you recommend, but I've read other books on this subject and frankly find their argument lacking. Way too often their authors cherry pick arguments.
One of the books on this topic was David Nutt's "Drugs Without the Hot Air". David Nutt is also proclaimed as world drug expert, but his book is riddled with huge amount of lies by omission. The one egregious example was him citing Kary Mullis (the Nobel laureate for inventing Polymerase Chain Reaction) saying that without LSD he couldn't have invented LSD. What Nutt forgets to mention is that Mullis is fucking lunatic who denies existence of AIDS, denies climate change, believes in astrology, sincerely describes his encounter with glowing green raccoon (The raccoon said: “Good evening, doctor.”). Like yo ... I'm not a doctor, but maybe this has something to do with copious amounts of LSD the guy consumed? If there is even a slight chance that Mullis' mental state was caused by the drugs maybe it was worth mentioning and not just cherry picking praise?
I was able to catch his lie just because I happened to known about Kary Mullis beforehand. So this example shows that David Nutt is, in fact, very biased (duh). What else did he lie about? Why should I trust him with his claims about something else?
Do you want your country (or mine) to be like Kuwait or Bahrain? If you can agree that that's the sacrifice required to make prohibition "work" - is it worth it?
FWIW, this style of governance is probably not possible in the United States partly because armed resistance is trivial. So it might be a moot point for the purposes of considering the ramifications of genuine enforcement.
It sounds like you and I agree on the capricious enforcement paradigm inherent in US drug policy. What I think that you haven't explored is why it is this way. That's really the heart of the matter.
> I've meant drugs that are defined by the UN as illegal: https://www.unodc.org/documents/scientific/Terminology_and_I....
Yes, and those too are chosen for political purposes, to give the appearance of legitimacy to an argument that doesn't make sense in the real world.
> David Nutt is also proclaimed as world drug expert, but his book is riddled with huge amount of lies by omission.
Indeed. David Nutt is not the kind of "expert" I'm talking about. He is perhaps an expert in some of the "hard science" components of drug use and abuse (although even there, his activities have called his expertise into question). He is not an expert in matters of drug policy and the history of drug policy, as was made all too evident during his short stint in government.
If you want to read or hear convincing material from drug policy experts, look to Ethan Nadelmann, Kevin Zeese, Tom Angell, Irina Alexander, Rick Doblin, Jim Gray, Mike Gray (no relation), Michelle Alexander (no relation), etc. These people have committed their lives to researching the specific societal implications of various drug policies, and I think they make deeply convincing arguments rooted in fact and sound theory.
Indeed, it sounds crazy. In fact, it's very close to the cliché definition of insanity: what you are proposing has been done over and over again, without a single successful example of prohibition in all of western political history.
But more than crazy, what you're suggesting sounds childish, expensive, and complicated. It does not sound like sober thinking about effective public policy to deal with the consequences of addiction.
A contrasting approach which is mature, affordable, and simple, is to legalize all plants and to create a controlled, safe market for plant derivatives like heroin. This will have the impact that is most important: it will disrupt the income stream of the drug cartels and dealers who, as I'm sure you already know, share your policy approach quite passionately.
I wrote an exact same response to a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19682651
Imprisonment just fuels the pockets of drug dealers and gives organized crime a profit motive. Ever wondered why terrorism is so rare but organized crime is so common? Because terrorism isn't profitable.
I can't tell if you are a troll or not. This is literally the war on drugs for the last 40 years. How's it working out for us??
Here's my response to the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19682651 It has more examples and may clarify my position a little better.
Are you sure about that? Having traveled around Europe and North America, the only public bathrooms that weren't absolutely filthy were the ones that you had to pay for or were privately maintained (e.g. mall bathroom)
So I'm not sure that's the obvious answer.
Also, in your 3 steps you just assume that the level of homelessness in LA, San Fran, and Seattle is normal - and it isn't. Those municipal governments are terrified of crazy activists and have completely abrogated their responsibility to the rest of citizenry and to the homeless. The reality is that homelessness in those cities are wholly due to mental illness and/or drug abuse. The laws are so bad that even immediate family cannot forcefully institutionalize their family member and take them off the street so they can get the treatment they need. According to ACLU and activists compassion means you let those individuals (who cannot make decisions for themselves) languish in filth on the streets.
It does seem that whatever solutions they have implemented so far don't work too well.
Are there cities that solved or at least made significant progress with homelessness that it would be possible to replicate.
Who are the activists? Are they homeless themselves I wonder. Otherwise I have observed quite a few times when activists' interests and motivations don't align with the those of the groups they claim to represent
Doesn't look like "the Republican Party at the national level" to me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-hea...
the previous administration could have changed the course of both the drug war and the opioid problem if they had acted but they also bow down to the real power behind the drug war which is the police and sheriff unions, those who enforce and those who run the prison systems.
you want to change the drug war you have to get the public employee unions out of politics one hundred percent. they perpetuate the drug war and resulting prison state far more than any corporation. they own politicians and have no issue exerting pressure to keep their power
You mean that giving tiny minority of people the ability to collectively bargain against the people and institutions that call the shots for society itself results in perverse incentives that are bad for society?
Shocking. /s
I have no problem with private sector unions but public employees are in the unique position of having an employer who is legally required to be mostly transparent and ultimately beholden to the opinions of the public. The opportunity for them to be abused by the employer/employee power imbalance is far less than that of their private industry counterparts.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/12/17/oregon-has-nations-sec...
https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...
"Watch out for that shi*!" she exclaimed. I thought she was crazy, shouting at random. Then I saw that I'd stepped in human poop.
True story.
It's just like saying that Earth is a lovely place, as long as you avoid breathing the atmosphere and drinking any of the water. Look at the forests! Hope your spacesuit's faceplate doesn't become pitted by the acid rain.
Edit: Wow, I'm being downvoted for a personal observation that a story is exaggerated. Sorry if I disturbed your confirmation bias.
True it's not "ankle deep in poop", but if that's the bar where we are comparing it with then there's something truly amiss in a 1-st world city/country.
A lot of these solutions just involve pumping money through injection sites, programs, etc. I think it’s something no amount of money will fix. Something needs to be done about a culture that not only accepts this as normal, but is trying to find ways to make it acceptable and easier to do in hopes that they’ll stop.
There’s a reason other counties bus people into SF: it’s because they know people in SF will put up with it. There will be a constant flow of new people who don’t care about ruining a city.
There's some serious cognitive dissonance here. The people who start in CA and end in Denver, Portland or Austin might not be shitting on the streets themselves but they fight tooth and nail for the kind of public policy that has led cities like SF and SD into their current pediment. They're shitting on the streets by proxy.
This is a very rare problem in literally any other Western city. Even in the severely deprived ones which have used needle problems. Dog waste and public urination, maybe.
I’ve lived most of my life in Philly, FWIW. Not exactly a bastion of cleanliness.
Possibly but I'll throw my two cents in. Non-American here with no Dem or Rep axe to grind, SF is the most disgusting western city I've ever been to.
I don't think it's a cheap shot to criticize SF in this case, and as a liberal city. It takes a woefully unrealistic approach to homelessness. At its core, the problem is the more accommodative you are of homeless people the more you attract. No matter how much money you throw at the problem, you cannot "solve it" as a city. Homelessness has network effects just like the tech industry.
Now I'm all for helping people less fortunate and those down on their luck, and SF does help people, but there are those who are chronically homeless. They fall into three groups: those who prefer the lifestyle, those who are mentally ill, and those who prefer to spend all their money on hard drugs (including drink). You're very unlikely to get these groups off the streets, no matter what you do, but you will still attract them.