Seattle has stopped charging people for personal drug possession

A short read, a couple of pages. Extract:

" The [heroin] addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses or receptionists or Dr Marks himself. As a group, you couldn’t tell.

Faced with this evidence, Marks was beginning to believe that many ‘of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves’. In the clinic, as Russell Newcombe tells me, they started to call the infections and abscesses and amputations ‘drug war wounds’. So Dr Marks began to wonder: if prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more? He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen people to more than 400.

The first people to notice an effect were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary. ‘You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,’ Lofts told a newspaper, amazed. ‘They came in in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs; and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.’ He said elsewhere: ‘Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.’

One day a young mother called Julia Scott came into Dr Marks’s surgery and explained she had been working as a prostitute to support her habit. He wrote her a prescription, and she stopped sex work that day. "

Just a perspective, not saying right or wrong.

Edit: added this:

" And something nobody predicted took place. The number of heroin addicts in the area actually fell. Research published by Dr Marks in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t — and found Widnes had 12 times fewer addicts. "

There is a heroin addict that lives on one street I use to walk to work. He can't have more than a few years to live, he's as broken as humans get. The street he lives on is littered with literally hundreds of his used needles across bus stops, gardens, yards, paths. He defecates on the street and in bags that he leaves around.

Letting people do this legally, which Seattle now de facto does, is not appropriate.

> we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.

Where I live, the groups of car campers (or often times falling apart RV's) seem to attract crime, drug use, theft, vandalism, etc. I stopped going to one park in the middle of a city with a large group of car campers, when I found a used syringe in the fenced in dog play area, and saw two different heroin deals go down while playing with my dog. (one of them involved prostitution right in the back seat of the car in the middle of a city park)

I have personally witnessed a car camper leave their vehicle and barefoot chase an ambulance in the road, screaming profanities at the ambulance (right across from houses with small children). Through their own profanity-laced words, the person was trying to start a fight with the ambulance. Any reasonable person would assume that this car camper was some combination of a) beyond high on some drug, or b) suffering from severe mental health issues (if so, please revoke their license and get him proper help?). My neighbors and I both witnessed the situation, and called the police. Five police cars show up, get a statement from the ambulance driver, and sit the camper down. After talking to the camper for about 5 minutes, the police left with no action.

This _exact_ same car camper 3 weeks later threw a stolen bike at a moving car, out of the blue. 1 week later, I again saw this car camper kicking cars that were stopped at a traffic light, all the while swearing profanities at them. This person is still on the street, likely ready to harass the next underserving victims.

Here's another experience, which you might just write off as another anecdote. I was with my pregnant wife for a normal pregnancy checkup. A person who again was either high or suffering severe mental problems was being restrained by hospital security for breaking the hospital entrance door. The reason? The person was screaming that "the door was not supposed to be guarded by an evil spirit". Again, this person was clear high or mentally ill, or some combination of the two. However, NO ONE, including THIS PERSON, benefits from being left on the streets.

Oh, another anecdote you might write off. I take the bus to work. One morning, there was a school field trip that shared this bus. There was another person on the bus who one might assume was homeless, but agreed, looks can be deceiving. This person was drinking from a handle of cheap vodka, and then spitting back into the bottle. In between swigs, the person was swearing. What a great environment for children. We need to feel compassion for these troubled people, and provide help, but that DOES NOT mean that we should normalize these harmful behaviors.

Anyways, just some first person anecdotes to balance this thread out. It's easy to preach when you're not the one raising children around these folks.

*edit for newline

West coast states have similar alternative drug courts and rehab available, but they are underutilized, because there is no prosecution in the regular court system and therefore no incentive.

It's not that simple. (Problems are never that simple.) I live in Ballard which has a lot of people living out of RVs and tents. Many of those people don't cause problems for anyone, however, I have personally experienced:

* People shitting in our alley.

* People pissing on our garage.

* Someone shitting in a medical commode on the side of the road in broad daylight. (I admit a certain admiration for this person's self-confidence.)

* In the middle of the night, someone standing at our fence gazing into our kitchen for several minutes while gesticulating wildly.

* Furniture stolen from our front porch.

* Someone rifling through our trash. (Presumably for identity theft. In Seattle, food goes into separate compost bins.)

* Finding used needles on the lawn. (I have small children, so I had to teach them that the shiny bright orange plastic things are not toys.)

* Frequent fights and people screaming at each other at all hours of the night.

* Multiple car break-ins from car prowlers. My wife caught and yelled at one car prowler before they were able to get into one.

* When they people relocate, they typically leave a pile of trash and human waste behind. Often, RVs will dump their blackwater tank directly on the street or sidewalk. This is, obviously, a health issue.

This is just what has happened directly to my wife and I. Other nearby events:

* My neighbor owns an RV in his backyard. Someone broke into it and stole several things, including an urn containing his father's ashes. He chased after the guy, who responded by pulling a knife on him. [1]

* A couple of blocks away, someone was stabbed in the chest when they confronted someone slashing tires (in what I heard was some sort of turf disagreement).[2]

* Another neighbor found a discarded gun in their bushes. They have small children too.

* Our neighbors are constantly finding trash that's been dumped in their bushes.

* Many neighbors have been screamed at, harassed, or assaulted by people that are either mentally ill, in the throes of meth psychosis, or both.

* Public parks that used to be places to play with the kids but now are effectively off-limits. [4]

All of this is just in a couple block radius, just in the past few years. And this is in a nice part of town. Residents in the city have had a lot of compassion and a lot of patience for many years, but the city has failed to actually come up with any effective solutions. In the past year or two, people have simply run out of. It's hard to get people to empathize with someone who is actively causing them harm.

Fundamentally, humans cannot safely live at urban density without access to the full range of residential services. You can't just "car camp". Humans produce waste. Without clean water, garbage pick up, and sewage services, each of those humans is a walking disease vector [3].

Safe injection sites are not a solution. If you don't address the crimes that addicts commit to afford drugs, then your injection site just becomes a crime magnet. Mental health and addiction treatment centers are good. Shelters are somewhat good but many homeless people choose not to use them because most shelters prohibit drug use.

It's not about jailing homeless people or drug addicts. It's about jailing people who repeatedly commit property or violent crime. The root cause is usually drugs, and should be treated as part of a solution. But, at the same time, other people in the city (including many other homeless people who are one of the most common victims of crime) need to be protected and feel safe. Being a drug addict should not be a blank check to steal from, vandalize, and assault people.

[1]: https://q13fox.com/2019/05/06/a-seattle-dad-frustrated-over-...

[2]: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/ballard-business-owner-hail...

[3]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/infectiou...

[4]: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/camping-in-the-end-zone-how...

King County has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States. There are several organizations giving out clean needles in King County. We are building new housing at a very rapid rate and many areas of the county were upzoned just this year so we can build even more housing.

To me your comment is asking for us to do more of what we are already doing, even though what we are doing is barely slowing the growth of homelessness. There is no amount of taxation on businesses the city, county and state can impose that will provide a home for everyone that needs it. This approach will not produce positive change.

The downtown spots have a high and constant density of mostly undangerous people, involved in low level anti social behavior.

White center has a low and volatile density of somewhat dangerous people, doing some nutty stuff. Just in the past few months, I can recall: A guy got his throat slit, while driving his car, because he had given his passenger's girlfriend a ride earlier. There was an armed robbery outside of Triangle. A 59 year old got shot in the bathroom of Tug on St Patrick's Day. I lived on 16th until recently, and would flip the scanner on every time I heard sirens, just to keep a pulse. It's not chicago, but it's legitimately dicey sometimes.

With that said, I agree that we need more housing, though I think seattle is doing an excellent job of that compared to SF, and it's reflected in the flattening rent prices. We could be doing more, though. No reason we can't have significant multistory buildings in west seattle.

Important to note that it’s often a funnel, homelessness -> addiction, so you have to work on both sides.

I don’t have the perfect solution, nobody seems to, but Seattle and a few other cities seem to be going down the wrong path with vigor.

We can discuss this with no implication that there's a static amount of soda consumption in the world, or that people want to be obese from consuming it. We understand life is a series of choices, "when to consume sugary drinks" makes up some of them, and that by disincentivizing that choice, people are more likely to choose a different beverage.

Nobody "chooses" homelessness, but like anything else, becoming / staying homeless often is the result of numerous choices, some of which are easier than others for various reasons. When you artificially remove bad consequences from some of those choices, it is not surprising that those choices are made more often.

Adding support for an activity provides extrinsic motivation for doing something.

Basically, cities get what they pay for. If you pay for homelessness you get it.

That said, I'm not saying we shouldn't help people, but that we should make sure that whatever support we provides guides people towards self sufficiency and not dependence.

“The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber, ... To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” – FDR 1935

Therefore, ppl who would otherwise being in jail for crimes are living on the streets.

There was a documentary about this done by a local Seattle TV station. I don't know how reliable it is, but at the end it actually gave fairly humanitarian and progressive solution to the problem, despite spending most of the show arguing lax and progressive policing attitudes created the problem to begin with [1]

[0] by, a criminal being more likely to become homeless, or by desperation driving the homeless to crime

[1] Their proposed solution, inspired by a program in RI (? maybe ME), is to treat drug addiction as a disease to be treated by having effective programs.

One approach includes both reward / consequence. In this model, things like theft, various forms of violence particularly in shelter or public housing violence, even taking over extremely large areas of public space (ie, 3-4 tents plus dogs plus...) results in consequences, while avoiding issues along the above lines results in rewards (ie, eligibility for service or additional service). In addition, these approaches tend to also consider impact on the non-homeless (ie, prison time linked arguably with a reduced risk of property crime)

Other models are focused primarily on making life as bearable as possible for the homeless - basically the straight service model. Under this model, resources are provided and consequences are reduced in the event to solve homelessness.

Some folks going through the tougher love systems (ie, jail vs rehab etc) say good things, other folks ask how can homelessness be criminalized and focus primarily on reducing risk of govt involvement (this can also save money in some cases - prison is expensive, rehab is expensive etc).

While I can't speak to the truth of the belief that people are actively moving to Seattle, I can say that there's little incentive for someone to follow basic property or drug laws in this city.

EDIT: To your point on how this differs from "Homeless people are lazy" I guess the idea is that we've created a situation where there are even more factors pushing homeless individuals to the streets and suburbs of Seattle, that Seattle has made homelessness more attractive in a sense.

The only solution is exactly the kind of thing this article is talking about. Providing consoling / rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one by one. There is no blanket solution.

As a kid I caught busses every day on 3rd Ave without a problem, and yes, the same open drug dealing still happens at 3rd & Pine (by the crackDonalds), but that has been going on since before I moved here in 2003. When I transfer there now, not much has changed in terms of the people you'll see.

The level of danger hasn't changed, but the homelessness crisis has worsened and become much more visible as we fenced off the underside of bridges, replaced parking in the inner suburbs with bike lanes (in large part to push the van dwellers out) and rent has increased. We have an opioid crisis that is going untreated, high rents and few middle income jobs.

Our society is stratifying badly between the 90% that is getting poorer every year (and feels no hope) and the 10% that are able to afford rent in prime cities.

That is Hollywood, not reality. Tossing happy drunks into cells to sober up overnight is not a thing.

(1) There are no happy drunks. The drunks cops arrest are loud and aggressive. Often the physical act of arresting them results in more violent behavior.

(2) "Drunk" is not a thing for cops. They don't know if the person has had too many beers or had just taken LSD, or both. If they assume a person is simply drunk, and that person dies in the cell of an overdose, the cops will be responsible because they isolated that person. Cops are forced to treat intoxicated persons is more like patients than a 'drunks'.

(3) Mental health problems can look like, or at least exacerbate, intoxication. Cops cannot casually lock people up under the assumption they are dunk when in all likelihood they may be a non-drunk person in the middle of an episode. So cops must test people, evaluate them to determine what is at play. That takes time/money.

(4) Police cells are not happy places. They aren't private 8x4s with a soft cot. Spend a night in an LA lockup. You will not be getting much sleep. Casually throwing hundreds of drunk people into that mix will not help.

Assuming this is just about happy drunks, businesses that get people drunk and let them loose on the streets share the responsibility. We cannot allow bars and liquor stores, and their patrons, to rely on a pleasant police force ready to keep drunk people safe after the bar closes. If a bar is going to serve someone to the point of arrest-worthy intoxication they must contribute to the cost of keeping that person safe.

I saw a BBC doc yesterday about drinking in the UK. They have stores selling 3-liter bottles of 7.5% cider for four dollars. That is ridiculous. 3-liter bottles of dirt-cheap alcohol, cheaper than coke, are not bought by happy social drinkers. Any store selling those knows what it is doing.

Thats sounds great except

1. Accusing the police of questionable arrest tactics, mistreatment, death while in police custody (even from lack of treatment) is already a PR issue that has caused huge public outcry.

2. Overdosing and sobering up isn't strictly safe on alcohol or on opioids. Where drug overdoses are a top killer in society right now.

3. Homeless and drug addled people don't have the cash to pay a small cash fine. They just spent it on their last score, or the only cash they have is stolen or pan handled. And if they don't have the money to pay, you've just criminalized them more or put them further into a debt they will never pay.

4. Denial is the first sign of a problem. Sure, tell a stranger to go to rehab. Thanks to the undoing of forced institutionalizing, that's all you can offer.

I'm not even commenting on whether these things should be legal in private, but there are very good reasons they shouldn't be allowed in public.

Also your conclusion at the end is completely wrong. Prison excludes people from society. Letting them exist in society by imposing some rules is exactly the opposite.

> close to dividing society into your kind and "subhumans" to be exterminated

As does this bit from another post:

> why you seem to be indulging in such fascist revenge fantasies

It's not ok to argue like this on HN, regardless of how right you are or feel, or how wrong someone else is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the site guidelines and commenting more in the spirit of this site, we'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You can say that, but it's very, very incorrect. Seattle spends $1 billion on services, clean up, housing, and etc. for a homeless population of 12,000.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of...

What happens if you do that and next year discover that now you have 1,000,000 homeless people?

You're responsible for all of the consequences of a program, even the unintended ones. The line between "supporting" and "enabling" is very fine and hard to navigate. It's difficult to help people on the bottom while avoiding incentivizing people to stay on the bottom.

>What does "enforcing norms against anti-social behavior" mean in this context, if not putting people in prison or issuing citations (which eventually lead to prison)?

Not being okay with it, which implies that we'd so something about it. Which does mean things like citations, at a minimum. Right now it's totally normal.

>The frustrating thing is that there is a solution to this, which is called housing first...

Broadly, I agree with this paragraph. I think we should take the billion we spend in this city on homelessness (not sure that stat is actually true since I've never seen the line item in the budget but people say it a lot) and build these places ... and then make them mandatory, or at least semi-mandatory. That might sound extreme, but frankly many of these people clearly don't have agency anymore given their addiction and they've become a danger to themselves and others. So that's my "out there" suggestion. Build the housing, fund the medical and job-training services, and deliberately - not passively - push people into them.

Of course, this presupposes that lack of housing is the first incident problem. Maybe it is, maybe drug use is in some cases. I don't particularly care for drug use, so my personal preference is that we repeal the decriminalization rules and reverse some of the cultural acceptance that's taken hold here of this behavior. We've probably missed the boat on that one, since most here seem to take the libertarian approach that what someone does with their body is "their business", despite the fact that it often becomes someone else's very quickly.

>...backed down when Amazon and other large companies raised hell.

If the city council wanted to just tax Amazon then they could've done that, but instead that cast such a wide net that medium sized low-margin businesses that don't have enormous capital behind them were wrapped up in it too - so I understand why they backed down. There wasn't any real self reflection from them after that happened, so I tend to agree that we're stuck in an infinite loop of "more of this".

The history behind the War on Drugs is very explicitly a one divided on racial grounds and a cursory look at things like the legality of marijuana or mandatory minimums tells the full tale.