An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
Determining root cause is important to finding the right solution. Further cracking down on homeless people will just transfer them from the streets to jails, where they will cost the taxpayers exorbitant amounts of money (and if they're in a private prison, create profit for private interests), while failing to get people back on their feet when they are eventually let go.
> no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts
While Utah isn't technically the West coast, how does the author's claim hold up in the face of the resounding success of their efforts to reduce chronic homelessness (down 91% in a decade while saving the government 50%)? Does this proven solution fit with his root cause model?
See: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
Ima go with that explanation since it is a lot simpler.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/1_krueg...
The author, describing his assumptions in building his model (pg 36), states "This is a big leap," - language I've never actually seen in an academic paper before. It's usually the sort of thing that peer reviewers say behind their hands before throwing barbs at you.
There are entire parts of my city (parks, downtown) I can’t even visit because of the homeless. Maybe someone who falls on hard times doesn’t deserve jail time but if you steal or break any other laws you need to face the music, just like everyone else.
The homeless deserve dignity and respect but so do the rest of us, I feel like that has been forgotten.
> The homeless deserve dignity and respect but so do the rest of us, I feel like that has been forgotten.
How mulmen isn't getting dignity and respect: he's afraid to visit parts of his city (parks, downtown).
How homeless people aren't getting dignity and respect: sleeping outside in the very places mulmen is afraid to visit, having to beg for food.
To be honest, even if anyone had forgotten about how inconvenient homelessness is for those who live in homes and don't have to go near areas with homeless, I'd be pretty okay with us forgetting that.
The current state of homelessness in Seattle sucks for everyone. Regular citizens of the city are rightfully getting fed up by the lack of progress.
That’s important because the only way we can solve it is with the support of the public. Attacking me isn’t doing anything to help.
We have law-abiding citizens getting stabbed walking down the street. Trash, human waste and used needles litter parks and public spaces. It’s not a safe place to be and that is not acceptable.
Okay, yes, we need the support of the public. But if we get the support of the public by appealing to the self-centered fear of people who live in homes, you get more of the solutions we already have: put spikes on the stoops and make benches impossible to sleep on, send cops around to wake people up every 30 minutes, etc. People haven't forgotten about your fear: that's all they care about. That's why they've driven all the homeless into a few select areas which are now scary and dangerous: so you don't have to be afraid, because you don't have to go there. Solving that last little bit of the homelessness problem will never be a priority because the fact that you want to go somewhere you don't have to go but can't because you're afraid just isn't a real problem. And if someone does decide it's a real problem, they can always just deport the homeless to another state[1].
The solution to homelessness is homes. No counseling, rehab, or drug treatment is going to reliably cure someone's mental illness while their basic physical needs aren't met. And giving homes to the homeless is an expensive solution that isn't going to be palatable to people unless they can muster a bit of compassion for the homeless. Because if all you're trying to do is create a safe space for people with homes to walk around, sweeping the homeless under the rug is a "good enough" solution.
[1] https://www.nbcsandiego.com/investigations/Nevada-Settles-Ho...
The homelessness problem in Seattle is very much something I see in person every day all over the city. You may not understand the nature of Seattle homelessness from New York or from a newspaper article from San Diego.
Housing the homeless is an important step and is something Seattle continues to try and do. The problems we face have more to do with the optional nature of rehabilitation and lack of social services that allow people to become homeless to begin with.
Responding to just this: you're the one who sees people sleeping in the streets and decided to make it about you. Highlighting the incredible disparity between your problems and homeless people's problems isn't intended as an attack on you (although it is also that), it's an attack on your argument.
It doesn't seem the article is advocating for a crackdown. The article seems to advocate for cities "to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions."
I've criticised the author (Chris Rufo, associated with the conservative and intelligent design group Discovery Institute) in his earlier pieces (see https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/acwqng/podcast_s... ) where he used seemingly incomplete estimates on the funding used in homeless initiatives and suggesting unproven solutions (large tents, sanitariums).
I'm not denying the homeless and drug problems in Seattle. I live in the same neighborhoods where I've seen people shoot up in starbucks bathrooms and on the street, RV camps of bicycle chop shops and filth. The King County complaint Rufo links to ( https://www.krcomplexlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/King... ) arguably means the local government is trying to take that first step in recognizing "addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless", right?
If you lock up the users, you’re just spending more money housing non violent offenders. If you lock up the sellers, someone else will take their place. Homeless drug addicts don’t fear jail, how could it be any worse than life on the street addicted to drugs?
I have no idea what the answer is, but I suspect it is a better social safety net where people think they have a fair shot in society where they don’t view drugs as an escape or have the mindset of having nothing to lose. I honestly haven’t thought about solutions that deeply.
But, I am far out of my area of expertise to know anything about clinical depression.
Frankly, imho, this is often driven by politicians. They're fond of make campaign promises to solve Issue X. The problem is, they've gotten the problem wrong.
Solutions to the housing, homeless and drug problem exist but the voters and politicians don't want them.
Nodding is the only thing dangerous about heroin addicts who have access to heroin, everything else is a symptom of prohibition. Additionally, long-term heroin addicts who have a consistent supply don't really nod much, or for long. It's the gaps in supply (of unadulterated drugs with a predictable purity) and the consequent simultaneous reduction of tolerance and increase in desperation that causes accidental overdoses and deep nodding.
Nodding is of course dangerous for drivers and operators of heavy machinery, but it should be treated like we treat any other sort of chronic seizure issue.
Can someone give their reason as to down voting this comment?
There have been numerous articles posted here as of late relating to loneliness, suicide rates, etc. What do you need to see the bigger picture? I don't understand why this is so difficult. I feel like there must be some ideology in the way here or maybe politics or cognitive dissonance. I mean you could have just ignored the comment if you were in ambivalent disagreement.
Having worked in social services for 14 years it has become clear to me that social support, ie healthy family structures, friends and coworkers, as well as having a meaningful reason to get out of bed in the morning are the most important factors when it comes to overcoming addiction. I'm not aware of much research regarding this aspect of treatment. All I can say to that is that I have a very paranoid and pessimistic view as to why.
Most famous is probably the Rat Park study: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Blaming the drugs is an easy out and probably is more pleasing to people coming from a puritan world view.
I didn’t downvote the parent, but the idea that only unhappy people use drugs isn’t true. Maybe if you limit it to hard drugs or maybe if you limit to “abusing drugs”? I have no strong opinions.
Alcohol and marijuana are both drugs, plenty of happy people drink and smoke weed. On the other hand, plenty of opioid addicts started taking the drug legally because of a real pain and then got addicted.
Unpopular opinion: I’m ok putting non-violent people in jail when they break the law. We need reform in the jails and prisons, not more lenient sentencing.
And because I’m sure it needs to be clarified, not every law breaker needs to go to jail immediately.
- selling drugs to adults.
- adults buying drugs
- prostitution (either side)
If we simply legalized all drugs tomorrow I don’t think it would solve many problems. We have to also look at and treat the underlying cause of addiction and drug abuse.
Your suggestion of reform is indeed necessary, but some of the things I suggested above would fall outside of what most people would consider "jail." We are stuck on this singular "solution", and why? It doesn't seem to be very effective.
If we're looking at addiction as a mental illness to be rehabilitated from, I would posit that forcibly housing them with a bunch of other mentally ill people, some of whom may be violent, would be traumatic enough to most people that it would more than negate the benefits of many rehabilitative interventions.
If locking up drug addicts in a room and telling them to sort it out doesn’t work maybe we should try a new form of rehab instead of just saying “well I guess rehab doesn’t work”.
The point is if you break the law the state should have the ability to force corrections.
I’m completely in support of reinventing what those corrections are.
The opioid addiction crisis is a complex issue, and the data defies reduction to any particular cause.[0] It's become popular to blame the issue on the pharma industry, but to do so is an oversimplification large enough to call a mischaracterization, and focusing primarily on that area will not solve the problem.
I think that the reason for the popularity of this misconception is that it throws a bone to almost anyone's ideological predispositions. It blames both "big business capitalism" and "the out-of-touch elite", it avoids laying blame on doctors, or on homeless urban addicts, or on poor rural addicts, or on the suburban middle class, or on a culture that fosters both urban homelessness and rural poverty, and it's a simple explanation that has intuitive appeal.
According to what I've read online though, most of the illegal opioids are not prescription, but rather from Chinese manufacturers via Mexican drug cartels.
I think that the thing that started this was the demand for psychedelics and pain killers among the rich tech workers of Silicon Valley, LA, SF, Seattle, etc, which have infected the west coast with the false notion that drugs are a 'victimless' crime. I've personally witnessed many very educated, very rich college students, take opioids -- not from a doctor's prescription -- but because they thought it would be fun. Perhaps they are not the addicts talked about here, but the fact is that their ability and desire to pay thousands for this stuff means that the drug cartels are enabled, enriched, and now have an incentive to market to less individually-wealthy, but larger markets.
Maybe it's time we start acknowledging that perhaps the environment is at least partially to blame for individual problems. Why are people staying with drugs that they hate? Could it be that there are societal issues which keep them from becoming mentally well enough to combat their other problems?
Another question is why do some countries not even have a drug taking culture in the first place. Lot's of places I've been to where the population isn't interested in any drug use despite it being decriminalized or readily available.
i don't know about superfoods making you feel better. i generally eat what i crave, which tends to be "real" food (fresh meats, dairy, and fruits/veges) more than processed food, although i do still love sweet/salty/fatty treats (but not breads particularly). i don't think we know enough about food and our bodies yet to optimize more than that.
It's just kind of a ladder they all climbed to the strongest, least legally available variant of what started out as simple pain relief prescriptions.
One really underhanded thing that's happened around here is that there are these new apartment buildings that are "affordable". (But not really.) But if you're a homeless vet, there is a provision where they are obliged to give you a place in these kinds of buildings.
One caveat though, it's not open to substance abusers. Which most of the homeless vets are. To add insult to injury, a lot of them got on the ladder because they were prescribed pain relievers by the VA. Now a lot are differently abled because of being wounded. Hooked on opioids due to climbing up the ladder I was talking about. And homeless to boot.
It's sad.
But what's the reasoning for not completely liberalising drugs? Is there a reasoning, or is it just a means to keep control over a population one feels they own?
I'm not necessarily for complete liberalisation, just curious about how/why the system is as it is.
In the UK the only apparent motivation for the original legislation in restricting drug sales, the Pharmacy Act 1868, appears to be that particular groups wanted to be the sole parties legally allowed to distribute those substances. Deaths fell, according to Wikipedia's mixed up statistics. But the motivation appears to have been unrelated to public safety. Meanwhile, of course, anyone with sufficient funds could simply buy the substances they wished. Wartime motivation (WWI) was to keep soldiers battle-ready. Then it seemed to become an international issue.
I moved from California. One thing I noticed that doctors in this area will easily prescribe pills compare to Calfornia. Everyone takes pain killers. Pretty much everyone carries pain killers all the time.
With the same evidence one could write an article that says "increasing prices drive out the most vulnerable first".
[1]: https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf
People who are living on the street, for the most part, have burned through all the support their family and friends are willing to give. Their addiction or mental illness (or combination) have resulted in their support network turning their back on them. Sure, there are exceptions, but this is true of a significant majority of people living on the street (this is easy to verify if you search for studies of people living on the street and addiction/mental illness).
It's not a coincidence that a large majority of people living on the street are addicted to drugs or suffering from mental illness (and in fact that the majority are suffering from both or self medicating with street drugs).
If you are homeless, but you have no mental illness and no addiction problem there are so many people and services standing by to help. The homelessness crisis is almost entirely a mental health crisis. People aren't living on the street because they can't find a job or affordable housing. Look at undocumented immigrants, they somehow find jobs and housing despite prejudice, language issues and low wages, and still find ways to send money home despite being completely ineligible for public assistance. If millions of people who are still learning the language can find housing and work and save money, then the otherwise physically healthy people living on the street can't be explained by 'income inequality' or 'housing prices', and in fact studies show that addiction and major mental health issues are nearly universal for people living on the street.
Except for, you know, homeless people.
Clearly the parent is saying that people start out with some sort of support network, and are likely to have transitioned from their own accommodation to sleeping on a couch or in a spare room, and _then_ become homeless. That in that process those with the most extreme problems lose, one way or another, their useful support network.
To counter the parents claim we'd need solid figures of those who went from self-supported accommodation direct to being homeless on the street without any support from family or friends [or others].
Shelter did an indicative, not statistically significant report in which they say
>"Half of the people we spoke to ended up rough sleeping because they had nowhere else to turn. This could be because they didn’t know anyone who was able to accommodate them, or they had burned bridges with friends and families due to drug and/or alcohol misuse." (Ch.3, "Summary report - On the Streets", from [2])
Half isn't quite the large majority the parent claims, but this isn't a statistical survey. I think it gives enough support that one should need to prove them wrong with well supported figures.
This page [1] has some relevant stats which I think largely support the parents position but the question of "did you arrive as a rough sleeper from being hidden homeless" doesn't seem to be well shown in stats I could readily find.
Crisis have pertinent UK stats too [3].
[1] https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/data/rough-sleepers-london...
[2] http://england.shelter.org.uk/professional_resources/policy_...
[3] https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/homelessness-k...
>"Half of the people we spoke to ended up rough sleeping because they had nowhere else to turn."
This is a little bit ambiguous, but I think one fair interpretation is that the other half they spoke to had somewhere else to turn. (It is also possible they had no information on half.)
So if half do have a place they could go (possibly with the condition of not using drugs, which is the reason they don't accept the accommodation?) and some number of others had burned bridges "due to drug and/or alcohol misuse", that's already a majority. Again this is a pretty close reading, but what I said is not controversial at all if you dig into some of the data and don't just read press releases which selectively quote the studies, or misleadingly combine statistics about people who have lost a residence (due to foreclosure, health, or other financial hardship) but have shelter with friends or family and people who are sleeping outside without shelter.
I have experienced this with one person. She didn’t become homeless but it had reached a point where the whole family said “enough is enough, we can’t help anymore”. Interestingly this was the turn around. Once nobody was willing to help anymore she pulled herself together and straightened things out. It’s still not perfect but much better. If she hadn’t had the energy or intelligence to get her life in order she would be homeless or dead now.
This is a pretty silly assumption to make when the data for San Francisco and Los Angeles show different, where less than a third of the homeless is addicted.
And given how the housing crisis is so much worse in San Francisco and Los Angeles than Seattle, it's choosing exactly the wrong data points to extrapolate from.
Further, it ignores how once someone is homeless it is much easier to fall into addiction, as other homeless people are often your support network and there's a higher incidence of addiction among the homeless, spreading it.
All too often "not my fault" is a reason to avoid addressing the parts that are our fault.
The only exception being that drugs like Fentanyl should stay illegal, under the hopes that having legal morphine, heroin etc completely eliminates the demand for it. (Often fent is acquired by dealers, rather than directly by the end consumer. Although there are people that do Fent recreationally, god have mercy on them...)
For example a typical street operation like openly selling baggies outside of a legalized injection clinic or to a homeless camp is often done by the addicts themselves, who will always only be holding just enough so they don't see much jail time if they are arrested. Security of this street dealing is overseen by very obvious looking prison gang members who hold no evidence and make sure to never take the money from the street addict peddling their baggies of heroin or crack instead there are drops coordinated with the huge prison goon nearby to prevent any robberies. Resupply is done through complicated handoffs and drops with a network of a few dozen addicts who've been recruited to sell for the gang. The gang themselves are buying off other mid level gangs who in turn are buying from higher level/cartels.
You can try to put a cop on every corner and disrupt the handoffs, or harass these enforcers off the street, but soon your police force is going to run out of overtime money, not to mention the other factor which is gang violence "management". The police know if they decimate the current street gang controlling the street trade that a dozen other gangs will immediately start fighting to be the successor meaning there will be high profile shootings going on in the media, which in turn puts pressure on city hall, which in turn puts pressure on the police chief to do something to stop the violence which eventually means relaxing enforcement on whatever gang currently controls the homeless drug trade so long as they stay in their lane and don't escalate their street violence into the media or against people not involved in the trade. It would be nice to arrest and stop the midlevel and high level suppliers but nobody has figured out how to effectively do that with limited enforcement resources either.
Nobody will vote for the city mayor who wants to significantly jack up property taxes to pay for a new drug crackdown when every voter knows it's largely a tried and failed, unsustainable policy. It would be vastly cheaper to just pour money into gang recruitment discouragement, and hand out free heroin undercutting the gang's product which is what they've started to do here.
Oddly enough, he fails to include any of the research we do have about the connection between cost of housing and rate of homelessness. When rents go up, homelessness goes up. http://fortune.com/2018/12/14/rent-homelessness-housing-inco... When affordable housing disappears, evictions go up and homelessness goes up. http://komonews.com/news/local/washington-homelessness-resul...
One recent positive change was a state law increasing the time a tenant has to pay rent late from 3 days to 14 days. There are many programs that will help pay a one-time late rent, but none of them are instant. Lots of tenants will accept a landlord saying that if you're not out in three days you'll be evicted and spend that time scrambling to leave instead of scrambling to pay, so that they have a chance at renting again in the future - and there's a ton of evidence that preventing the initial step into homelessness is by far the cheapest and most successful way to prevent longterm issues. https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/4/26/18518477/eviction-refor...
Of course, Rufo and people who quote him admiringly tend not to support interventions like this at the point of entering homelessness, since they are committed to the idea that not having a place to live is not a cause of homelessness (which, to be clear, INCLUDES those who are staying with friends or using their social safety net).
Regardless of the situation, the city is not really coping very well with this challenge. We should just do what Utah did, focus on getting housing for everyone, then you can send treatment to them. I can't quite understand why we can't arrest and hold people to longer sentences who commit crimes dozens of times in Seattle. This is separate from just arresting people for drug use, which never solves anything. Get housing, get enough services, treatment for people and also police and other services. That is how we deal with this.
[update, fixed a few typos]
No word on methodologies though.
This article gets causality backwards. It’s kind of amusing.
"The true source of drug addiction: a society organized around the quest for wealth and geopolitical power, which creates enormous dislocation. This pursuit of wealth and power inevitably produces widespread addiction, which we insist on calling a “drug problem.”"
We live in a society where record numbers of people are lonely, depressed, and disconnected. We worship consumerism and the economy, and idolize weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.
Increased opioid regulation has had the effect of forcing a lot of people who are in pain to suffer even more. The addictions that plague our society won't go away until we fix the underlying problems that make people so vulnerable in the first place.
This breaks the site guidelines against flamebait and name-calling. Would you mind reviewing them? Taking threads further into flamewar is what's most important to avoid here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197294.
It also fails to acknowledge (in CA at least) that the 80s republican plan to save money by closing mental health facilities put a large number of people on the streets without any means to afford necessary drugs, and so no ability to work (assuming they had somewhere to live). This dramatically increased the cost to the state as now people with mental health issues get put in prisons. Keeping someone in a prison costs much more than in a proper treatment facility, and also fails to provide any rehabilitate support, and now they have a criminal record so even if they could get treatment in prison they can’t get a job when they get out, so end up homeless, and then back in prison.
It also ignores fairly basic concepts: there are fewer rooms available to rent in SF than there are homeless people, so even if the city just paid the rent for them (which is cheaper in the long term), there isn’t anywhere for them to live.
Cool beans.