We're living through an opioid epidemic and people are reframing it as a housing problem, SMH
The pills are incredibly cheap to manufacture.
A few things would happen if we started handing out opiods for free:
* petty crime would decrease -- it's not the drug that causes the crime, it's trying to pay for the drug
* organized crime would decrease -- moving opiods is a lucrative operation, and our addicts are bankrolling very bad people by doing business with them
* users would get clean product -- opiods laced with fentanyl are a huge problem and responsible for the majority of hospitalizations and overdose deaths
* more users could hold stable employment and rehabilitate themselves -- i've known plenty of opiods addicts, but you'd never know they had a problem, because they were all rich tech workers that were not stealing to satisfy their addiction
* most injection users would be pill users if it wasn't so expensive -- giving them free pills would encourage a less risky route of administration and decrease sepsis cases
If we still have a homeless problem after that, communal housing outside of the city with free drugs might be enough to get them to relocate to where they're not a problem and in considerably less danger.
But then I remember that we live in a god-fearing christian nation, where drugs are bad and addicts should be shunned, so my plan probably won't work.
You'd re-invent the 19th century opium den, but it's public housing with free Oxy just outside the city limits, where you can choose to forego any meaningful integration into society, and (I assume) cut your life a bit shorter and escape into an unending, but more socially-acceptable, opium high.
I think the idea would be to keep everyone safe and ideally give them pathways back to normal society, not create a permanent underclass.
If a significant percentage of the population wants to take advantage of such a program, that probably means society is doing something else wrong unrelated to drug or housing policy.
Anecdotal for sure, but a couple of my friends have had parents who were addicts, even when they had the love and support and housing options of being with family they chose to stay on the streets, unless they decided they needed to rob a family member for some more spending money. Spreading subsidized housing out doesn't work, addicts will just hang out closer to their dealers/sources on the streets. Putting up highly concentrated housing programs just make this problem even more dense, creating a radius of exceptionally high crime.
Even in the most idyllic scenario of creating perpetually well-maintained and totally free housing, many will end up choosing the streets anyways, out of convenience, mistrust, or mental health issues.