Comment by Mizoguchi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mizoguchi | Hacker News Reader

Talk to any homeless person in a tent city in the US and they will confirm most if not all of them are heavy drug abusers.

To solve the homelessness problem we first need to help these folks recover their health.

A drug addict with a house will still be a drug addict, the only difference is we won't see their struggle on the streets.

Seriously, if you have ever dealt with addiction you know when you are sick you can't even do the dishes or wash yourself, so how are these guys, just by getting a home, going to manage to get sober, find a job, pay the bills and eventually be able to support themselves and move out so that the next person in need can use the place?

Unfortunately the answer is very unpopular and controversial.

A drug addict will never voluntarily quit drugs and check themselves into rehab then follow a long, difficult treatment to get sober.

Addiction is an awful, depressing, humiliating and painful disease with momentary lapses of reason where many times you just want to put it all to rest with an overdose.

The most frustrating part is the resources are there, we can build SoTA facilities and run the programs and treatment plans these guys need, even customize them if necessary.

But again, we will somehow need to bring them in, most likely by force, and that's the part many in this country can't even consider for debate.

A great book on this is a little known paperback classic, "Love and Addiction" by Dr. Stanton Peele. It is about love, but there is a haunting chapter about society and social drifts. Highly, highly recommended to understand the societal problem of addiction and how it pulls individuals in like a fast moving expanding current. Also force is not going to work -- if a dog is abused and is afraid it will not respond well to being caged. Universal basic income, job opportunities, family and community relationship potential, hope, positive cultural surroundings, healthy food and water, the ability to exercise, a societal safety net, a feeling of camaraderie over competition, the ability to express oneself and develop hobbies, and to feel secure in the parent city, state and nation. Essentially everything the USA will not talk about or try to fix. USA is a warzone of violence of survival for the majority of people. Drugs are society's recommended course of action when the society has broken down.

I think cities should look into Ozempic as a treatment option for drug addiction. Preliminary reports shows that it's mainly a willpower drug, not just a weight loss drug.

> Talk to any homeless person in a tent city in the US and they will confirm most if not all of them are heavy drug abusers.

I don't think self reporting is useful here. Ask the guy who is smoking fent in the back of the bus (smells like burnt peanut butter) if he is a drug addict, and he will confirm that he has never even tried them before.

More to the point, most homeless are only homeless for a week or two. They usually aren't abusing drugs and find themselves back on their feet relatively quickly (or at least can get help and haven't burned all bridges with their family). However, among the chronic homeless, the ones that are the most visible to everyone, substance abuse and/or mental illness is a common problem (with fent, permanent mental illness results pretty quickly).

I really think we should be dumping our resources into easy cases (people who just need some financial support/housing) because if they fall into hard cases (people abusing drugs), it is very expensive to impossible to solve their problems. I don't even think force will work very well, unless you can apply it at the beginning of addiction, most of them will never be productive again and will, humanely, require some kind of assisted living for the rest of their lives.

Don’t mistake my comment for a lack of compassion. Having been homeless myself for almost a year when I was younger, camping out in a local forest preserve and packing out each and every day in the midwest, I do have quite a lot of compassion for homeless people. While I was working my way out of the hole I was in, many of my coworkers were also homeless, I got to know many of them and their individual struggles quite well. However, I’m curious about the cost of assisted living for every drug abusing homeless person in the United States, the ones that don’t work and likely never will, and how the rest of society could shoulder that burden with tax dollars when a huge portion of society barely understands how they will afford to retire when they become too old to work blue collar jobs themselves. I don’t see that being a realistic goal, but I’m interested in hearing more about that if I’m somehow wrong.

I was homeless for a couple of weeks when I was young. It wasn't really that bad for me though, since I was working, and was eventually given a couch in a friend's house.

Finland's method of dealing with chronic homeless should provide a model for an assisted living solution. It comes out to be cheaper than providing services they would consume on the street. A small apartment and a (more well payed than in the states) social worker for every 10 or so residents to make sure they don't burn down the place they are being given by the government.

But we need to provide it nationally rather than at the state or local level. This would give us the opportunity to house them in less expensive locations and would prevent the current "tragedy of the commons" situation we have now.

Worth pointing out that Finland has a much more sparse population density than the United States, with the United States having about 35 people per square kilometer, to Finland's 16. This might enable them to create even cheaper buildings in less desirable parts of their country, though on the flip side, I don't know that all of Finland's land is considered "liveable", basically being in the North Pole. Looking at their homelessness statistics, they've been on a downward trend for homelessness since 1989, having about 17,000 homeless individuals. So assuming that's around the time they started working to put homeless people in houses, I'll use that as their baseline. I'm not sure how accurate the census is on the homeless population in the US, but according to the following link we have about 582,000:

https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

I guess the question here is: does Finland's assisted living solution scale to the size of the United States' homeless problem? And I truly don't have that answer, but while I think it's valuable to point out the patterns that other countries have done to course correct their issues, I think it's also fair to say not every pattern that smaller countries use will work at scale, or even work with our current economic and social systems.

> Ask the guy who is smoking fent in the back of the bus (smells like burnt peanut butter) if he is a drug addict, and he will confirm that he has never even tried them before.

This feels like a reverse Bloom filter situation. Positive means positive, negative means maybe.

That is true. But surely there is a better way to get a handle on this problem than just via self reporting. The issue is also that there are many different kinds of homeless that really aren’t very related to each other. You can’t use the same methodology to even count them.

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