Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who thinks funding rehab centers and getting homeless drug addicts into free apartment units are people who have never been around homeless drug addicts. There may be some wonderful examples of this working but 99.8% of the people you will encounter on your commute are not about to participate in rehab, and if you ask them they will give you a history of apartments and homes they've been asked to leave due to destroying them. Even if you used the same enforcement to take other peoples money in taxes for funding in order to force them into homes and rehab centers you will find that the overlap (at least in the US) with severe mental illnesses is huge AND you cannot legally force these people into places to address it. The reality of drugs and homelessness in America is so bad that listening to people talk about government ran programs and some funding figures are naive or disingenuous - all of the state programs are closer to end of life hospice work than a solution.

The homeless drug addicts covers a huge range of people. Many actually claw their way back into normal society. No solution is going to fix everyone but you can minimize the externalities from homelessness.

It’s simply an optimization problem. Prison is horrendously expensive, and people on the street have real externalities for everyone in the area.

I was with you until “simply”. Nothing about this problem is simple.

Being an optimization problem doesn’t mean it’s simple, just that there are tradeoffs.

If anything the complexity is why it’s an optimization problem.

It’s simply complex.

What does commenting 3 asterisks mean? I’ve been noticing this more and more recently

It’s an alt-right dog whistle.

What does it refer to? Couldn't find anything on Google.

I didn't see the original three asterisks, so I'm not sure. In general writing, three asterisks is used as a visual break between two sections in a document.

I assume the other commenter is referring to using "(((@name)))" on Twitter, and similar patterns, which is some social media thing I don't understand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses.

What if we make it not simple, but "simply" exclude just one solution - lifetime punishment (prison + 40,000 collateral consequences, life imprisonment, or a death penalty) - directed against the persons with the problem, from the mix, and leave everything else as wide open as ever for consideration?

Yeah I've seen the destruction that comes from removing legal/social consequences for drug abuse. Neglected and abandoned children is by far the most tragic. The community of non-addicts bears the responsibility for cleaning up the destruction, the addicts themselves cannot. That's the nature of addiction. To be clear I'm talking about the hard drugs; opiates, cocaine, meth.

I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive. Some have no desire to stop. There are also frequently other mental or emotional problems. Just feeding addiction's most obvious symptom (by continual drug use) does nothing - see this article.

I doubt whether there will ever be a neat and tidy "solution". Eventually the healthy part of society will have enough and some action will be taken, like prohibition or war on drugs, etc. Then it will wax the other way again.

Imagine you are suffering day in and day out in crushing poverty, that you see nothing but crime and hopelessness all around you, that your friends and family have been killed or are rotting away in jail, that you are looked down upon, spat upon, and despised, that you see no hope of bettering or escaping your situation.

Then imagine you've taken something that infinitely transforms your world and makes you feel amazing to such a degree that's absolutely unimaginable to someone who hasn't tried some of these substances ("better than sex" is an extreme understatement). All your pain is gone, all your misery forgotten, amazing vistas open before you, all is good.

After that brief stay in paradise, you come crashing down and back in to your miserable life. Everything is as before, your passion is back, only you now know it's possible for you to get back to that exalted state, to escape that prison of a life you've been living in, even if for a moment.

Is it evidence of a disease for someone who's gone through this to desperately want to experience that escape again? To be free and feel great?

Is the cause of such a desire -- the misery, the poverty, the hopelessness, the fantastic way these substances make you feel and the escape they offer -- can all that be justly summed up in the word "disease", or is there something else going on?

This is a fantasy, a romance. It very little resembles the reality I've seen.

Many addicts I've known and seen come from stable environments and it isbecause of their incessant drug use that they end up poor, homeless and degraded.

Of course some addicts definitely start in "crushing poverty" but many do not. It affects people from every background, every social strata.

If your hypothesis were correct than the housing and support programs would work. They don't.

I come from a developing country, and I agree. very often, the people consuming drugs come from a stable socioeconomic background from middle to upper class. When my family and I lived in a poor neighborhood, we didn’t notice anyone with an addiction problem, Perhaps one well-known case, at most. Once we started to move into wealthier, neighborhoods, however, it became far more visible.

> I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive.

Treatment is elusive because it isn't possible in the traditional sense.

The phenomenon is the exploitation of two things: the vulnerability of humans to chemicals, and the inability of communities to protect their free spaces from the outcomes of humans abusing chemicals.

Free spaces are a sacrifice zone. Legalisation of addictive drugs, at scale, will destroy what we value as community.

What if we make treatment basically consist of some sort of genetic or other biotechnological intervention that essentially tweaks the vulnerability? Can't be worse than a jail + thousands of never-terminating under any circumstance collateral penalties.

Someone elsewhere in this HN discussion compared the support of people destroying themselves with drugs to being like providing hospice (palliative) care.

If we legalised all drugs, we would need to protect our communities, not abandon our communities to people destroying themselves.

The trick is to not assume that "feeding" it will solve it but to create alternative actions, doing research to do so while enduring the destruction patiently for as long as that takes.

The other day I read that in a Finish housing first programs they had a success rate of 4/5 and it was much less expensive than in the past. Not sure of the kpi’s, so grain of salt, but sounds promising

Adding, dealing with homelessness reduces healthcare costs [1], so by all means, a net positive to society.

[1] https://nlihc.org/resource/study-finds-affordable-housing-re...

What about not freezing to death? That sounds like a Key Performance Indicator to me.

I hate to say it but the type of folks who are homeless and suffer from mental illness usually have a fundamental incompatibility with society and should be forced into mental illness institutions. If they can be rehabilitated, great, if not, at least they are in a place that can help them and protect society from them.

Honest question: Why are mental issues so prevalent in USA?

Temptative hypothesis 1: People have less roots than in Europe, so they don’t belong somewhere, and have weak ties with close family and no ties with extended family, so they move, and when they fall off their life, there is no social safety net?

Temptative hypothesis 2: Americans classify any bad mood as a mental issue?

Temptative 3: Medical aid is too expensive when you’re, by definition, fallen off at the feet of the social ladder?

Temptative 4: Capitalism separates people? Financial success separates people?

Temptative 5: CIA needed off-network money to fund ISIS, so they traded drugs in Columbia, sold to poor schmocks in Texas, and got the money to pay ISIS? (everyone is a victim here)

Lmao one of these things is not like the others.

I think part of it is how isolated the us is. We don't really have walkable neighborhoods in most of the country, which means less spur of the moment decisions to gather at a social place and more isolation since so many people are commuting in single occupancy vehicles and doing drive throughs.

Combine that with wealth stratification, Hussle culture, and the complete lack of any real social safety net and if anything I'm surprised we're doing as well as we are.

I don't think it's a single issue by far, but if I had to peg one aspect as the worst offender, it's isolationism. There's strong correlation between drug use, depression, suicide, and lower life expectancy in places with power population density (Alaska, Noth Dakota, pretty much any small rustbelt or mountain or southern town)

When there's nothing to fill the emptiness, people turn to drugs and overeating just to feel something.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2022472118

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States...

Isolation is a big one. The classic study people bring up is the “cocaine rat”.

The rat in isolation was drawn to the bottle with cocaine water. When the rat was in a cage with activites and other rats, lost the preference for the cocaine water.

Do you have a citation? A search for "cocaine rat study" mostly turned up references to the Rat Park experiment, which used morphine. A later study comparing heroin and cocaine found that social isolation increased overall usage of heroin (apparently because the isolated rats picked up the habit faster) but not cocaine, and that by the fifth week of the study usage rates were similar between isolated and non-isolated groups for both drugs [1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2616610/

I would hope that "cocaine rat" is a major motion picture soon to be coming to theaters near you.

Give humans in a room together a vat of cocaine water and that vat will be quickly drained lol

Doing drugs in isolation is a coping mechanism, doing drugs with others is social bonding

So what if you remove the vat of cocaine water by just removing the vat instead of by permanently crippling the other "rats" with 40,000 life-long collateral penalties after a jail where they could easily have been killed inside of?

There has to be a basis for social unity. Family ties are the natural basis. Ethnic ties (which are defined more so by culture, though extended family ties still play a role) and religious belonging, all form this basis, this matrix. The US and countries like it are adoptive nations, oddballs in that they are not really rooted in ethnicity. Ethnic identity evaporates after a couple of generations, during which assimilation and intermarriage dilute the culture of origin. According to the triple melting pot theory, religious belonging becomes a stand-in for ethnic identity in "artificial" nations like the US (it was originally called "triple" because the three largest religious groups at the time in the US were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but this is incidental to the basic claim). With the atrophy of traditional religious affiliation in the US, you're seeing an identity crisis and the rise of various ideologies and subcultures as attempts to find a substitute.

Meth induced psychosis. Meth is given to many people as children here.

Mental illness is a huge risk factor for becoming homeless, which in turn will escalate any mental health issue to a massive degree. Better access to treatment and better safeguards against homelessness for the affected do actually help a lot. OTOH, migration of the affected towards areas with comparatively good services can create perverse incentives for other areas to just dump their homeless and mentally ill. And then feel smug about solving the problem for themselves.

"Mental illness" is also a problem in France.

I recommend you check out reddit r/LateStageCapitalism .

There is so much to be said about how fuck up our world is, I don't wanna start or i'll write a brick.

Elon Musk said recently that school is a joke, and that he do home schooling. Well, he is not the first one to have said it, but he is damn right. Idriss Aberkane has some very good conferences on the subject.

In USA, compared to France, you can add the issue of student debt (slavery). And the city layout being made for cars, public transportation or bikes are scarce, meaning young ones have to heavely rely on parents to do any activitie.

Oh... and your president is not just bad and malevolent, like in France, he is also senile. But like in France, a lot of citizen have voted for him.

Finnaly, who is really sick here ?

"It is not a sign of good mental health to be well adapted to a sick society."

lol you can’t expect to be taken seriously if you are recommending that subreddit.

#6 they're prevelant everywhere including Europe, and care for them is terrible everywhere, including Europe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com