Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change until this country starts actually helping people.
* Quality drug treatment that is paid for by the state/federal level.
* Job training/retraining that is paid for at the state/federal level.
* Affordable, high quality education that helps people not get interested in, have time for, be so full of despair that they resort to these hard drugs.
* Quality, affordable, accessible mental health services IN ADVANCE of a crisis.
Locking people up or making drugs illegal will change nothing but cause there to be more pain.
Making drugs illegal and locking people up, or straight up executing them, is actually extremely effective at stopping drug addiction, as seen in many east Asian countries, particularly Japan, Korea and Singapore. As well as the middle east.
It's an uncomfortable truth for the Western world because we don't like strict punishments for nonviolent crimes, and for good reason. But let's not pretend that the heavy-handed corporal punishment approach doesn't work.
This I support 100%.
> paid for by the state/federal level
This I can't. That's not "we" in any sense or form; that's other people's money taken away from them by violence or threat of violence.
If you encourage people to help others (as we should!), then we should help people ourselves. Not delegate it to others, especially if they're not doing it voluntarily.
And if no individual is feeling charitable that day, then no help would be provided?
What if that reduces our policies, in every area, to zero effectiveness?
All your suggestions are depend on locking people up to force it. Your post is just saying we need "corrective" prisons.
And so we're caught in this terrible in-between with people who can't be held responsible for their actions, but who also can't have the state enforce care on them unless they ask for it, and regular citizens just trying to peacefully live their lives bear the brunt of it. Its a luxury belief whose costs are disproportionately borne by the lower income members of society which makes it even more galling to watch it masquerade as some sort of progressivism. Ultimately people are going to force politicians to make a choice. If these people aren't responsible then the state needs to step in until they can become responsible. If they have inalienable rights then they also have responsibilities that come with those rights and need to be punished for their misdeeds. The current path is not cutting it and the voting public is waking up to that.
The only drawback is it represents a kind of prisoner's dilemma defection and when a sufficiently high percentage of the population gets a clue and starts reliably defecting the whole system is going to collapse. Not for lack of payment, but simply for lack of beds, doctors, and nurses.
I work with people coming out of prison who have been clean for a decade and the first thing they do is go and score some meth or crack or whatever. After a decade without!
That costs a lot of money. Something that people who want to live in a city that's livable should probably be willing to collectively pay for. But don't.
Many of these people its a lifestyle choice, one that works very well for what they want. They get to beg, do drugs, and sell stolen goods all in one spot, its very convenient. yes, if you have been paying attention, all those store robberies and car break ins is very much related. many of those instances, the hot goods are exchanged for cash at these tent areas - some even have xmas lights!
> "hopefully at the end of all that, a new shot at a normal life."
What makes you think they even want that? They want to do drugs, they want to not work. we should re-criminalize public drug use, followed by not allowing people to set up permanent residence anywhere they please.
All of a sudden, less people would want to choose that lifestyle.
Research disagrees.[1]
[1] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
Any organization that actually helped deal with homelessness with the intent to help people, rather than the intent to "clean up the streets" (especially in countries that "solved", compared the US, this problem) will be more than happy to explain to you all the ways in which this claim is just complete nonsense, and will be equally happen to explain to you how much harm yelling "they're all criminals" does.
To pretend that people choose to be homeless, or that homeless folks somehow have a better life when they're not on drugs that dull that experience and so should be trivially capable of choosing not to do drugs, is simply bonkers.