Posters Promoting Illegal Drug Use Pop Up in Downtown San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Posters Promoting Illegal Drug Use Pop Up in Downtown San Francisco

sfstandard.com

14 pointsmikhael20 comments

> It's very literally not hurting you, your business, or the economy

It literally hurts me to see people destroying themselves with drugs. I think the duty of a homeless person to change anything in order to sooth my hurts is exactly equal to zero. But that doesn't make the hurt not exist.

And yeah, I avoid businesses in areas where I want to avoid that hurt, and I'm not alone in that.

And yeah, when you destroy yourself with drugs you're subtracting epsilon from the GNP, so it effects the economy.

So that's three lies in one sentence.

I support your right to destroy yourself and hate it when you do that.

Ask retail business owners in downtown San Francisco whether their business is hurt by drug use in the area. I'd guess over 95% would say it definitely does. Also at least in some small ways it does hurt their customers. Just yesterday I had a lot of trouble finding a local business that would allow me to use a restroom, even if I was a paying customer. They didn't have to explain the reason.

Drug use in my area does not affect most(all?) businesses. I use commercial bathrooms all over where I live, too, and they're not even so much as locked. There's your counter-anecdata.

Where do you live? You may think your area has a drug problem, but it’s probably not on the level of these large west coast cities.

>It literally hurts me to see people destroying themselves with drugs.

It's a bit of a trap to build society around this, though. It hurts Christians to see people living a homosexual lifestyle (destroying themselves with sin). It hurts anti-miscegenists to see biracial marriages (destroying themselves through corruption). Et cetera.

Strong agree. Which is why my emotional hurt should create no obligation from the homeless or anyone else. But it's still real even if we choose not to act on it, and it still changes behavior with economic consequences.

high rent and car centric cities does worse for all the metrics you mentioned, so you're wrong on all accounts of your hot take

"It's very literally not hurting you, your business, or the economy"

Weirdly, I'm way less likely to spend my time or money in a neighborhood overrun by people selling or using hard drugs, so I think this statement is "literally" not accurate.

I'm for drug legalization and bodily autonomy, but that doesn't mean individuals get to a monopolize public Commons and resources.

At best, users should be able to occupy public spaces proportional to their population, and receive resources proportional to their contribution.

We spend tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person, and even more per drug user. We should just sweep them up and move them to forests or parking lots where they can camp. Much easier to manage them, and the drug dealers will know where to go. I don't see why they should have the right to tens of thousands of dollars in free resources PLUS living where all of the tourists and workers need to go.

I say, move them to the woods. If you want to go camping, do it in nature

Give homes to the homeless. It works.

Any chance these are astroturfed? The logic being that pro-cleanup folks are helping to push the overall impression of total bankruptcy to induce demand for their position?

To be clear: no judgment on my part. Berkeley/sf resident for 12 years and I say bring in the bulldozers.

> Created by an entity called the Drug User Liberation Collective

Interesting, did the organization acknowledge it was them? I could also see the opponents creating the same flier and posting it. "Yeah we're going to be buying, selling drugs and shoplifting here and nothing you can do about it" could just as well be a way for those against those things to raise more awareness and drum up support for their own cause.

I am not saying this is the case, but I could also see it working that way as well.

> “People who use drugs are not morally corrupt.”

Using drugs in itself isn't what makes them morally corrupt. Using drugs to the point you can't take care of yourself and need others to do it is. This manifests itself in many ways: emergency service costs, depriving others of public spaces because you have to live in them, litter and human waste on the streets, danger from discarded needles (requiring cleanup), impact to businesses, etc.

San Francisco is becoming more and more lawless and decayed every day, and the reasons why are interesting to look into.

>"Anti-drug user culture and laws = white supremacy," reads another sign

This tells you everything you need to know about the sort of people who put up these posters.

At this point, what isn't white supremacy? "I got a bad beat while playing poker, this is white supremacy manifest!"

To play devil's advocate, and very lax with what they might have meant, if you replace the term "white supremacy" with the also commonly misused term "fascism", and assume that by "fascism" they very loosely meant "an excess of law and order to the point that it is suffocating and damaging", and assume that they value greater personal freedom and less than balanced order like anarchism...

Wait, I see now where this goes, and they still don't have a point. My bad.

LOL, I really appreciate the rhetorical structure of your comment

This struck me as weird too but I didn’t want to bring it up.

There is a lot of racism associated with how drugs are viewed and handled in the US today. That needs taken into account. We need to keep that information alive.

At the same time, we’re in the middle of an opioid crisis. Meth seems to keep rising in popularity (my opinion, no data). Black, white, yellow, or pink it doesn’t matter. People are dying left and right.

Context is important to understand how we got here and how to get out. But what we equally need is working together towards a solution. Screw those racist white dudes. However, if we spend all our time complaining about dead racists instead of working to overcome it…We get nowhere.

I’d be more than happy to listen to other viewpoints. We all have blind spots. This country needs to do more to eradicate racism. But this campaign ain’t it.

Sure, this may be the perspective of an individual suffering from a mental dependence on a dangerous mind-altering substance, but it deserves equal consideration. (/sarcasm)

Unfortunately, I don't think it's this type of visible but marginal nonsense which perpetuates the SF drug economy. There are simply a lot of people making money on the blight. Private equity funds have piled into methadone treatment, even though other treatments are more evidence-based. No matter the customers are penniless wretches, the government is billed astronomical sums to perpetuate their suffering. These are some of the highest profit margin balance sheets I've ever seen. A public which lacks the stomach to account for whether remediations are evidence-based, collaborates with the cartels to keep the whole thing spinning and shambling.

Walk into any hospital waiting room, and count the dollars disappear to "treat" the dopesickness of a victim. Like the rest of the US healthcare system, it's a galactic obvious grift enabled by regulatory capture, operating in plain sight.

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