And once you start using some of the most powerfully addictive substances we know, it's not about "flaws of character" or anything else, now you've messed with brain chemistry, in some cases, permanently.
I’m asking because as a teenager I lived in motels and homeless with pill-mill turned heroin addict parents and my anecdotal experiences with the broader transient public suggest a downward spiral involving substances first.
Anecdotally, as a person in San Francisco who's been in recovery 23 years, all the people I know who were once homeless became homeless because they were abusing drugs and alcohol. Sometimes mental illness was at play, too.
There's a strong selection bias in my sample set — they're all alcoholics/addicts (thankfully in recovery, thankfully housed).
We'd need a Danish style medical records system to answer queries like that, or you can study it with VA data.
Opioid use disorder is crazy common, nearly 5% of Americans (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/rates-nonmedical-prescriptio... but also 9% of the population uses cannabis (https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html). It's unclear how many overdose deaths happen to homeless people every year generally, and you can conclude that since homelessness is rare, so too will be "homeless given overdose death." However, the flip side - overdose death as a fraction of all deaths given homeless - can be 17% in one study (https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/more-homeless-die...).
So overall, I think you're right. Opioid disorder is so much more common than homelessness generally, homelessness is not going to possibly explain opioid use disorder in the general case. Of course it can interfere with treatment. However, when so many people use cannabis, and I haven't even investigated alcohol, the right idea is that substance abuse is so prevalent in America, you'd need more serious interventions earlier on. The issue that can be acted by just medical professionals, which is the prescription of painkillers due to legitimate medical visits that lead to substance abuse, I think there is action on this but I'm not sure what it is.
As another poster, Sean, points out most homeless advocates are loath to admit to this for obvious reasons.
Uncle Bob gets hurt, can't work for a while, and gets put on Percocet, but that's to expensive and has limitations. Eventually he gets on other pills, and then a neighbor mentions he sells pills sometimes, and can get other stuff.
Few years later Bob can't take pills, can't afford them, but can snag bags of H. That's stable for a second but eventually it screws his life up more, and he's homeless.
A lot of young folks end up there cuz their home life was bad and it was easy to party / forget abuse at home, and just end up stuck.
For good reason, many homeless also don't trust cops as they are just as likely to abuse or harass them as anyone else.
Channel 5s recent discussion on this is something everyone should watch to get a good picture of what they are dealing with.
I can't stand how everyone keeps brushing over the fact that it's completely legal to clear an encampment if there's somewhere for them to go. Instead of immediately starting housing first initiatives; these cities pretend there's nothing they can do and continue to sue for the right to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on their citizens. It's insane.
Other people may be glossing over some legal technicality but the “it’s easy, we just need to spend more money” crowd constantly and deliberately glosses over the fact that the population we are talking about are not people down on their luck and just need a helping hand to get back on their feet. They are people that have alienated everyone in their lives and that no else in this world—-including each other—-wants to share space with.
Another way of saying this is that your safety net is the excess capacity of your social network. If your network is composed of people with stable jobs and guest rooms, it's practically guaranteed that someone will accommodate you for as long as you need. After taking all the time you need to get back on your feet, you will probably pay it forward to others in your social network.
If your social network is composed of people with low income, lots of dependents, and unstable housing, it's less likely. Sometimes because your peers have no capacity to help, but mostly because the network is already saturated - you're not the only one of your friends who needs a couch and a ride to work.
A term to describe this phenomenon is "class", which is a concept so thoroughly erased from American culture that we have to rediscover it through thought exercises like this.
I had a stable job, had plenty of room for someone to stay over, had people in my network that were junkies, and no way would I ever let them in my house. That would be insane. Best case, they steal my shit to buy drugs, that is the most favorable possible outcome, worst case they OD in my bathroom.
There's nothing you can do. But no, you can't "accommodate" them.
Do you think that everyone that ended up homeless (living out of their cars or couch surfing) deserved it due to some personal failing? That's the usual conservative line, but they tend not to be so forward about it, so I'm curious
Plus the pandemic exacerbated the problem a fair bit.
And no, spending more money isn't easy. There's nothing easy about this. I think Housing First is the right solution because it works, not because it's trivial.
1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-23/city-con...
There's a whole world outside any given city. We shouldn't brush over this fact either.
If cities face restrictions on public space they'll just continue to turn their public spaces over to private entities who don't have to follow such rules which is its own kind of dystopia and not one that would be any more friendly to the struggling poor.
The punishment for vagrancy was the same as the typical punishment for many other crimes - a short stay in jail or a fine. That's neither cruel nor unusual. Far from being unusual, it is a completely ordinary punishment.
The cruel and unusual punishment clause was intended by the authors the Constitution to prohibit the use of torture in order to get a confession. The founders were worried about things like the Inquisition or the use of torture devices like the rack.
The 9th Circuit completely ignored the original meaning of the Constitution, as it has done in so many other cases. Hopefully the Supreme Court will uphold the rule of law here, instead of continuing to allow the judicial branch to usurp the functions of the legislative branch by ignoring or misinterpreting the law in order to enact its own policy decisions.
She is the sweetest young woman in the world.
It is a hellish job. I cannot even imagine her managing belligerent addicts. She would quit in a heartbeat.
These rules are in place for the simple reason that workers demand it
People who are on the street turn to any kind of drug they can find to numb the harsh realities of living on the street. Alcohol and cheap opioids.
It would be a struggle to find a homeless person without some kind of substance abuse problem. Addict to homeless process, or homeless to addict process.
not just the street; schizophrenia and schizo-affective disorder are substantially over-represented in the homeless population, and many of the people who suffer from these conditions are self-medicating to try to "cope" with them. This is of course a double or triple tragedy: first, we have quite effective drugs that they could use which be much more beneficial than alcohol, opiates and nicotine; secondly, it is much easier to treat these conditions if they are caught early, but the nature of the intersection between US healthcare and poverty means that it very often is not.
ps. I learnt all this last night at a training program for first responders.
The issue is there’s a cohort who thinks that the solutions that enable safe streets require too much sacrifice of one’s individual liberty - even if said individual abuses their freedom to harm themself and others.