Addiction Activists Say They're 'Reducing Harm' Locals Say They're Causing It | Hacker News Reader

Addiction Activists Say They're 'Reducing Harm' Locals Say They're Causing It

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16 pointsJimmc41422 comments

This is an area where I totally don't understand the research.

In MA they tried to convince the public to allow facilities to use drugs. And they constantly point to research that shows there's no increase in crime or detriment to the local community.

And you know what. They're right. That's overwhelmingly what the research shows. Even research that focuses on Vancouver.

But I've been to Hastings street. The area where the use facilities are is not safe. And it has definitely harmed the local community. You can see that with your own eyeballs. You can say that it's helped people who use drugs, ok, but that it hasn't changed the community seems absurd to say.

So I don't get it. How can people's lived experiences be so far away from what these papers say? How can the experts in the field say things that seem so obviously false? Is there something wrong with what they're measuring? Is there really no harm at all, then what explains the state of Hastings? The only time I've tried to get answers professionally I couldn't get anywhere.

In all of the research that I'm involved with when simple observations disagree with our models and benchmarks we update the models and benchmarks.

If this whole research area wasn't toxic it would be interesting to look into more seriously. But I suspect that many scientists stay away because of the bad blood.

Maybe the research is worthless because of data quality issues. Pushing all the junkies on an area where people don't trust the police isn't a good way to have accurate statistics on the increase (or lack of) in crime. But also there could be a feeling of insecurity that is disconnected from reality, but with the state of social sciences, hard to know...

So maybe you need to update your benchmark. What do you think Hastings used to look like, that makes it confusing to think “Hastings is unsafe” and “safe injection locations don’t make places unsafe”?

Travis Lupick’s book about the origins of the place might be interesting for you.

It’s happened in more places than just large cities with historically bad neighborhoods. In my city it transformed a small working class neighborhood into ground zero for drug addicts and crime after they opened one. The people using the site are not getting better in any way and now that they all congregate in one area and get high they are causing a lot more damage to the community.

That’s interesting, what country are you in? I don’t think I’ve heard of any safe injection places outside large cities.

How do they measure detriment? One interesting thing I felt while reading the article was that many of her complaints like having to sweep up syringes or people defecating in the street would not be registered as crimes.

How would you even quantify the feeling of frustration at seeing someone defecate next to a car in the street. Seems like a very complicated issue to measure scientifically.

Research in politically charged topics will be subject to many forces regarding what gets published. It's incredibly naive to think otherwise.

My guess is that this kind of research is even less rigorously performed than the p-hackers that are still getting unearthed. NGO folks with an axe to grind aren't the folks I'd expect to embrace RCT.

I have found that a lot of modern activists are more concerned with people who quit trying fit in to society than people who do fit in but are struggling. Anti social junkies, convicted murderers, panhandlers ,convicted rapists will all have long lines of credentialed activists and ngos defending their rights to squat in the street and break things.

Regular working people like barbers and kitchen workers who work hard to make ends meet are are not needy enough to to satisfy the activists' savior complexes.

These harm reduction/ police abolitionist types have an ideological point to prove and they don't care how many of us they have to sacrifice to prove it.

The squeaky wheel gets the oil.

> Regular working people like barbers and kitchen workers who work hard to make ends meet are are not needy enough to to satisfy the activists' savior complexes.

There are lots of people trying to help regular workers. Like trying to get them into unions with bargaining power, increases to minimum wages, improvements to worker safety laws and enforcement, something like universal public health care would be an incredible lift for struggling workers. People are actively trying to do all these things. Its just very difficult because there are powerful forces resisting all of them.

Drug policy is perhaps the area where ideology clashes with reality the most. Both too hard and too soft stances are super counter-productive, it takes a very pragmatic approach to achieve a good result. Portugal may be the best example of success, but I'm pretty sure you can find faults to its policy.

https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...

Portugal did well until funding for the program was slashed. Now its not so great there

This style of reporting is so irritating. Surrounding facts and statistics in a heart felt drama of suffering and human angle. Of course I feel for Sonja Bingham, but if I'm trying to get my head around the consequences of Harm Reduction, I want facts, statistics clearly laid out with analysis by (named) experts in the field.

I disagree, you need both. Statistics sometimes obscure the reality of what's happening and can't be relied upon in a vacuum. I recently learned about on hn about a story where Amazon's statistics proved that there was no wait time problem on it's phone lines even though it was a common customer complaints. We need a mix of statistical analysis and first hand accounts.

Source: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/95066/jeff-bezos-explains-the...

Get enough first hand accounts and you can do stats!

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." - Joseph Stalin [0]

(To be clear, I'm agreeing with the point that you need both)

[0] Or maybe not - see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

This is a terrible piece. A woman who is mad about her neighborhood and blames a local program for the neighborhood following lockstep with federal trends. Arguing for a return to the policing style of the crack panic as racial fairness is a thin veneer over “we got screwed: now burn it all down”.

So she can dispose of the syringes she sweeps on your kids playground? Easy to criticize her, when it's not your neighborhood being ruined. Also I didn't think she was arguing for indiscriminately locking the addicts, she just couldn't help but notice policing was different when white people were involved...

Needle exchanges are an evidence based, immediate way to reduce the presence of discarded needles on the street. Safe injection sites prevent the needles getting on the street in the first place.

The activists are in her neighborhood handing out needles already, why are there still syringes for her to clean? How come the Savage Sisters have time to hand out needles and lecture but not enough time to grab a broom and clean up after their 'friends'?

It’s not “harm reduction”, it’s enabling. Drugs are supposed to be harmful. They’re drugs. That’s nature’s way of telling you that you need to stop doing them. Take away the harm and you just have an eternal drug addict.

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