But public safety is more than worries about being violently attacked. If you have someone passed out on a narrow sidewalk, you then have to walk into the street to get past them: that's unsafe, and even worse for people with mobility issues. If someone relieves themself in a public space or throws away needles on the street, that's a matter of hygiene and disease.
And although opioid users aren't going to be violent, there are other drugs. Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?
I suppose that not everyone has abandoned the old drug-warrior mindset yet, absurd and useless as that philosophy has proved to be.
> Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?
That certainly is a different situation, and I would feel concerned about that too: but meth has been a problem for decades, while the phrase "drug zombies" has only come into use during the fentanyl era, when you now see people tipping over and passing out and otherwise shambling around unable to fully control their bodies. Those people are out of it, unable to do much of anything but breathe (usually). The fear is really unwarranted.
Here's the deal: you have no right to tell people how to feel.
A block of drug zombies, or a block doesn't have any of that?
I saw the look in his eyes, and any anger I had just vanished. There was nobody home.
But I make sure when my daughter visits, we never walk down that street, or any other streets that have similar inhabitants.
I can tell unpleasant stories of how the homeless have treated women, especially those who wear headscarves.
Buses now have recorded messages telling people to report “gender-based” aggression.
Since I’m male, I guess I don’t need to report someone defecating on my shoe.
I can see as well as you can that crime, poverty, and public drug use are related - but research shows that your intuitive explanation of causality is backward. It is housing policy which causes homelessness, which causes desperation, and desperation causes addiction - but does addiction cause crime? Not so much as you'd think: drug addicts are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime - which is mostly a function of poverty, a consequence of economic policy.
When someone focuses on public drug use as an issue, they mistake an ugly, visible downstream symptom for the actual disease. It is a matter of unpleasant appearances, not the meaningful problem. Trying to eliminate public drug use by focusing enforcement on the people who are using drugs in public is a cruel and pointless game of whack-a-mole, so long as the policy engine which creates those desperate addicts remains in operation.