Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.
Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
The core problem is that there are a large contingent of homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any services given to them will just be redirected by them towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but the choice way of living for those with it.
This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book tale is that homeless people are just regular people who are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be right back on their feet again. But that story is just a fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way more fucked up than that.
The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them. They have burned every bridge, and nobody they know wants anything to do with them. All to feed a ravenous addiction.
>The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.
Or their family backstabbed them, if they ever had one (this article has a case study on someone raised out of an orphanage). Or this continually individualistic society has loosened support networks so you never truly got "friends". Or you simply got priced out because rent became 3k and you're not a silicon valley engineer.
Not all homeless people are drug users. Just the ones you remember most.
They're refusing treatment because they're addicted. They're refusing shelter because the shelters have policies (like not using drugs, or from the article; no pets) that they can't meet.
A lot of them have been abused by the institutions that were supposed to help them in the past, so understandably don't trust that they will be helped by similar institutions now.
Any of us, put in the same situation, would find it impossibly hard to deal with. I was lucky; I had friends who could help and I got lucky with some work that allowed me to get out of that situation. If I'd not had that luck, I could easily have gone down the same road.
Anecdotally during covid la metro cut a ton of staff, including security, and people started smoking meth and crack and fent in the station platforms openly. It was disturbing and made the few of us still riding the system then feel very unsafe and complain to metro leadership and the press. As a result they hired more staff to arrest and kick these people out and ridership constantly improves. I haven’t seen someone smoke from a glass pipe on metro station property in probably years now, going from seeing it at one point or another basically every workday.
A friend of mine who lived there for a while commented that that's because the police round them up and ship them out to the suburbs where they're not being seen by the tourists. They then migrate back to the centre over time because that's where they can beg, and the cycle repeats. Nothing is solved, no-one wins, and people die because of this policy, but at least the tourists are impressed by the lack of street people.
Moving drug addicts off the subway does literally nothing to solve the problem, except it keeps the subways nice and clean and allows everyone to think the problem doesn't exist any more.
We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.
[0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list.
I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it.
If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1]
> society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them
In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world
Can you cite this? How much does the US spend on entitlements vs other countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
It's kinda interesting. In terms of % of GDP on social welfare spending it's halfway down the list (but still just above Australia and Canada which surprises me).
In terms of government taxation and spending it's very close to the top on taxation and #10 on spending, which is definitely not what the USA tells itself.
This implies that the USA taxes folks heavily and then doesn't spend it on social welfare (which seems consistent with the vast military spending).