[jMyles]

Are you saying that you volunteered at a location which expressly served as a safe-injection or maintenance program site? Or a place where addicts clandestinely acquired and used heroin?

This discussion is about the former: is it a good idea to have safe injection or maintenance facilities at or near shelters? The consequences you are describing sound to me like symptoms of the latter, which are not widely described at actual safe injection or maintenance sites.

[deeg]

I volunteered at a shelter in a Boston suburb and the problems were fairly small compared to big cities. This was a while ago so heroin wasn't much of a problem; by far the drug of choice was alcohol with crack a distant second. You cannot allow alcohol in a shelter, it is a recipe for disaster.

The problem with simple solutions is that many people don't want to do what you think they should do. They don't want safe injection, they want their hit now. They want to drink until they pass out. They want the freedom to make bad choices.

[lazyasciiart]

Yes, you can have alcohol in shelters, it is cheaper, safer, and in all ways except performing a puritan morality play, better. It's called low barrier shelters, or housing first. Seattle's DESC housing has been successfully providing it for decades. Plenty of successful programs have implemented it in multiple countries. It is not a new idea or an untested idea. You can't have it in a shitty "shelter" that just lays out sleeping mats by the dozens in a big empty room and then turns out the lights, no. So what?