[gabinator]

I visited NYC and San Francisco. It's appalling and unacceptable in this day and age.

My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag. That's not a lifestyle that we want to enable or perpetuate. I do not understand the mental hurdles that Berkley-educated 'scholars' jump through to rationalize letting people suffer the most potent and deadly forms of addiction. The penal system is the last net to catch these people before they die from OD or blood-borne pathogenc or the consequences of criminal activity. And the "empathetic" west coast intellectuals say "legalize the drugs". Absolute lunacy

[Broken_Hippo]

we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag

Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.

[JumpCrisscross]

> homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight

The best option is treatement. But the worst is leaving them on the streets. They're hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise. But they're also hurting bystanders.

[Tanoc]

Once they're arrested that screws up their chances of recovery though. Even if an officer formally books someone and puts them in the drunk tank until the methamphetamine wears off so they don't scratch their own face down to the bone, they were still arrested. That arrest follows them around, and it severely reduces their chances of finding employment that will actually motivate them to work towards financial goals instead of merely just getting by. A lot of former drug addicts end up working in construction or commercial sailing not because they're too dull to be hydronautics engineers or factory logistics overseers, but because those are two of the few well paying industries who will hire regardless of your arrest record.

The U.S. has one of the highest re-offense rates out of any developed nation because an arrest is something employers, banks, and even privately run welfare programs all see as a permanent red flag. It's like someone figuratively puts walls in the way so the person with the arrest on their record is confined to a tiny square, cut off from viable opportunities. What makes it even worse is the combination where some states don't expunge records of juvenile offenses when you turn eighteen if they're federal offenses, and records of arrests aren't differentiated by how long ago they happened. If you got thrown in juvie at sixteen for mail fraud for using your uncle's name to scam magazine subscriptions then in some places like New Jersey that'll still be there when you're forty and will be treated as if it happened yesterday.

From a macro view there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose, which is just really messed up. All because of zero tolerance policies from organizations that have nothing to do with law enforcement.

[bluGill]

Arrests do not follow you around if you do just a little effort to legally fight it. Until you are convicted you are innocent, you just need to follow the process to ensure that you are never listed as guilty by no contest (which is sadly often the default if you don't ask for a court hearing).

I wouldn't expect a drug addict to know the above, but it still needs to be stated. If anyone happens to be arrested in the US make sure you don't accidentally get listed as guilty and served time (that night in jail counts as time served so if the judge would sentence you to one night in jail)

[actionfromafar]

Classic American Scarlet Letter thinking, ostrasize and shun.

[Tanoc]

There's a heavy need for rehabilitation shelters, but the public at large looks down on addicts and refuses to fund them. That leaves organizations like the Salvation Army to take up the slack, and the results can negligible. There's very little support on the private shelter's side other than providing a roof, a cot, and some basic directions to nearby organizations. Meanwhile the addict is meant to improve their behaviour almost immediately, fight the shelter itself to maintain their cot, and facilitate setting up their own recovery. Many of them choose to be homeless rather than put up with the ridiculous standards of these privately run shelters. Meanwhile on the public side it's a problem we started working on in the 1970s after the Vietnam War created a large wave of drug users, but Reagan gutted psychiatric care in the U.S. in 1982 and that meant that any progress towards making those shelters a reality was smashed into shards. What we were left with is people being put into psychiatric facilities that don't have the type of structure needed to rehabilitate an addict.

There's no way up from the bottom other than having another person take your hand. And nobody wants to be the one to reach down their hand. They rely on broken organizations and inappropriate tools to do that because their proximity to that ruin makes them uncomfortable. Either the addict gets screwed by the police or they get screwed by the rehabilitation facilities. So the addicts decide to turn away from both, and the public decides to turn away from the addicts. As you said, those in the public ostracize and shun them.

[JumpCrisscross]

> there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose

Do you have a source for this?

[Tanoc]

I can provide some, specifically the section on probation in [1] and "drug war logic" in [2], though it's not really something you need a source for. If you arrest someone it affects them for the rest of their life. Drug abuse is a terrible affliction, but it's still temporary. The abuse stops when access is revoked. Revoking that access can be a difficult and sometimes even dangerous process, but it marks the end. It can begin again if it's induced by an addiction, but that merely starts another temporary behaviour.

That's not even considering systems, like how a single arrest introduces costs to the state because of the transportation, the provided meals during their stay, the hygiene standards the arrestee must go through, and the required paperwork. Or how it affects total prosperity by almost guaranteeing that someone will be stuck with less productive and less meaningful employment for the rest of their lives, reducing taxes the town/city, county, state, and federal government can take and that person's own contributions to the local economy.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/10/12/every-25-seconds/human... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9302017/

[soerxpso]

When someone is a danger to innocent people walking by who didn't choose to do any fentanyl, their recovery chances are secondary to the safety of the innocent passers by. The people who advocate for leaving them on the street never want to take responsibility when one of them kills a random kid for fun. That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.

[Tanoc]

That's the biggest issue. The police aren't the correct solution, at least in their current form, but there are no other solutions. Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes. But it isn't temporary. Being arrested and having a minor possession charge that will be erased after five years without the person re-offending wouldn't be as bad.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes

I think the question turns on scale. If one person has the capacity to harm dozens, as one does in a city, the calculus may shift towards incapacitation. If it’s a small handful of non-violent interactions, on the other hand, as would be more likely somewhere less dense, then I agree with you. (Same turn on access to weapons.)

[ThrowMeAway1618]

>That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.

Yep. There is no solution except to shoot those filthy addicts, amirite?

I mean who wants to spend $35-50K/annum to keep these scum in prison, right?

In fact, why should my tax dollars pay for any of these subhuman criminals, addicts and other undesirables? A bullet only costs a dime.

That's the way to go, right soerxpso? Pew! Pew! Pew!

[Broken_Hippo]

Somehow, you believe that jail is the best option for treatment?

So, lets jail the professionals that are addicted too. After all, it is the best option for treatment, right? They are also hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise and probably hurting bystanders and their family. But that's ridiculous - few support that. If it were the best option, it would be recommended treatment for all.

The best option for treatment is actual medical based treatment in a facility that isn't punishing you and with staff trained in caring for you in your state. The best option for not leaving people on the streets is to house them. Housing and feeding folks makes treatment much more likely to work.

[pandaman]

If professionals harass people under drugs (or without) we do jail them. It's just the homeless in the liberal cities who have untouchable status and can freely violate all kinds of laws.

[Broken_Hippo]

That isn't what the poster was saying. They were saying that the best treatment was jail. And that's not the case. Jail is horrible for treatment.

[pandaman]

They were not saying such a thing, you can open the post and Ctrl-F for "jail" to 0 results outside the quote.The comment says that treatment would be the best option, but anything else would be better than letting dangerous criminals roam the streets unmolested.

[woodruffw]

Why is the assumption here that big cities (East/West Coast or otherwise) want to perpetuate addiction? I think a simpler assumption (that involves fewer inferential leaps) is that large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there.

[JumpCrisscross]

> large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there

There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone significant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.

[woodruffw]

Given that less than half of NYC residents are born in NYC, the null hypothesis would be that the average homeless person is also born outside of the city[1].

(Maybe this demographic skews more towards natives in the case of homeless addicts, but I can’t find a statistic to support that.)

[1]: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/explorer/cities/New%2...

[skylurk]

There's several programs for bussing them out:

https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-sys...

Although, many cities do this, and everyone leaving is just arriving somewhere else.

[BobaFloutist]

For what it's worth, the San Francisco programs supposedly only send them away if they have someone they're going to.

"These three programs all help people relocate outside San Francisco to reunite with family or support networks." (Emphasis mine).

[bryanlarsen]

Small town America has an overdose rate 48% higher than big city America, despite the fact that many drug users move from small town America to the big cities.

[watwut]

Do you have source for that?

[bryanlarsen]

I made an easily falsifiable, google able statement, that should be enough. If you want the cheap Internet points, you can do it yourself.

[watwut]

I tried to google it. I did NOT found anything that would confirm your claim.

It seems to be untrue, but I wanted to ask first.

[matwood]

> My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag.

You can search for more articles, but small town America has been hit very hard by opioids and now fentanyl.

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/unbudgeted...

Thinking that it is only a city problem is itself part of the problem.

[kasey_junk]

I visited a couple of West Virginia towns that _shocked_ me with the rampant and obvious drug addiction this summer. And I live in a big city (Chicago) that suffers from homelessness.

My take away from that experience is that we normalize the misery around us but seeing it, even in a nearly identical form, in another context is shocking.

[gamblor956]

The dirty secret about NYC's, SF's, and LA's homeless are that more than 3/4ths of the homeless aren't local, or even regional.

George Lopez at the LA Times used to be a huge advocate of the homeless. And then he tried to do a series of articles about the homeless in Hollywood to highlight their plight and get more people to think like him. When he went out to do his research, it took him over a day interviewing dozens of homeless people to find one who was actually from LA. Less than a quarter were even from California. Needless to say, he's no longer a huge advocate for the homeless.

So yes, it's easy for small towns to talk about how they don't have a homeless problem, because they've shipped their homeless off to the big cities to deal with.

[yencabulator]

I lived in Los Angeles for years and in that time got to know exactly one person who was from Los Angeles (well, Beverly Hills, if you're local). Melting pot cities just simply have people from all over. Including the ones who made a conscious decision to leave small towns in Minnesota that the original commenter thinks are perfect; I knew several.

[Nursie]

I don't think people in these cities want to legalise fentanyl. That's a strawman.

They may want to decriminalise it and treat it as a health problem because empirically this has been shown to actually make a difference in outcomes.

[Hikikomori]

Police brained Americans.

[a123b456c]

OK, but do you realize that the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with?

And you're out here bragging about what you "let" your neighbors and kids do. And bragging about visiting two US cities.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with?

Source? (I genuinely know nothing about this. But would appreciate hard data.)

[skylurk]

Not GP and I don't know anything about this either, but I found this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

Anecdotally, I used to take the Greyhound a lot and everyone on them is either a student or somewhat homeless, e.g. they just lined up another friend's couch to sleep on for a little while.