If folks can steal other people's stuff, it is not a good shelter. It doesn't matter if it is drugs or any other personal belonging. If folks can steal drugs, they can steal money as well.

Build better shelters.

But more than that: You can require certain things, like not being violent with other folks. That they clean up their own messes. Provide mental and physical health care at the shelter and offer medical help in weaning off drugs. This won't work in an environment that isn't safe and secure, for both the person and their stuff.

More unpopularly: Require that they shoot up in the proper location, where there are sharps boxes and so on. Get treatment for folks or employ trained staff to help folks shoot up (if you can't help folks stop, we can do it as safely as possible).

Humans are fucking difficult. It doesn't mean you cannot help folks and provide mental and physical health services. You'll probably get better because you have trained people that have dealt with addicts before instead of the average homeless shelter employee/volunteer that has little to no education to back them up - merely a will to help others.

And no, it won't be perfect. It rarely is. But it is a much better start than the shitholes we call homeless shelters now. Stop treating folks like animals, even if you look down on their lives.

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.

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.

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?