If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/us/san-francisco-drug-cri...
> If we're on the subject of compassion, millions who are no longer able to acquire effective pain relief could use some.
Could you clarify what you mean by that?
There are almost no homeless people in the surrounding areas because they come to SF for drugs and they know they won't be prosecuted for living their lifestyle. We're literally killing people by tolerating their bad behavior.
However, the driving factor for homelessness in SF, is the fact that there is no where for people to live. Thats part of why eviction is so stupidly hard in SF. Once you become homeless it is functionally impossible to get out.
The Reagan canard is also just that; The Supreme court ruling sought by the ACLU during the Carter administration is why people are out on the street, the govt can't legally commit people like that anymore.
Evictions are hard here for the same reasons that its trivial to get fentanyl in front of the federal building that houses the DEA - failed govt policy.
https://www.pacificresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/H...
"Roughly 34 percent of the homeless in San Francisco are homeless due to direct economic factors, such as evictions and job losses. Another 12 percent became homeless when they lost the safety net of family or friends."
"About 15 percent are due to drug addiction or substance abuse."
The City has even had to sue other counties for dumping: https://www.ktvn.com/story/30191022/nevada-san-francisco-rea...
Its very well known that SF has drug tourists, its so obvious if you're on the streets here...
And somehow this makes you an expert or informed on the matter?
> 95% of the people on the street are not from SF
This is likely the case for every metro in the world. And?
> well known that SF has drug tourists
Facts and research, please. You seem keen to peddle the homeless as drug-addled perpetrators stereotype.
Even the Mayor of SF has talked about how SF has drug tourists and how they need to be prevented from receiving services. You don't seem to be very informed about SF.
I'm not interested in the incredibly small percentage of people exploiting the system that isn't helping them in the first place, but the large percentage of homeless - transient or long term - that need services but are fought every part of the way by ignorance like this.
Pulling numbers out of thin air doesn't make them true.
They also asserted that if our local DA actually did something about dealing on the streets we'd lose that same number of homeless people and they'd return to wherever they came from before SF, or go to Oakland. SF has turned itself into an "attractive nuisance" due to our unchecked open air drug markets.
I'm sure it did, and it's not just completely made up with absolutely no corroborating evidence to back it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson
Carter era federal law signed into effect 1980:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_of_Institutionali...
Other links:
Why haven't they fixed it since then?
San Francisco is trying a new approach but has only managed to get ONE person into conservatorship in the last 2 years because of all the roadblocks put up by a group called "The Coalition on Homelessness".
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/conservatorship-off-to-a-slo...
To give you an idea, you have to be 5150'ed (aka put on a psychiatric health hold) 8 times in order to receive inpatient treatment. 8 times. If you told someone they'd have to try to kill themselves 8 times before they got help, they'd probably call you nuts.
I'm still not seeing what that do with "Reagan".
If it's a law he instituted, that law could be changed back, yes?
Here's a current article written by a local advocate, its unfortunately paywalled but you're probably aware of ways around that.
Here's a snippet:
I called Thomas Wolf, one of the loudest critics of the city’s policies, to run past him what I was hearing from professors and other experts who have spent their lives studying drug use.
“Forgive me for saying this,” Mr. Wolf politely told me, “but those people who you said you talked to — the experts — they have never shot dope, man. They never stuck a needle in their neck. They never spent a night on the street.”
Mr. Wolf has done all of those things, which makes him one of the most poignant voices in the debate over what San Francisco should do to address an epidemic that claimed 713 lives last year, more than twice as many as died from the coronavirus in the city in 2020.
“You can study homelessness and addiction in a book all day long,” Mr. Wolf told me. “But until you have experienced the power of addiction and the things you thought you would never resort to, you don’t really understand.”
Alcohol and "legal drugs" are not the problem.
I don't doubt that opioids have contributed, but alcohol and other legal drugs are a major problem too. If this ruling is based on government caused harm, then it would require investigating the availability of alcohol due to policy too.
You can count the number of people on the street, maybe 1 in 15 has an alcoholic beverage, the rest are smoking meth/fenty/heroin.
SF's problems are all about drugs.
It seems alcohol is still the most abused substance in the homeless population. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29852450/
This is basically what you'll see every few feet in San Francisco's Tenderloin district:
https://twitter.com/DTenderloine/status/1382405311009488897
(Warning, extremely graphic)
Alcohol is certainly abused, but not as publicly as Heroin/Fentanyl....
SF is another example of what happens when public policy gets it wrong, our false compassion is killing people and city leaders are doing less than nothing about it.