Have a go at sleeping rough, not washing, barely eating for 6 months, then refuse an offer of fentanyl. The causality is mostly the other way around.

I haven't seen a starving homeless person. There are soup kitchens and shelters in cities, along with charities and of course, a fair amount of pan handling.

Have a go at sleeping rough, not washing, and eating soup for 6 months, then refuse an offer of fentanyl ...

Do you think soup kitchens/pantries offer 3 meals a day? Can't keep leftovers without refrigeration. Most don't even offer food every day let alone give enough to keep people not hungry.

There's an expansive gulf of misery before you hit the Christian Children's Fund commercial, 5yo w/rickets starvation. I assure you that you have absolutely no clue what it looks like and what you've seen hasn't told you what you think it has.

> As with most things I "know", I'm not sure what info to trust, but I'm currently under the impression that most of America's homeless population are homeless because they're hopelessly addicted to fentanyl and can't think straight.

Sure, drug addiction is a giant problem in the US, but you were correct to second guess your take. Reducing the most dire portion of the US's housing crisis to drug addiction is flabbergastingly reductive. You should start by trusting information from people who have meaningfully studied housing in the United States.

And fentanyl comes from China, right? I don't get it how China's communist party can't enforce the law and stop fentanyl production.

They dropped the hammer two years ago .. these days:

> Instead of finished fentanyl being shipped directly to the United States, most smuggling now takes place via Mexico.

> Mexican criminal groups source fentanyl precursors — and increasingly pre-precursors — from China, and then traffic finished fentanyl from Mexico to the United States.

it's hard to even get (direct) fentanyl precursors from China .. but those that have the knowledge in both India and Mexico can start further down the chain and get "pre - precursors" to produce fentanyl to smuggle into the US.

(2022) [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...

(2020) [2] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

Why would they? Payback for the Opium Wars.

Making the US pay for GB's wars? The crisis is fueled by the pharmacy industry, not some revenge.

Sounds like the plot of some sort of dystopian sci-fi novel (as in, I'm pretty sure I've read one where that was more or less part of the plot, but can't remember what it was...I'm pretty sure it wasn't A Scanner Darkly at any rate)