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

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

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

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

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

(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...

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.

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.

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.

Do you have a source for this?

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/

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.

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.)

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!

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)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.