Overdose prevention sites are still just treating the symptoms, but at least in a way that doesn’t attack the victims. Offer free meaningful rehab treatment to addicts like China did. They went from 30% of their population addicted to opium to nearly 0 within a few short years this way. We shouldn’t be encouraging destructive drug use, nor should we be criminalizing victims of drug companies and criminal organizations.
IMO, this is the data people who are arguing against it refuse to see.
Removing those resources isn’t stopping the problem, it just pushes it deeper underground. And then it spills out into the neighborhoods/small towns that have been wrecked by it.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
“But I don’t want to fix the problem, I want to punish people.” A conservative, probably.
But building houses is so boring, let’s spend 5mil on police military gear!!!
Potatoes are food, not friends.
yeah, but that takes work and money - you know what’s free? blame.
This guy has never been anywhere near an encampment. One of the ones near me is 15 yards from a rather clean public bathroom.
I regularly see these assholes shitting in the middle of the road instead.
As someone who has directly worked with those exact people:
Address the underlying problems, not the mentally ill victim
Wow I wonder why those encampments exist in the first place?
It’s as if they were constantly being chased off.
I see this guy has never tried to use a public restroom in san francisco… Providing public restrooms resulted in absolutely horrendously disgusting and unusable public restrooms that literally require a hazmat suit to clean, ignoring the needles.
The primary issue was the defunding and closure of mental health facilities. While far from perfect, we probably should’ve focused on improving them instead of throwing mentally unstable people onto the streets to fend for themselves.