24 ms·

An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis

72 points by ltbarcly3 7y ago

Waterluvian 7y ago
Maybe I missed it in the article. What percentage of homeless in these cities are or were recent drug users?
- astura 7y ago
  >In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl.... For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments. No word on methodologies though.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Also from the article: the mayor estimates the rate at 1 in 3. Still no word on methodology.
    - opportune 7y ago
      Might be a difference in wording. As I recall, 2/3 of Seattle homeless are not sleeping on the street (instead they are in cars or shelters), which may make them "sheltered". The other 1/3 are in the street and if most of them are addicts, then yes, about 1/3 of total homeless are addicted as well
gatvol 7y ago
Unclear to me if they're homeless because of addiction, or became addicted after becoming homeless. This distinction would seem crucial to me.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  From what I have seen for most people addiction or other bad live events ( bad divorce, job loss, health problems) comes first and then homelessness. Only a few people become homeless without some kind of crisis before. Once you are homeless you are in dysfunctional environment where it’s easy to get into other kinds of trouble .
- asperous 7y ago
  According to [1] it's both, but it makes the problem worse for people that fall into it. [1]: https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf
- ltbarcly3 7y ago
  Almost everyone has some kind of support network, whether it's extended family or friends, that would offer a spare bed or a couch. Sure, they won't let you stay forever, but it will keep you off the street until you can get yourself together. People who are living on the street, for the most part, have burned through all the support their family and friends are willing to give. Their addiction or mental illness (or combination) have resulted in their support network turning their back on them. Sure, there are exceptions, but this is true of a significant majority of people living on the street (this is easy to verify if you search for studies of people living on the street and addiction/mental illness). It's not a coincidence that a large majority of people living on the street are addicted to drugs or suffering from mental illness (and in fact that the majority are suffering from both or self medicating with street drugs). If you are homeless, but you have no mental illness and no addiction problem there are so many people and services standing by to help. The homelessness crisis is almost entirely a mental health crisis. People aren't living on the street because they can't find a job or affordable housing. Look at undocumented immigrants, they somehow find jobs and housing despite prejudice, language issues and low wages, and still find ways to send money home despite being completely ineligible for public assistance. If millions of people who are still learning the language can find housing and work and save money, then the otherwise physically healthy people living on the street can't be explained by 'income inequality' or 'housing prices', and in fact studies show that addiction and major mental health issues are nearly universal for people living on the street.
oil25 7y ago
For anyone interested in how drugs became such a crisis in America, I highly recommend History Channel's "America's War on Drugs" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7026882/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7026882/) - it's free with a trial on Prime Video. It is a fascinating story involving the CIA, fear of communism and, of course, the bottomless guile of corporate greed.
- portonoy 7y ago
  Also check out The History Channel's 'Ancient Aliens' and 'Ice Road Truckers' The history channel is bullshit. Primary sources or gtfo
  - twic 7y ago
    Wait, are you implying that Ice Road Truckers is inaccurate?
    - portonoy 7y ago
      There are no ice roads it's all CGI
    - portonoy 7y ago
      Those are just regular road truckers on a green screen
electriclove 7y ago
I appreciate the author identifying what is really going on with homeless on the West Coast. Any visit to Portland, Seattle, SF, LA corroborates this. We need to crack down on those that are perpetuating and benefiting from this crisis.. the dealers, cartels, and yes, the pharmaceutical companies.
- __blockcipher__ 7y ago
  Cracking down on dealers does not work. I believe that we should legalize every drug under the sun, but require the “dangerous ones” (e.g. heroin due to risk of respiratory depression) be done under medical supervision. The only exception being that drugs like Fentanyl should stay illegal, under the hopes that having legal morphine, heroin etc completely eliminates the demand for it. (Often fent is acquired by dealers, rather than directly by the end consumer. Although there are people that do Fent recreationally, god have mercy on them...)
- hackermailman 7y ago
  These street drug networks are pretty sophisticated and hard to crack down on. For example a typical street operation like openly selling baggies outside of a legalized injection clinic or to a homeless camp is often done by the addicts themselves, who will always only be holding just enough so they don't see much jail time if they are arrested. Security of this street dealing is overseen by very obvious looking prison gang members who hold no evidence and make sure to never take the money from the street addict peddling their baggies of heroin or crack instead there are drops coordinated with the huge prison goon nearby to prevent any robberies. Resupply is done through complicated handoffs and drops with a network of a few dozen addicts who've been recruited to sell for the gang. The gang themselves are buying off other mid level gangs who in turn are buying from higher level/cartels. You can try to put a cop on every corner and disrupt the handoffs, or harass these enforcers off the street, but soon your police force is going to run out of overtime money, not to mention the other factor which is gang violence "management". The police know if they decimate the current street gang controlling the street trade that a dozen other gangs will immediately start fighting to be the successor meaning there will be high profile shootings going on in the media, which in turn puts pressure on city hall, which in turn puts pressure on the police chief to do something to stop the violence which eventually means relaxing enforcement on whatever gang currently controls the homeless drug trade so long as they stay in their lane and don't escalate their street violence into the media or against people not involved in the trade. It would be nice to arrest and stop the midlevel and high level suppliers but nobody has figured out how to effectively do that with limited enforcement resources either.
seltzered_ 7y ago
I think the question to ask is what created the opioid problem in the first place - I tend to think it's lack of regulation in the pharma space. I've criticised the author (Chris Rufo, associated with the conservative and intelligent design group Discovery Institute) in his earlier pieces (see https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/acwqng/podcast_seattles_homeless_challenge/edngsrn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/acwqng/podcast_s... ) where he used seemingly incomplete estimates on the funding used in homeless initiatives and suggesting unproven solutions (large tents, sanitariums). I'm not denying the homeless and drug problems in Seattle. I live in the same neighborhoods where I've seen people shoot up in starbucks bathrooms and on the street, RV camps of bicycle chop shops and filth. The King County complaint Rufo links to ( https://www.krcomplexlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/King-County-Complaint-1-010518-1.pdf https://www.krcomplexlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/King... ) arguably means the local government is trying to take that first step in recognizing "addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless", right?
- scarface74 7y ago
  And if you tightly regulate the “pharma space” and those drugs are harder to get, the same addicts will just find a substitute drug. The “War on Drugs” has been an abysmal failure. If you lock up the users, you’re just spending more money housing non violent offenders. If you lock up the sellers, someone else will take their place. Homeless drug addicts don’t fear jail, how could it be any worse than life on the street addicted to drugs? I have no idea what the answer is, but I suspect it is a better social safety net where people think they have a fair shot in society where they don’t view drugs as an escape or have the mindset of having nothing to lose. I honestly haven’t thought about solutions that deeply.
  - chiefalchemist 7y ago
    Drugs are often an escape but not always from immediate societal pressure. Ppl with (emotional) pain with likely eventually self-medicate. That is, addiction is a symptom. The problem is, we tend to want to treat that symptom and remain in denial that there are underlying root problems.
hackermailman 7y ago
From my anecdotal experience living in an area filled with fentanyl shooting drug addicts I've noticed they generally are substance abusers with other drugs, such as meth or heavy drinking, ilegally procured prescription pills, cocaine etc., they have groups of fellow substance abusers they meet with daily to combine resources and when the money runs out switch to other drugs that are cheaper to buy like bags of heroin to snort which they quickly get hooked on and then I would see them on the street shooting up. Another question is why do some countries not even have a drug taking culture in the first place. Lot's of places I've been to where the population isn't interested in any drug use despite it being decriminalized or readily available.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  Coming from Germany I found it interesting how much the US culture depends on ingesting substances to make you feel better. Be it painkillers or “superfood” or other things. That makes the US really vulnerable to all kinds of addictions. As a kid I remember only a few occasions where I took any kind of medicine but today’s kids know a ton about all kinds of drugs and it seems pretty standard to take some.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - baxtr 7y ago
    Hmm, makes me wonder if it is in any way related to the somewhat “lost” cooking culture in the states. My roommate in the States didn’t even know how to cook tea or how to boil an egg. And I am really not kidding. Might be a crazy theory but maybe...
    - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
      Who can't make tea? Or boil an egg. That's a terrible kind of exceptionalism. I've never seen that in the us.
    - tathougies 7y ago
quakingaspen 7y ago
While this article alleges that addiction is the root cause of homelessness, it makes no effort to prove that claim. That there is correlation between the two is clear, but claiming that addiction is the root cause of homelessness of the west coast is just fear-mongering. Determining root cause is important to finding the right solution. Further cracking down on homeless people will just transfer them from the streets to jails, where they will cost the taxpayers exorbitant amounts of money (and if they're in a private prison, create profit for private interests), while failing to get people back on their feet when they are eventually let go. > no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts While Utah isn't technically the West coast, how does the author's claim hold up in the face of the resounding success of their efforts to reduce chronic homelessness (down 91% in a decade while saving the government 50%)? Does this proven solution fit with his root cause model? See: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
- Gimpei 7y ago
  Not saying I disagree with you, but west coast cities do have temperate climates that I would think attract more of the chronically homeless. I'd much rather live on the street in LA in the winter than SLC.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    They also have booming economies. People move to successful big cities for work, where they have no existing safety net. Then they can't find a job fast enough, or get sick, or get divorced and start drinking, and become homeless. These are the vast majority of "not from here" homeless people in Seattle. The chronically homeless tend to be old people in pretty bad shape who don't move cities for the weather. So is the answer that people born in economically ruined rural areas should be locked out of big cities? Only allowed to stay there so long as they have enough money? People arguing you shouldn't be able to get benefits somewhere you're not "from" are arguing for a system that entrenches the political and economic divide between rural and urban Americans.
  - 7y ago
chiefalchemist 7y ago
This article aside, my general understanding has been homelessness is very often a symptom of mental health issue. Yes, there are people (read: families) who would obviously prefer not to be homeless. But many others are there because individual rights / protections are such that we can not force them to do otherwise.
wutbrodo 7y ago
I don't think it's "disguised" as a housing crisis: dishonest advocates took advantage of superficial similarities between the housing cost crisis to claim that homelessness was driven by it. I don't think most people serious about understanding the homelessness issue instead of exploiting it for their pet cause think that the housing crisis is a primary driving factor (though I'd be surprised if it wasn't contributing)
Animats 7y ago
A friend who lives in the SF Mission likes the idea of shipping the druggies off to a drug camp in the middle of nowhere. They get all the drugs they want, until they die.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  Same for unemployed people and depressed people who have fallen on hard times?
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Well, given how people who come up with ideas like that think, yeah, they probably would like all the poors to be removed and shot or something. It's just how those people think.
- bayareanative 7y ago
  Real humane of you. Maybe you should ship yourself there first?
jlg23 7y ago
The article points out a correlation between "being addicted" and "being homeless" but does not provide any evidence that there also is a causation. With the same evidence one could write an article that says "increasing prices drive out the most vulnerable first".
draw_down 7y ago
You can choose to believe either that people’s lives are bad because they are addicts, or that people become addicts because their lives are bad.
epistasis 7y ago
> If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles) This is a pretty silly assumption to make when the data for San Francisco and Los Angeles show different, where less than a third of the homeless is addicted. And given how the housing crisis is so much worse in San Francisco and Los Angeles than Seattle, it's choosing exactly the wrong data points to extrapolate from. Further, it ignores how once someone is homeless it is much easier to fall into addiction, as other homeless people are often your support network and there's a higher incidence of addiction among the homeless, spreading it. All too often "not my fault" is a reason to avoid addressing the parts that are our fault.
Consultant32452 7y ago
I think this is a belonging crisis disguised as an addiction crisis. People mostly become addicted because they don't have strong social ties to family, friends, church, whatever. If it were just a physical reaction to drugs every Grandma with a hip replacement would be a junky on the streets. But good luck putting families back together again.
monkeyodeath 7y ago
From this article: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/519/filling-the-void https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/519/filling-the-void "The true source of drug addiction: a society organized around the quest for wealth and geopolitical power, which creates enormous dislocation. This pursuit of wealth and power inevitably produces widespread addiction, which we insist on calling a “drug problem.”" We live in a society where record numbers of people are lonely, depressed, and disconnected. We worship consumerism and the economy, and idolize weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Increased opioid regulation has had the effect of forcing a lot of people who are in pain to suffer even more. The addictions that plague our society won't go away until we fix the underlying problems that make people so vulnerable in the first place.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 7y ago
  > weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump This breaks the site guidelines against flamebait and name-calling. Would you mind reviewing them? Taking threads further into flamewar is what's most important to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197294.
lazyasciiart 7y ago
This is a dishonest narrative propped up with misunderstood statistics. He claims that saying "30% of homeless people" are addicts contradicts the claim that "80% of unsheltered" - but he's been arguing about how to get rid of homeless people for long enough to know that unsheltered is a subset of the homeless, and generally the group with the most issues (which is why they are sleeping outside and not even in a car). Oddly enough, he fails to include any of the research we do have about the connection between cost of housing and rate of homelessness. When rents go up, homelessness goes up. http://fortune.com/2018/12/14/rent-homelessness-housing-income-zillow-research/ http://fortune.com/2018/12/14/rent-homelessness-housing-inco... When affordable housing disappears, evictions go up and homelessness goes up. http://komonews.com/news/local/washington-homelessness-result-of-evictions-rent-spikes-uw-study-finds http://komonews.com/news/local/washington-homelessness-resul... One recent positive change was a state law increasing the time a tenant has to pay rent late from 3 days to 14 days. There are many programs that will help pay a one-time late rent, but none of them are instant. Lots of tenants will accept a landlord saying that if you're not out in three days you'll be evicted and spend that time scrambling to leave instead of scrambling to pay, so that they have a chance at renting again in the future - and there's a ton of evidence that preventing the initial step into homelessness is by far the cheapest and most successful way to prevent longterm issues. https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/4/26/18518477/eviction-reform-washington-state-renter-rights https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/4/26/18518477/eviction-refor... Of course, Rufo and people who quote him admiringly tend not to support interventions like this at the point of entering homelessness, since they are committed to the idea that not having a place to live is not a cause of homelessness (which, to be clear, INCLUDES those who are staying with friends or using their social safety net).
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  Rufo isn't interested in an open consideration of the facts. I think he just wants to curry conservative support.
techntoke 7y ago
Dude, people become addicts cause life sucks when you are in a constant struggle.
- bayareanative 7y ago
  Addiction is an optional choice, homelessness may well be an involuntary state of being.
pizlonator 7y ago
If you become homeless, you are super likely to do drugs. Just visit a homeless camp and you’ll find that out. This article gets causality backwards. It’s kind of amusing.
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
He provides no evidence to back up his claim that it's a drug crisis at root. I walk through Seattle every day and there's definitely an aspect of drug use, but it's many many other things, including people too poor to afford a house here, people with mental issues, along with a lot of drug use. Then I noticed the name of this author, a kind of frustrated conservative who ran for office in Seattle and claimed basically that people were really mean to him - so take his claims with a giant tub of salt. Regardless of the situation, the city is not really coping very well with this challenge. We should just do what Utah did, focus on getting housing for everyone, then you can send treatment to them. I can't quite understand why we can't arrest and hold people to longer sentences who commit crimes dozens of times in Seattle. This is separate from just arresting people for drug use, which never solves anything. Get housing, get enough services, treatment for people and also police and other services. That is how we deal with this. [update, fixed a few typos]
diogenescynic 7y ago
I have been saying this for a while and the activists in San Francisco get so offended. 90% of the people on the street in the Bay Area are on meth or heroin. Their addiction is the bigger issue than housing affordability. The reason so many homeless have come to California lately is that California cities give cash handouts almost immediately. We are absolutely being taken advantage of and really we are making the problem worse.
olliej 7y ago
The article fails to acknowledge that drug abuse can be caused by homelessness (which also makes sense when you think about it). In fact all it says is that homeless people use drugs, and then goes on to say that therefore drugs cause homelessness. It also fails to acknowledge (in CA at least) that the 80s republican plan to save money by closing mental health facilities put a large number of people on the streets without any means to afford necessary drugs, and so no ability to work (assuming they had somewhere to live). This dramatically increased the cost to the state as now people with mental health issues get put in prisons. Keeping someone in a prison costs much more than in a proper treatment facility, and also fails to provide any rehabilitate support, and now they have a criminal record so even if they could get treatment in prison they can’t get a job when they get out, so end up homeless, and then back in prison. It also ignores fairly basic concepts: there are fewer rooms available to rent in SF than there are homeless people, so even if the city just paid the rent for them (which is cheaper in the long term), there isn’t anywhere for them to live. Cool beans.

72 points by ltbarcly3 7y ago

Waterluvian 7y ago

Maybe I missed it in the article. What percentage of homeless in these cities are or were recent drug users?

astura 7y ago
>In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl.... For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments. No word on methodologies though.
- fwip 7y ago
  Also from the article: the mayor estimates the rate at 1 in 3. Still no word on methodology.
  - opportune 7y ago
    Might be a difference in wording. As I recall, 2/3 of Seattle homeless are not sleeping on the street (instead they are in cars or shelters), which may make them "sheltered". The other 1/3 are in the street and if most of them are addicts, then yes, about 1/3 of total homeless are addicted as well

gatvol 7y ago

Unclear to me if they're homeless because of addiction, or became addicted after becoming homeless. This distinction would seem crucial to me.

maxxxxx 7y ago
From what I have seen for most people addiction or other bad live events ( bad divorce, job loss, health problems) comes first and then homelessness. Only a few people become homeless without some kind of crisis before. Once you are homeless you are in dysfunctional environment where it’s easy to get into other kinds of trouble .
asperous 7y ago
According to [1] it's both, but it makes the problem worse for people that fall into it. [1]: https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf
ltbarcly3 7y ago
Almost everyone has some kind of support network, whether it's extended family or friends, that would offer a spare bed or a couch. Sure, they won't let you stay forever, but it will keep you off the street until you can get yourself together. People who are living on the street, for the most part, have burned through all the support their family and friends are willing to give. Their addiction or mental illness (or combination) have resulted in their support network turning their back on them. Sure, there are exceptions, but this is true of a significant majority of people living on the street (this is easy to verify if you search for studies of people living on the street and addiction/mental illness). It's not a coincidence that a large majority of people living on the street are addicted to drugs or suffering from mental illness (and in fact that the majority are suffering from both or self medicating with street drugs). If you are homeless, but you have no mental illness and no addiction problem there are so many people and services standing by to help. The homelessness crisis is almost entirely a mental health crisis. People aren't living on the street because they can't find a job or affordable housing. Look at undocumented immigrants, they somehow find jobs and housing despite prejudice, language issues and low wages, and still find ways to send money home despite being completely ineligible for public assistance. If millions of people who are still learning the language can find housing and work and save money, then the otherwise physically healthy people living on the street can't be explained by 'income inequality' or 'housing prices', and in fact studies show that addiction and major mental health issues are nearly universal for people living on the street.

oil25 7y ago

For anyone interested in how drugs became such a crisis in America, I highly recommend History Channel's "America's War on Drugs" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7026882/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7026882/) - it's free with a trial on Prime Video. It is a fascinating story involving the CIA, fear of communism and, of course, the bottomless guile of corporate greed.

portonoy 7y ago
Also check out The History Channel's 'Ancient Aliens' and 'Ice Road Truckers' The history channel is bullshit. Primary sources or gtfo
- twic 7y ago
  Wait, are you implying that Ice Road Truckers is inaccurate?
  - portonoy 7y ago
    There are no ice roads it's all CGI
  - portonoy 7y ago
    Those are just regular road truckers on a green screen

electriclove 7y ago

I appreciate the author identifying what is really going on with homeless on the West Coast. Any visit to Portland, Seattle, SF, LA corroborates this. We need to crack down on those that are perpetuating and benefiting from this crisis.. the dealers, cartels, and yes, the pharmaceutical companies.

__blockcipher__ 7y ago
Cracking down on dealers does not work. I believe that we should legalize every drug under the sun, but require the “dangerous ones” (e.g. heroin due to risk of respiratory depression) be done under medical supervision. The only exception being that drugs like Fentanyl should stay illegal, under the hopes that having legal morphine, heroin etc completely eliminates the demand for it. (Often fent is acquired by dealers, rather than directly by the end consumer. Although there are people that do Fent recreationally, god have mercy on them...)
hackermailman 7y ago
These street drug networks are pretty sophisticated and hard to crack down on. For example a typical street operation like openly selling baggies outside of a legalized injection clinic or to a homeless camp is often done by the addicts themselves, who will always only be holding just enough so they don't see much jail time if they are arrested. Security of this street dealing is overseen by very obvious looking prison gang members who hold no evidence and make sure to never take the money from the street addict peddling their baggies of heroin or crack instead there are drops coordinated with the huge prison goon nearby to prevent any robberies. Resupply is done through complicated handoffs and drops with a network of a few dozen addicts who've been recruited to sell for the gang. The gang themselves are buying off other mid level gangs who in turn are buying from higher level/cartels. You can try to put a cop on every corner and disrupt the handoffs, or harass these enforcers off the street, but soon your police force is going to run out of overtime money, not to mention the other factor which is gang violence "management". The police know if they decimate the current street gang controlling the street trade that a dozen other gangs will immediately start fighting to be the successor meaning there will be high profile shootings going on in the media, which in turn puts pressure on city hall, which in turn puts pressure on the police chief to do something to stop the violence which eventually means relaxing enforcement on whatever gang currently controls the homeless drug trade so long as they stay in their lane and don't escalate their street violence into the media or against people not involved in the trade. It would be nice to arrest and stop the midlevel and high level suppliers but nobody has figured out how to effectively do that with limited enforcement resources either.

seltzered_ 7y ago

I think the question to ask is what created the opioid problem in the first place - I tend to think it's lack of regulation in the pharma space. I've criticised the author (Chris Rufo, associated with the conservative and intelligent design group Discovery Institute) in his earlier pieces (see https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/acwqng/podcast_seattles_homeless_challenge/edngsrn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/acwqng/podcast_s... ) where he used seemingly incomplete estimates on the funding used in homeless initiatives and suggesting unproven solutions (large tents, sanitariums). I'm not denying the homeless and drug problems in Seattle. I live in the same neighborhoods where I've seen people shoot up in starbucks bathrooms and on the street, RV camps of bicycle chop shops and filth. The King County complaint Rufo links to ( https://www.krcomplexlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/King-County-Complaint-1-010518-1.pdf https://www.krcomplexlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/King... ) arguably means the local government is trying to take that first step in recognizing "addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless", right?

scarface74 7y ago
And if you tightly regulate the “pharma space” and those drugs are harder to get, the same addicts will just find a substitute drug. The “War on Drugs” has been an abysmal failure. If you lock up the users, you’re just spending more money housing non violent offenders. If you lock up the sellers, someone else will take their place. Homeless drug addicts don’t fear jail, how could it be any worse than life on the street addicted to drugs? I have no idea what the answer is, but I suspect it is a better social safety net where people think they have a fair shot in society where they don’t view drugs as an escape or have the mindset of having nothing to lose. I honestly haven’t thought about solutions that deeply.
- chiefalchemist 7y ago
  Drugs are often an escape but not always from immediate societal pressure. Ppl with (emotional) pain with likely eventually self-medicate. That is, addiction is a symptom. The problem is, we tend to want to treat that symptom and remain in denial that there are underlying root problems.

hackermailman 7y ago

From my anecdotal experience living in an area filled with fentanyl shooting drug addicts I've noticed they generally are substance abusers with other drugs, such as meth or heavy drinking, ilegally procured prescription pills, cocaine etc., they have groups of fellow substance abusers they meet with daily to combine resources and when the money runs out switch to other drugs that are cheaper to buy like bags of heroin to snort which they quickly get hooked on and then I would see them on the street shooting up. Another question is why do some countries not even have a drug taking culture in the first place. Lot's of places I've been to where the population isn't interested in any drug use despite it being decriminalized or readily available.

maxxxxx 7y ago
Coming from Germany I found it interesting how much the US culture depends on ingesting substances to make you feel better. Be it painkillers or “superfood” or other things. That makes the US really vulnerable to all kinds of addictions. As a kid I remember only a few occasions where I took any kind of medicine but today’s kids know a ton about all kinds of drugs and it seems pretty standard to take some.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- baxtr 7y ago
  Hmm, makes me wonder if it is in any way related to the somewhat “lost” cooking culture in the states. My roommate in the States didn’t even know how to cook tea or how to boil an egg. And I am really not kidding. Might be a crazy theory but maybe...
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    Who can't make tea? Or boil an egg. That's a terrible kind of exceptionalism. I've never seen that in the us.
  - tathougies 7y ago

quakingaspen 7y ago

While this article alleges that addiction is the root cause of homelessness, it makes no effort to prove that claim. That there is correlation between the two is clear, but claiming that addiction is the root cause of homelessness of the west coast is just fear-mongering. Determining root cause is important to finding the right solution. Further cracking down on homeless people will just transfer them from the streets to jails, where they will cost the taxpayers exorbitant amounts of money (and if they're in a private prison, create profit for private interests), while failing to get people back on their feet when they are eventually let go. > no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts While Utah isn't technically the West coast, how does the author's claim hold up in the face of the resounding success of their efforts to reduce chronic homelessness (down 91% in a decade while saving the government 50%)? Does this proven solution fit with his root cause model? See: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...

Gimpei 7y ago
Not saying I disagree with you, but west coast cities do have temperate climates that I would think attract more of the chronically homeless. I'd much rather live on the street in LA in the winter than SLC.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  They also have booming economies. People move to successful big cities for work, where they have no existing safety net. Then they can't find a job fast enough, or get sick, or get divorced and start drinking, and become homeless. These are the vast majority of "not from here" homeless people in Seattle. The chronically homeless tend to be old people in pretty bad shape who don't move cities for the weather. So is the answer that people born in economically ruined rural areas should be locked out of big cities? Only allowed to stay there so long as they have enough money? People arguing you shouldn't be able to get benefits somewhere you're not "from" are arguing for a system that entrenches the political and economic divide between rural and urban Americans.
- 7y ago

chiefalchemist 7y ago

This article aside, my general understanding has been homelessness is very often a symptom of mental health issue. Yes, there are people (read: families) who would obviously prefer not to be homeless. But many others are there because individual rights / protections are such that we can not force them to do otherwise.

wutbrodo 7y ago

I don't think it's "disguised" as a housing crisis: dishonest advocates took advantage of superficial similarities between the housing cost crisis to claim that homelessness was driven by it. I don't think most people serious about understanding the homelessness issue instead of exploiting it for their pet cause think that the housing crisis is a primary driving factor (though I'd be surprised if it wasn't contributing)

Animats 7y ago

A friend who lives in the SF Mission likes the idea of shipping the druggies off to a drug camp in the middle of nowhere. They get all the drugs they want, until they die.

maxxxxx 7y ago
Same for unemployed people and depressed people who have fallen on hard times?
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Well, given how people who come up with ideas like that think, yeah, they probably would like all the poors to be removed and shot or something. It's just how those people think.
bayareanative 7y ago
Real humane of you. Maybe you should ship yourself there first?

jlg23 7y ago

The article points out a correlation between "being addicted" and "being homeless" but does not provide any evidence that there also is a causation. With the same evidence one could write an article that says "increasing prices drive out the most vulnerable first".

draw_down 7y ago

You can choose to believe either that people’s lives are bad because they are addicts, or that people become addicts because their lives are bad.

epistasis 7y ago

> If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles) This is a pretty silly assumption to make when the data for San Francisco and Los Angeles show different, where less than a third of the homeless is addicted. And given how the housing crisis is so much worse in San Francisco and Los Angeles than Seattle, it's choosing exactly the wrong data points to extrapolate from. Further, it ignores how once someone is homeless it is much easier to fall into addiction, as other homeless people are often your support network and there's a higher incidence of addiction among the homeless, spreading it. All too often "not my fault" is a reason to avoid addressing the parts that are our fault.

Consultant32452 7y ago

I think this is a belonging crisis disguised as an addiction crisis. People mostly become addicted because they don't have strong social ties to family, friends, church, whatever. If it were just a physical reaction to drugs every Grandma with a hip replacement would be a junky on the streets. But good luck putting families back together again.

monkeyodeath 7y ago

From this article: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/519/filling-the-void https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/519/filling-the-void "The true source of drug addiction: a society organized around the quest for wealth and geopolitical power, which creates enormous dislocation. This pursuit of wealth and power inevitably produces widespread addiction, which we insist on calling a “drug problem.”" We live in a society where record numbers of people are lonely, depressed, and disconnected. We worship consumerism and the economy, and idolize weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Increased opioid regulation has had the effect of forcing a lot of people who are in pain to suffer even more. The addictions that plague our society won't go away until we fix the underlying problems that make people so vulnerable in the first place.

deleted 7y ago
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dang 7y ago
> weirdo greedlords like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump This breaks the site guidelines against flamebait and name-calling. Would you mind reviewing them? Taking threads further into flamewar is what's most important to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20197294.

lazyasciiart 7y ago

This is a dishonest narrative propped up with misunderstood statistics. He claims that saying "30% of homeless people" are addicts contradicts the claim that "80% of unsheltered" - but he's been arguing about how to get rid of homeless people for long enough to know that unsheltered is a subset of the homeless, and generally the group with the most issues (which is why they are sleeping outside and not even in a car). Oddly enough, he fails to include any of the research we do have about the connection between cost of housing and rate of homelessness. When rents go up, homelessness goes up. http://fortune.com/2018/12/14/rent-homelessness-housing-income-zillow-research/ http://fortune.com/2018/12/14/rent-homelessness-housing-inco... When affordable housing disappears, evictions go up and homelessness goes up. http://komonews.com/news/local/washington-homelessness-result-of-evictions-rent-spikes-uw-study-finds http://komonews.com/news/local/washington-homelessness-resul... One recent positive change was a state law increasing the time a tenant has to pay rent late from 3 days to 14 days. There are many programs that will help pay a one-time late rent, but none of them are instant. Lots of tenants will accept a landlord saying that if you're not out in three days you'll be evicted and spend that time scrambling to leave instead of scrambling to pay, so that they have a chance at renting again in the future - and there's a ton of evidence that preventing the initial step into homelessness is by far the cheapest and most successful way to prevent longterm issues. https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/4/26/18518477/eviction-reform-washington-state-renter-rights https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/4/26/18518477/eviction-refor... Of course, Rufo and people who quote him admiringly tend not to support interventions like this at the point of entering homelessness, since they are committed to the idea that not having a place to live is not a cause of homelessness (which, to be clear, INCLUDES those who are staying with friends or using their social safety net).

NotSammyHagar 7y ago
Rufo isn't interested in an open consideration of the facts. I think he just wants to curry conservative support.

techntoke 7y ago

Dude, people become addicts cause life sucks when you are in a constant struggle.

bayareanative 7y ago
Addiction is an optional choice, homelessness may well be an involuntary state of being.

pizlonator 7y ago

If you become homeless, you are super likely to do drugs. Just visit a homeless camp and you’ll find that out. This article gets causality backwards. It’s kind of amusing.

NotSammyHagar 7y ago

He provides no evidence to back up his claim that it's a drug crisis at root. I walk through Seattle every day and there's definitely an aspect of drug use, but it's many many other things, including people too poor to afford a house here, people with mental issues, along with a lot of drug use. Then I noticed the name of this author, a kind of frustrated conservative who ran for office in Seattle and claimed basically that people were really mean to him - so take his claims with a giant tub of salt. Regardless of the situation, the city is not really coping very well with this challenge. We should just do what Utah did, focus on getting housing for everyone, then you can send treatment to them. I can't quite understand why we can't arrest and hold people to longer sentences who commit crimes dozens of times in Seattle. This is separate from just arresting people for drug use, which never solves anything. Get housing, get enough services, treatment for people and also police and other services. That is how we deal with this. [update, fixed a few typos]

diogenescynic 7y ago

I have been saying this for a while and the activists in San Francisco get so offended. 90% of the people on the street in the Bay Area are on meth or heroin. Their addiction is the bigger issue than housing affordability. The reason so many homeless have come to California lately is that California cities give cash handouts almost immediately. We are absolutely being taken advantage of and really we are making the problem worse.

olliej 7y ago

The article fails to acknowledge that drug abuse can be caused by homelessness (which also makes sense when you think about it). In fact all it says is that homeless people use drugs, and then goes on to say that therefore drugs cause homelessness. It also fails to acknowledge (in CA at least) that the 80s republican plan to save money by closing mental health facilities put a large number of people on the streets without any means to afford necessary drugs, and so no ability to work (assuming they had somewhere to live). This dramatically increased the cost to the state as now people with mental health issues get put in prisons. Keeping someone in a prison costs much more than in a proper treatment facility, and also fails to provide any rehabilitate support, and now they have a criminal record so even if they could get treatment in prison they can’t get a job when they get out, so end up homeless, and then back in prison. It also ignores fairly basic concepts: there are fewer rooms available to rent in SF than there are homeless people, so even if the city just paid the rent for them (which is cheaper in the long term), there isn’t anywhere for them to live. Cool beans.