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My city in Poland offers help to homeless people. There is only one condition. For them to stop drinking. They never do.

ahelwer 5y ago
You presumably know at least a few housed people in your life with drinking problems. Why don't they just quit drinking? Why do you think it would be easier to quit drinking while also not having housing?
retrac 5y ago
This reminds me of wet shelters. [1] I'd encourage people interested in this topic to read up on them. It's fascinating. They provide alcoholics with alcohol. Usually a scheme like 1 - 2 drinks per hour, on the house, if they abstain from outside alcohol and drugs and otherwise obey the shelter rules. The results are (to me) quite counter-intuitive. For some drinkers, if you give them a rate-limited but ultimately unrestricted supply of booze, and tie access to it to good behaviour -- but not abstention -- they actually stabilize their intake and start slowly decreasing it over time. They tend to keep coming to the shelter (free booze!). Participants in wet shelters drink less than on the streets as they're rate-limited. Their health generally improves. Some eventually even wean themselves off this way. The cyclical nature of drug addiction when in poverty means complete chaos, withdrawal, then binging again. Just giving them booze interrupts that. This ties into my pet hypothesis (not exactly revolutionary, I know) that homeless people, as well as drug addicts, quite rationally really, seek to avoid immediate chaos, disorientation, and pain. Drug withdrawal is chaos and pain (of a completely intolerable kind for some) and so is avoided, even at enormous longer-term cost. (Similar results with stabilization, improved health and self-tapering have been seen with providing heroin addicts access to opiates, too. [2] The % that exit such programs sober who stay sober is higher than pretty much any other form of drug addiction treatment. Makes one wonder if we're going about addiction the wrong way.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

ahelwer 5y ago

You presumably know at least a few housed people in your life with drinking problems. Why don't they just quit drinking? Why do you think it would be easier to quit drinking while also not having housing?

retrac 5y ago

This reminds me of wet shelters. [1] I'd encourage people interested in this topic to read up on them. It's fascinating. They provide alcoholics with alcohol. Usually a scheme like 1 - 2 drinks per hour, on the house, if they abstain from outside alcohol and drugs and otherwise obey the shelter rules. The results are (to me) quite counter-intuitive. For some drinkers, if you give them a rate-limited but ultimately unrestricted supply of booze, and tie access to it to good behaviour -- but not abstention -- they actually stabilize their intake and start slowly decreasing it over time. They tend to keep coming to the shelter (free booze!). Participants in wet shelters drink less than on the streets as they're rate-limited. Their health generally improves. Some eventually even wean themselves off this way. The cyclical nature of drug addiction when in poverty means complete chaos, withdrawal, then binging again. Just giving them booze interrupts that. This ties into my pet hypothesis (not exactly revolutionary, I know) that homeless people, as well as drug addicts, quite rationally really, seek to avoid immediate chaos, disorientation, and pain. Drug withdrawal is chaos and pain (of a completely intolerable kind for some) and so is avoided, even at enormous longer-term cost. (Similar results with stabilization, improved health and self-tapering have been seen with providing heroin addicts access to opiates, too. [2] The % that exit such programs sober who stay sober is higher than pretty much any other form of drug addiction treatment. Makes one wonder if we're going about addiction the wrong way.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment