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This exactly. There is more than enough housing in LA and SF to house the temporarily homeless. There is also enough housing to house the mentally ill homeles
by gamblor956 4y ago
This exactly.
There is more than enough housing in LA and SF to house the temporarily homeless.
There is also enough housing to house the mentally ill homeless.
But there is essentially no housing to house the drug-addicted homeless.
Thousands of shelter beds go unused in LA every night because most homeless shelters are sober facilities, meaning no drugs or alcohol, and the drug addicts would rather keep their booze and their high then have a bed and a bath. And those are the majority of the homeless you encounter in LA and SF.
(Note: mind altering substances can trigger mental illness; marijuana is known to trigger latent schizoid-series mental illnesses and this is one of the reasons it remained a controlled drug at the federal level for so long. Most illegal psychotropic drugs damage the brain, ultimately leading to the development of mental illness after sustained or heavy use; I don't classify such individuals as mentally ill because their drug addiction dominates.)
Source: I was a public defender representing the criminally mentally ill at the start of my career and essentially acting in the same role as proposed by the mental health court plan (albeit without the criminal law element).
- NoraCodes 4y ago> the drug addicts would rather keep their booze and their high then have a bed and a bath. Or, rather, their addiction - which is an illness - prevents them from making that decision. Right?
- michaelbrave 4y agoThere is that, but also when one's life is that shitty the comfort of "something to numb that pain" would be welcome to most, especially those with little to no hope of things getting better
- gamblor956 4y agoNo, that's wrong. Addiction makes it painful or unpleasant not to continue drug use, but it doesn't compel continued use of drugs; the choice is made to continue using instead of temporarily dealing with the pain of withdrawal. In that sense, it's no different than giving up sweets, or pushing through physical discomfort during hard exercise. While drugs can cause mental illness due to brain damage, the amount of drug use required to get to that point is always a deliberate choice by the addict. And the "tough life" "self medicating" BS is just that. Billions of people have harder lives and don't do drugs to self medicate.
- kjeetgill 4y agoThis weird characterization of addiction is just wishful thinking on your part. Even your examples are absolutely blind to casual scrutiny. Plenty of people find it incredible difficult to alter all sorts patterns of behavior. I'm very sympathetic to the whole: "If you can't fix you I can't fix you" resignation of the situation. And I totally get people being over "solving the disease not the problem" rhetoric. That's all normal. But you're just flat out pulling justification out of your butt to feel better. Your compassion is limited and it's acceptable that it is. That's all.
- gamblor956 4y agoNo, my justification comes from actually working as the appointed legal guardian for a number of drug addicts and knowing how it actually works instead of having a purely academic understanding of addiction like so many homeless "advocates" do. Compassion for drug addicts does not mean letting them stay addicted. That is the cruelest thing you can do to them. Compassion for a homeless drug addict means forcing them into treatment so they can be human again.
- kjeetgill 4y agoI'm fine with everything you're saying here. I only take issue with trivializing addiction as simply "deliberate choices" that are "uncompelled".