I’m so tired of hearing that homelessness is due to high rent costs/lack of affordable housing. As a recovering addict I can tell you- homelessness is due to addiction/ mental illness.
My drug addiction fueled my mental illness. Which in turn fueled my anti social behavior. Which in turn fueled my problem with keeping a job. Which left me homeless and unable to function as a human being. If you don't take care of the first, nothing else can follow.
We need to change the game by changing the vocabulary. Calling people "homeless" implies causality and solutions that we know are wrong. Call them MIDAS, Mentally Il/Drug Addicted Street people.
When I hear or use the term "homeless" I think of, or am referring to, a person without a home. Nothing more, nothing less.
The DA's focus in SF has been to ignore quality of life crimes in an attempt to decriminalize homelessness - their reasoning not mine. As someone who has at times over the last 40+ years lived in, worked in, been actively addicted to drugs and alcohol in, and been briefly homeless in, the TL I can assure you that not holding people responsible for their actions is not doing them or the rest of us any favors.
The DA's abdication of duty vis a vis promoting the general welfare was a gross dereliction of duty. That the mayor was fine with turning a blind eye to the problem until the day her photo opportunity met the same excrement and needles the rest of us navigated on a daily basis implicates her as well.
When one stops enforcing quality of life crimes it should come as no surprise that quality of life will lessen. I watched it happen in the TL (quality of life was low when I started working there in the mid-70s} and SF in general. That means the quality of my life as a sane and sober constructive member of society was diminished on a daily basis, not only by the property crimes I was a victim of, but more importantly by the horrible soul sapping exposure to the unfolding human tragedy and the filth and violence to which we, who were or are there, were continually exposed.
About mental illness... I lost my mother to it right after I was born. I have a soft spot in my heart for all people affected by it. While mental institutions of the past have a bad reputation, deservedly so IMHO, there is no reason to believe we can't care for the mentally ill in a more compassionate way. But, from a treatment perspective, that compassion can never devolve into "letting the inmates run the asylum".
But back to homelessness. When I encounter the word I don't think of any type of person other than one without a home. Until further investigation of that person's circumstances their lack of a home is all we know about their circumstances. If the problem is to be solved it will be on a case by case basis. It will not be one size fits all. Tent cities and public camping are not the answer.
My quality of life as a San Franciscan who does not live in the Tenderloin has steadily increased during the 30 years I have lived here. Violent crime has plummeted, the quality of Muni, parks, libraries and public schools had increased and there are more things to do every year (excepting Covid). The only bad thing is the rising real estate prices. People wouldn’t pay this much to live here if the quality of life was as bad as you claim.
People have to live somewhere. Throwing people in jail for using a drug that happens to be illegal doesn’t do anyone any good. How many lives have been destroyed by “reefer madness”?
I never claimed the quality of life was bad everywhere in SF. Based on your experiences I'm pretty sure I can guess where else you don't live or work in SF... But what you seem to be arguing is that as long as you can avoid the filth and soul sapping human suffering it's not a problem. Presenting addicts with a choice of rehab or jail (assuming they've violated the law) will do a lot more good for all parties than letting them die on the streets.
I have lived in San Francisco and worked here most of that time. Currently I live in Bernal, a block from Mission Street and two blocks from some subsidized housing. It's not the best neighborhood in San Francisco but its not the worst either. My point is that San Francisco stopped enforcing quality of life crimes and the quality of life has continued to improve, at least citywide. You claimed that not enforcing quality of life crimes has caused the quality of life to decline, presumably citywide. It's a different story for the Tenderloin to be sure, which has become a containment district.
I don't think locking up a bunch of addicts will do them any good. People in prison don't have any tough time finding drugs. Poor people have to live somewhere and if they can't afford rent, it will be sleeping rough, usually in a tent. Instead of looking down their noses at poor people, rich people should vote more taxes for themselves to get more basic housing. We also need to collectively decide that building housing is a priority and make it easier to do so. San Francisco is the hardest place in the nation to build housing and that is part of the reason it is so expensive here.
The DA's in most major cities are not there to help the people, they are there to help the political establishment. In states like VA the attorney general position tends to become the governor or other higher political offices.
This is why George Gascon went from SF to LA. Why would you change DA jobs and cities unless you were up to something? Why is the DA office in LA a more attractive job than the DA office in SF?
I mean after Mike Nifong fake charged those Duke kids for the fake racist scandal, and ruined their lives, who needs to put any type of laws around bullshit prosecutors I mean just ask Roy Moore, right?
Thanks for the comments. I think the larger point is that activists try to solve the "homelessness" problem by offering shelter. That's the reason for a need for a vocabulary change. It follows your logic that we need to address individuals' issues, but the main issue to be addressed for most of the people who you stress should be held accountable for actions is other underlying issues, not lack of shelter.
I completely disagree. All too often "changing the vocabulary" is an empty gesture designed to distract from the lack of meaningful progress in important issues. Recently The Woke Mob here in LA have insisted that for reasons they never have bothered to explain that the term "homeless," despite being perfectly accurate and non-pejorative is now "demeaning" to the -- well, the homeless, and that the term the "unhoused" is more appropriate. The words mean the exact same thing. The ONLY purpose of the word change is to make those who insist we use it feel morally superior.
You replying to me and saying that means you didn't understand my point. I am saying something completely different from those people you came in already having a beef with. You are complaining about situations where they change the word but the new one means the same thing. I am recommending changing the word very much because the thing it means today is not very descriptive and I want to call it something entirely different that meaningfully describes things. Very much not a case where "the words mean the exact same thing".
"Homeless" is exactly descriptive and "implies no "causality" like you claim it does. It means that the person is currently without housing. Period. It could be because of fire, lack of funds, drug addiction, personal preference, or any other reason a person can be left without shelter. YOU are the one imputing a meaning to the word which doesn't exist.
I wrote hastily but activists and the bulk of our nation spend tons of time and energy pitching shelter projects as solutions to "homelessness". The average person hears the word "homeless" and agrees that this sounds like a good idea to solve the problem, or at least does so in numbers too great because no one tries another solution. Time and again, projects successful at providing shelter have not solved the problem.
Whereas your first post made it sound like I was simply proposing a PC wording change a la "mental disability" instead of "retarded". I have written long breakdowns on the path from clinical term to insult of "idiot", "retard" and onward, their use on the playground, and the uselessness of changing them, which agrees with the principle you were espousing despite that principle not applying to my point. I have explained to many others why the AKC should always retain the use of "bitch", because as soon as they change it the new word is simply going to become an insult itself anyway.
call them whatever the fuck you want god knows all this talk is doing them so much fucking good I mean liberals have talked about this problem since the 1960s but in the cities which the DNC control, there is NOT ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE OF SUCCESS IN SOLVING THE PROBLEM
Many people take illegal opiates after being prescribed opiates.
Illicit drug use is quite often self-medicating. It's amazing how many people on prescribed psychotropic meds smoke tobacco and pot "to relieve the jitters" from the prescribed drug.
Evidence suggests decriminalizing allows for de-stigmatizing the issues involved here which is the first step to solutions. Both of these perspectives are simple...but one was relying on the oversimplification for their point to be internally consistent. The other did not to anywhere near the extent.
Last year I had a kidney stone and had to go to the emergency room. After telling them I was a recovering addict/alcoholic, they then tried to give me morphine and got offended when I asked if they were trying to kill me. So I asked for whoever was in charge at the time. This doctor came in to see what the problem was so I told him I was in recovery and that they wanted to give me morphine, he looked at the chart and found that they didn't put that in it. He ordered some toradol which worked great. They had to admit me because I had a infection, you better believe that everything they gave me afterwards was double checked. When I was released they give me the prescriptions and what do they give me for pain. Fucking oxycontin. I called the nurse who was taking care of me showed her the list and said what do I really need. Out of seven I needed three. If that wasn't crazy enough they gave pamphlets on all the drugs they had prescribed. The one for the oxycontin said that if you think you might abuse it you could die, so if you think you might abuse it they would give you a prescription for naloxone. Thankfully I had a good sponsor, and people in recovery to keep me humble, that the next month I celebrated twenty nine years clean and sober. Was it easy? Hell no. Was it worth it? Absolutely!!
Sad to see that you have to work so hard to stay clean and that the system works against your success. It's a testament to you that you steer clear of the rocks.
Wish our leaders could get to know stories like this, to imagine what happens to those less aware and careful as you are, Deb, and work to fix the system.
I think that the system works against all of us at one time or another. The system back in 93, is totally different than 2022, at least they weren't encouraging people to die.
The overwhelming majority of people who use drugs never become addicted and do not have any serious problems with them. This is even true with alcohol, which is one of the most dangerous drugs there are.
I wrote this long screed about root causes, then my late sponsors voice entered my head and said KISS, keep it simple stupid. When someone shares at a meeting, they don't share root causes. That's therapy talk. If you go to a meeting what you're gonna hear is experience, strength, and hope. You're gonna hear what happened, what they did to change, and what its like now. You're gonna hear shit that'll curl your toes, and people laughing about it. You'll hear about sorrow, fear, and encouragement. The person sitting next to you who just strung together a week of clean time, losing a family member and not knowing what to do, so you do the only thing you can. Hug her and offer her a place of refuge. Not once have I heard root causes. Responsibility sure, root causes nope. What I learned was that I was a little narcissistic asshole who knew how to get what I wanted, and if I didn't I'd make your life miserable, and hold you hostage until you caught on and escaped. When my sponsor pointed this out to me my first emotion was pissed off, how dare she. The second was despair, I've been like this since I can remember what now. Keep it simple stupid!!! If you wanna use, help someone. If things don't go your way, help someone, etc,etc,etc. I'd ask her why? It was always why,why,why. Sometimes you're not ready for the answers, and sometimes you'll never know. I'm fine with that. I don't need root causes to live a contented life. All I need to know is that I'm an recovering addict/alcoholic and if I do certain things I will continue to be. But I also don't kid myself into thinking its any better out there. Oh yeah, my root cause was, I was a narcissistic little asshole who liked doing drugs.
That's hilarious, Iconoclast! Like the guy that wants to run six sigma on number of coffee cups to order for the breakroom. Very funny. : )
For those that might have missed Iconoclast's humor, a root cause analysis is inappropriate here for two reasons:
1. Root cause analyses are type of deductive inference that require a firm understanding of all of the underlying possible causes AS WELL AS the problem. Of course issues like addiction are anything but well understood and the "causes" are almost never well defined like say a faulty bridge gusset plate weld.
2. Root cause analysis can help one determine the HOW, but never the WHY (Iconoclast wrote: "But you dont say WHY you got addicted" (sic, but emphasis mine)
There are very few virgins in the program. Most people are in and out. A guy my husband sponsored took ten years to get one. Sadly my husband had 18yrs and decided to give it another whirl. He died of end stage liver disease on August 28 2012. The guy my husband sponsored now has11yrs. Life is funny like that.
Iconoclast wrote: "people like you are part of the problem"
I take it then you were not joking. Sorry for my misinterpretation. No need for the ad hominem.
I do not work in that area, specifically, but spent almost a decade studying treatment and the techniques of those that help with treatment within SSCP. So while I did not do what you supposedly have done, I have studied it a lot more in depth than most practitioners or clinicians.
However, none of the reply above has any relevance to my criticism of confusing root cause analysis techniques for what is instead an inductive reasoning pursuit...whether you call it that or not.
Part of the problem is that people sometimes mean different things by "homeless." Some (myself included) use the word to mean people living on the street, in train stations and homeless encampments and I agree this is largely a mental illness and drug addiction issue. Others use the phrase more literally to include the itinerant poor. People sleeping on friends' couches, maybe getting stuck sleeping in their car some nights, people who have short-term stays in shelters, temporary hiccoughs with section 8 housing eligibility/availability etc. People can find themselves in these situations for a variety of reasons, some of them economic.
Cities where landlords require good credit checks and substantial security deposits can contribute to temporary "homelessness" in this group - a trend which in turn is exacerbated by some jurisdictions establishing absurd burdens to successfully evict non-paying tenants.
“As a recovering addict I can tell you- homelessness is due to addiction/ mental illness.”
Congratulations on your recovering; nothing that follows can or was intended to detract from your accomplishment.
As for your general observation, You certainly can tell us about YOUR addiction, YOUR recovery, YOUR homelessness, and/or YOUR mental illness. But that doesn’t qualify you to make broad generalized conclusions about all others or even most others. Even if you think everyone you encountered on your road to recovery suffered the same problems you do or did, that can only tell us something about the very small subset of addicted and homeless people you encountered. Your observations may not be applicable to the much larger group of people you never encountered.
Like that of a cancer survivor, your story is inspiring. You deserve credit and accolades for what you’ve done. But surviving cancer doesn’t make one a cancer specialist, and your recovery doesn’t make you an addiction specialist or an expert on homelessness and mental health.
Wood house falls into the same trap in his argument. He presumes his observations, his visits to homeless camps, and his interviews amount to a representative unbiased sampling. They don’t.
As a formerly homeless person, I can tell you homelessness is mostly due to not having enough money to pay the rent.
Almost all people who are homeless are not homeless for very long: they get a job, find a couch to crash on and become productive members of society. That's what happened to me. Prosecuting me and throwing me in jail for the "crime" of not having enough money to scrape together a security deposit would be counterproductive. But that's exactly the policy you espouse. You will fill our jails, destroy the liberty of hundreds of thousands of people who have only committed the "crime" of being poor and impoverishe our society in the long run by giving a criminal record to people who would otherwise get jobs later on in life.
Your confusion about the different reasons that people become homeless can be forgiven, given your own personal experience. But the evidence does not support your claims, unless you twist the word "homeless" to the point where it means something entirely different than the way it is used commonly and by the government.
Karl Marx stated that the capitalist society produces two prominent classes which are in conflict with each other: the bourgeoisie and proletariats.
The bourgeoisie are the oppressors who own the means of production and the proletariats are the oppressed workers who labor for the bourgeoisie.
Capitalism is distinguished not by privilege but instead by individuality of property ownership and that those who create the conditions of the oppressed group express this power in the form of laws that function to serve the bourgeoisie’s interests.
Therefore, capitalism is responsible for the manifestation of certain social conditions that have led to homelessness (see Marx on alienation, 1844 Philosophical Manuscripts) and I would add addiction.
The argument that we need to arrest street dealers is as old as it is bankrupt.
And going after the head honchos has made drugs a global industry and created the conditions for illegal governments and narco-states.
The continuance of the phony drug war will increase both the power of the cartels, the further corruption of public officials and the consumption of drugs.
Arguing that addiction causes homelessness is like arguing that workers cause unemployment.
Homelessness and addiction are what capitalism vomits up in its terminal stages.
The binary thinking, that homeless is caused by one single problem, this or that, rather than a confluence of traumas born under late-stage capitalist life is a problem.
There is not one cause for homelessness and addiction: they are symptoms of a society in free fall, of people alienated from themselves, other people and their societies that yes, are capitalist.
I would ask the authors how they would have evaluated and analyzed the great opium addiction of China.
Two wars did little to stave off the centuries of opium addiction.
And both failed.
Did the opium addiction cause homelessness in China?
As in America it certainly was a factor, this can hardly be denied.
Only when the Chinese organized a revolution in 1949 were policies adopted to eradicate both homelessness and addiction.
Any class analysis of society will see that there is now a working class of poor people, many who are homeless.
Any class analysis of society will see that there is now a ‘useless class’ of workers or what Marx termed surplus labor, many who are homeless and addicted.
And both classes are growing.
The grand addiction, of course, is the addiction to the profit system by both citizens with false consciousness and those who profit from it.
Arguing about what causes homelessness is a fool’s errand without seating the issue within a class society and addressing capitalism, a system that puts profits before people, drugs before homes.
Boudin’s failed policies and recall is a reminder that false consciousness and capitalism, now systematized into literal brainwashing by social media and transnational media corporations, which cause and increase homelessness, will not be solved or eradicated by reforms.
“Lock ‘em up” or “compassionate policies for the poor” do little more than hide the class nature of the savagery of homeless and addicted life and individualize what is a social problem.
Asking if drug dealers are better off in SF under Boudin is like asking if drug dealers were better off under Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Jr., Clinton, Obama, Trump or the war criminal we have today in the Whitehouse.
The paucity of debate outside the realm of a failed economy is the providence of academics who doubtfully will visit the homeless, but will never be homeless themselves due to their social class.
I have worked in addiction treatment in the criminal justice system for over 11 years, every day with high-need, high-risk addicts. Everything Mr. Woodhouse says is correct. It’s not compassionate to refuse to accept that addicts are ruled by fear, terror in fact, and that “forceful action” is needed to help them. Addiction is not choice. It’s the loss of choice. Someone needs to make the choices they cannot. Thanks to the false god of “justice reform,” we have abandoned a generation of people to addiction. “Wanting to stop badly enough” is not enough. I’ve met very few late-stage addicts who didn’t desperately want to stop. They can’t. That’s what addiction is. A fear of something greater than the fear of a day without drugs is necessary. Refusing to provide that is not kind or ethical. That is is the last thing it is.
Most homeless people are not addicts. In fact, almost half of them have jobs. You raise a different issue here.
I fully respect your knowledge and experience regarding addition, but I have a different experience. That doesn't at all mean that both can't be true for different people. I've lived with heroin addicts, including best friends and a girlfriend. As much as some of us tried to cut them off from their dealers and supplies, it didn't work. What I learned, over time and the hard way, was that, in order to stop doing heroin, they needed to want to stop doing heroin more than they wanted to do it. In contrast to your comments, it is undeniable that drugs provide certain pleasurable experiences and/or pain relief (the drugs themselves, not the results of doing them or becoming addicted). People won't break their addictions without wanting to do so more than they want to get high.
I have no opinion regarding people who only do drugs because they're addicted and get no pleasure from doing them. I've known some people like that, but not closely enough to opine on this.
50% of people who are addicted in there 20s are no longer addicted in their 30s. Most people “age out” of addiction when they decide the hassle of being an addict outweighs the fun it gives them. Don’t infantalize people. Even addicts make choices and no one forced them to drink or do other drugs in the first place.
I will grant that as an addict gets older and older the chance of them self rehabilitating goes down and down. They obviously need help.
Addiction is not substance abuse. It’s a whole different animal, and there is nothing fun about it. Many, maybe most, people can use drugs without becoming addicts. They do not have the genetics or trauma history of addicts. AA recognized this 85 years ago when it said it was like some people are allergic to alcohol, while others can drink, a lot, and not ruin their lives. 83 years later, the genetic link to addiction was discovered. One of the worst traits of modern “mental health experts” is refusing to accept this reality.
There have been two approaches - a wide-angle statistical approach, which has shown for decades a genetic link in addiction, and a microbiological approach, which is now identifying gene sequences. Lots out there. This article and its citations are a good start. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879628/?target=broweuli.com
Thanks. While is seems alcohol addiction runs in families, it's good to see an effort to understand why. Awareness can be helpful and maybe someday a way to moderate the effects of the genetic tendency.
Interesting platitude. Besides being an obvious example of a false dilemma (aka false dichotomy), I truly have no idea what that means.
Are you implying that if you felt sorry for someone you had to turn them away? "Sorry folks, I'm feeling sorry for you which means I can't help you." That's seriously twisted.
And aren't people really feeling sorry for a person's *situation*?
Ben Spielberg strikes me as one of these highly educated fools who haven't been mugged yet. The very definition of a liberal.
When Ben gets mugged, or home-invaded, or watches as a flash mob strips his store of all its inventory (though, I doubt he has ever run a business, so scratch that one), perhaps he will develop a different perspective.
When Ben's mother gets beaten or worse by an insane homeless man at the train station or in the park or a thousand other public places that they infest, will he change his tune? "Oh if only we had cheaper housing. It's all those greedy white landlords' fault!"
Homelessness is a scourge and a disgrace on our country ever since the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill back in the 1960s-70s, with the closure of hundreds of state-funded residential facilities for mental illness treatment. Thousands of people were thrown into group homes or halfway houses or simply let out on the street, where they experienced violence, drug abuse, and death.
What kind of a civilized society would do such a heartless thing? A society that listens to an educated elite that is totally out of touch with reality. It was the psychiatric profession and the social scientists that infest academia and public administration, that advocated for this disastrous policy.
It has been reported for decades that most of the homeless since the 1970s, except for families, had either mental illness or drug addiction, or both. This is nothing new, and Ben Spielberg should maybe do more research before making silly claims about the economic causes of homelessness.
Of course there are economic homeless. California is a perfect storm of tightening the screws and making it impossible for middle class families and individuals to live there. That's why they're leaving.
In my opinion, California as well as New York and a few other "progressive" states should declare bankruptcy and turn over control to an occupying force composed of business and military leaders who will, as with U.S.-occupied Japan, just rewrite their constitutions, get rid of ridiculous laws, and turn things around.
I don't understand why so many right wingers flock to Glenn Greenwald's websites or whatever you call this. Greenwald has said that he's a leftist, though he's not the phony type of leftist that most people identify as such, and he has no problem criticizing any side that's full of it. That's one reason that I read or watch him. But he certainly doesn't support this evil law & order crap, and I don't understand all the horrible extreme right wing comments here and to Chris Hedges. Don't these people understand that writers like Greenwald and Hedges are diametrically opposed to their ideologies?
Why do you think people can't be opposed to someone's ideology, but can agree on certain things. It used to be, I don't agree with what you're saying, but I'll defend your right to say it. Sadly that time has been destroyed. Do you know the reason Glenn is on substack? Nowadays we're all expected to belong to a tribe, and to believe in everything that tribe espouses. It's really easy to be shunned and even destroyed by a mere word or two. Climate change, transgender, abortion, immigration, etc,etc,etc. Depending on what tribe you consider yourself in, try speaking for or against whatever ideology they hold, and if its wrong be ready for the repercussions to follow. Maybe we're all starved for the truth (I know I am) that it doesn't matter if its coming from someone who has a different ideology than you.
I don't think that. I'm a radical environmentalist, and I've worked with people whose political ideologies were the opposite of mine except for on environmental issues.
The problem HERE is that when people post essays and ideas on sites that allow comments, trolls come to these sites to be disruptive. Glenn has said he's a leftist, but Rumble and Substack seem to draw a very large number of right wingers/conservatives to even leftist websites like Glenn's, Lee Camp's, Jimmy Dore's, and Chris Hedges's. These people are trolls, because they basically have nothing in common with the author, and are just being disruptive on the website. It's not about engaging in a productive conversation or discussion, it's about being as disruptive as possible. Do you really think that Glenn and the leftists here -- and to be clear, I am NOT a leftist, though I agree with the left on most issues -- haven't heard all the corporate/establishment and right wing/conservative comments about these issues? Posting that kind of stuff here and/or on other similar websites doesn't provide anything useful or constructive. I'm happy to engage in discussions with people with whom I disagree, as long as they don't deny obvious true facts and don't claim false ones.
I'm so disappointed that we have become a nation of tribes out to destroy each other just because we can. I don't live in that world and the people I call friends don't either. I think the glue that holds us together is, none of us are on anti-social media. We might be the only group of friends who haven't banished anyone for some kind of wrong think. We have heated debates, because we're all different but we have respect for each other. I'm sorry I took what you said in the wrong way, but glad that you replied back respectfully. To me trolls are trolls, whichever side they come from I just scroll on by. But sometimes I like feeding them.
Deb, this person Jeff is a chronic self important whiner you can find on many threads. Humor him but take little of what he whines about seriously. He likely still resides in his parents' basement.
I’m not a fan of trolls either-the best thing to do is ignore them and they typically go away. However, I believe the point of this post was to encourage debate and support those who are voicing their opinion even if you don’t think have anything relevant to add-maybe someone else does.
And you strike me as a right wing police-state supporter who's never been imprisoned or otherwise screwed by the system. Not that that would change your mind, you're clearly close-minded and mean-spirited. Your final paragraph tells everyone all they need to know about you, and it ain't good. Same for the immoral fools who upvoted your evil comments.
One of the most sensible comments I’ve heard on this entire thread. I’m a 76 yo retired neurologist, but did a lot of training in psychiatry, because I felt it was important to also understand the “mind." One of my rotations was through a true psychiatric hospital, separate from the main medical center. It was there one could find the worst afflicted schizophrenics, manic depressive disorders, and other psychiatric disorders you can find in DSM. Thanks to the liberals you can find the same people on the streets of San Francisco and other major cities, particularly in blue states. of course, some of the people in these hospitals had mental disorders brought on by their drug addictions.  I well remember the liberal fools stating that “now we have medications to treat these disorders, so we can let them out of the psychiatric hospitals" followed by closure of the same hospitals. Of course at the time and still that is only half true. Many of these disorders' symptoms and signs are only mitigated by psychiatric medications. there are simply not enough psychiatric wards in main medical centers to house the number of chronic psychiatric patients who had benefit by dedicated psychiatric hospitals. 
You want to dissolve democracy and declare yourself dictator because you disagree with some other peoples choices. Let me guess, you are a Trump voter.
---Our method was simple: talk to anyone who would talk to us, which, as it turned out, was most people we approached. We asked them straightforward questions about how they became homeless, whether they would choose to take shelter if offered and under what conditions, and what their drug use habits were. Almost everyone was as plain and direct with us as we were with them.
From these interviews it was clear as day what we were looking at: the tent encampments in all of these cities are sites where people who are addicted to (principally) meth and fentanyl can acquire and use those drugs. That’s the reason they exist. These are places plagued by brutal violence, rampant theft and human trafficking, as people who live in them will tell you. The only reason people live there at all is because the power of addiction is so relentless that the fear of withdrawal eclipses the fear of any of those things.--
I used to work in corrections in Canada at the national level. Ask a prisoner how he got to be in a cage and they will often tell you it was "drugs" too, and for sure that is often a factor. But their mere opinion, their story, is not, and cannot be accepted as dispositive of anything really.
If someone on drugs says "drugs are keeping me homeless" and someone responds by saying "no, it is high housing costs", I'll take the first-hand testimony.
That aside Occam's only says that the simplest explanation is the most likely correct one. It does not say, as some think that the simplest explanation is ineluctably the correct one.
Ted Bundy said porn made him do it.
Should we buy that ridiculous and reductive explanation just because he said it and it's simple?
Principle of Parsimony (PoP) in science, AKA Occam's razor, utilizes abductive reasoning (CS Pierce) via hypothesis testing which is typically set up as testing competing hypotheses for the *same prediction*. If two hypotheses lead to disparate predictions, PoP (Occam's razor) is largely irrelevant.
The reason for choosing the simplest form of a hypothesis has to do with the scientific method; seeking to falsify one hypothesis as being superior. It minimizes the chance of a "moving goalpost" fallacy arguing a favored hypothesis, as measured, was not sufficiently complex.
Woodhouse et al aren't claiming to have talked to "most homeless people". They are claiming to have talked to the people living in tent cities on the streets of major West Coast cities who invariably tell them it's the drugs.
Recorded interviews to traceable people, btw, are not anecdotes.
FWIW, you didn't source your 3:1 claim. I'm not saying you are wrong or that you are pulling things out of your ass, but as of now it's just an anecdote.
"Recorded interviews to traceable people, btw, are not anecdotes."
Yes, they are!
"I became homeless because I am drug addict" is isn't a fact. It's an opinion.
Lots of people are drug addicted but don't become homeless. It's a factor for sure, but the mere fact of being addicted is dispositive of nothing really.
That's down to the very common hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the former must have caused the latter.
--"I became homeless because I am drug addict" is isn't a fact. It's an opinion.--
Saying a person attributes his homelessness to drug addiction is a fact. Dismissing this data point is beyond bizarre.
Saying that there are drug addicts who are not homeless is neither disputed nor relevant.
Saying that there are homeless people who are not drug addicts is also neither disputed nor relevant.
Saying that the vast majority of those in the tent cities crapping on the streets are drug addicts and by their own confessions are homeless due to that addiction is what you are disputing.
You are hand-waving away the best explanation for the problem.
And for those who are 'addicted' (a loaded word) to 'drugs' (an almost meaningless term in this context) is the inflated price of those drugs that in many cases causes more problems for them then the effects of the drugs themselves. Prices are insanely high because some drugs are illegal. *Decriminalise, or better legalise, and drug prices will drop to affordable levels.
In his book "Junkie", William S. Burroughs talks about getting cheap heroin from the government and so there was no need for him to become a real criminal. It's also true that after the Civil War many many soldiers came home addicted to heroin, so much so that heroin addiction was called the "Soldier's Disease". Unlike today though, their addiction caused relatively few social problems as then legal heroin was cheap and readily available.
If cigarettes cost $100 each, we'd see people rendered homeless due to their addiction to same.
But yeah, the entire problem pretty much reduces to not having enough money, for whatever reason, to pay the man his filthy lucre.
*someone will now jump up to argue that affordable, legal heroin, will result in more addicts! It won't of course because the reason most people do not use heroin is not due to the high cost!
It relies on the objective reporting of Shellenberger and Woodhouse unless you're claiming they are lying
--I mean surely if Occam meant simplest explanations are the best (which he certainly did not)..--
It means the simplest explanations are preferred. Your anti-Occam explanation adds multiples of assumptions i.e. Woodhouse (or anybody else) did not have input; Shellenberger is not accurately reporting what he sees; none of his subjects understand their circumstances.
You have made up your mind. I don't think reasoning can change it.
Unlike you, I can't read their minds. I can only know about the arguments as the two writers presented them. The only evidence I remember reading from Woodhouse is Shellenberger.
If by objective you mean the videos they took, I suggest you have to *believe* they were objective because they did not take the basic care to make sure their *evidence* isn't biased.
The reason THAT is important is because researcher bias (probably not what you think it is) is pernicious and very difficult to eliminate even with the best intentions.
I choose to be wary of people that begin with a rigid worldview as such *research* almost can't help but confirm the worldview. But whatever it is, it is not objective.
And on *that* topic, I give you this...a humorous take on the subjectivity of objectivity...
Reading words is not mind reading. Hearing words is not mind reading. The only way you can win this argument is to show Woodhouse & Shellenberger made everything up i.e. hired actors or used CGI or whatever.
Win argument? What argument? I only stated that the only evidence provided by Woodhouse was Shellenberger and videos no self-respecting researcher would consider objective. That doesn't bode well for his position. I made no such claims as to which argument was more correct in real life. Doing so would be the quickest way to prove myself a fool which I try to avoid.
As for this:
"The only way you can win this argument is to show Woodhouse & Shellenberger made everything up i.e. hired actors or used CGI or whatever."
Do you know what false dichotomy/false dilemma is? If not, re-read that sentence or watch this video:
LIterally anything would be better than our current approach which is to ignore them until they commit a crime and then monetise by feeding them into the huge gaping maw of the US Prison Industrial Complex for processing.
I would add this. We’ve been doing various forms of talk therapy, often called “cognitive behavior therapy,” with addicts for about 60 years. The evidence supporting the stand-alone, long-term effectiveness of these “evidence-based practices” is nearly non-existent. In fact, the primary route to becoming an “evidence-based practice” has nothing to do with its long-term effectiveness. Modalities acquire this label by being popular among peers, not effective. Why do we continue pretending talk therapy alone is “treatment” for addiction? Perhaps money has a lot to do with it. Another reason is the refusal to accept what addiction is and how recovery happens. Addicts don’t think themselves into a better way of living. They live themselves into a better way of thinking. Only the combination of the compulsive power of courts, combined with trauma-based therapy, jobs, drug testing, etc., on a regular basis, for a long time, has shown genuine long-term effectiveness in reducing addiction and its related crime and homelessness. Real treatment is hard, long, and expensive. Those who care are willing to do that work, because they know addicts can recover and lead great lives. Those who pretend to care feel and demonstrate pity, not empathy, and they wax on about “justice reform,” while people die in the streets. Pity kills addicts. I am grateful every day that those who saved my life and gave me a wonderful new one showed me none.
Most addicts cure themselves without any treatment whatsoever. It’s called “aging out” by mental health experts. To be fair, some of those who don’t age out just die instead.
I was a nicotine addict. I only managed to get that monkey off my back when one day I noticed that biking up a hill that I normally had no probs with had become hard. Very hard.
I had tried to quit many times in many ways. I always wanted to quit but could not. It took that bike ride to make me understand, at a very deep level, that I was killing myself. That is what often happens to an addict, they finally hit a low that forces them to understand that real change is required if they want to live. (or to stop hurting others that they care about).
Today I would not smoke a cig a gunpoint. It took 20 relapses though to teach me, at a very deep and unarguable level, that I cannot just smoke one cigarette, because I now genuinely understand that if I do that I am finished.
Great job in what I know to be a terrible struggle. I’m not minimizing your accomplishment at all. Please understand that. What I would add is that, while Nicotine is highly physically addictive, with a relatively small psychological element, most addicts have suffered severe and/or persistent trauma, and drugs give them relief, temporarily, from the pain that haunts them. They are really addicted to oblivion, not to just one or a few drugs. When they are not high, the psychological pain, terror, and constant anxiety is crushing, in addition to the physical effects. Many people think the physical effects of stopping are the hard part. No, they’re the easier part of trying to stop.
Literally, addiction is the loss of the ability to “decide to change.” If someone doesn’t care enough to decide for them, they will continue to destroy themselves and everything / everyone around them. Refusing to accept this fact is THE problem.
After a racist anti-Black campaign, most Asians voted to recall Boudin and most Blacks voted to keep him. After 50 years of Asians displacing Blacks there are now more Asians. It’s really that simple.
There were no daily attacks on Asian elders but there was a concerted effort by the corporate media to convince you of this. The propaganda that you gobbled up unthinkingly.
The only hate I see here is the hate in your own heart. I have seen your kind come and go. You will swim back to the suburbs to spawn with your own kind.
San Francisco will continue to be a beacon of tolerance long after your kind has made the money you came here chasing after and left to go back to your true homeland of hate.
So let me see if I have this right. A guy who doesn't live in San Francisco, has never lived in San Francisco, and apparently gets his entire knowledge about San Francisco from the news media is going to tell a second generation San Franciscan with kids in public school all about his city.
My grandfather built Liberty ships here during WWII. His great grandchildren will raise their children here. You came here to make a quick buck and then left as soon as things didn't go your way. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Homelessness is caused by more than one thing, and that's not debatable. The big increase in homelessness in California started when Hitler, er, I mean Ronald Reagan, closed the state mental hospitals when he was governor, throwing the patients onto the streets. It has mushroomed from there. People are homeless because they are mentally ill, because they can't afford rent, and/or because they're addicted to drugs. The plurality if not the majority of homeless are now military veterans, so I'm guessing PTSD is also a cause, though that would come under being mentally ill.
The false duality seen here, where people pick a side and stick to it regardless of the facts or reality, is really astounding. This should not have degenerated into arguments about lone causes of homelessness, because there is none.
I have no real answers as to how to solve the homeless issue -only observations, I lived for 9 years in Portland and saw a rise in homelessness with all of its accompanying problems escalating to the point where I finally left. There is enough blame to go around to be sure, but at least in Portland there was and is no functioning government to solve ANY of the problems facing the city. It is a commissioner form of government which means that each commissioner has his/her power base which they are not going to give up ergo nothing gets done. Compassion overflows for the people on the street but what is termed compassion, keeps common sense at bay
I am currently living in Mexico where poverty is on display but homelessness is not. It may be the strength of families who would never allow a member to face the world alone. It may be the strength of religion which is not frowned upon and gives both a sense of community and of pride in self and community. . It may be that everyone is doing something in and for the town be it sweeping the streets, stopping traffic so that oldsters like me can cross the street, selling lollipops or even singing for pay on the bus.
Finally, there is a strong love and commitment to the children who are cherished far more than I saw in the States. They are considered the treasures of the present and the future and are being taught that poverty alone does not justify behavior that shames and ruins the Mexican family/community.
We all know that Mexico has its share of problems and I am sure many comments will list them all, but from what I have seen where I live , it also has a lot to teach the US.
Deinstitutionalization was in vogue in psychiatric circles in the 1960s-70s, which is why state governments like California went along with it. It justified closing expensive facilities that had achieved a terrible reputation among the public, thanks to exposés like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". The residents of those facilities had no political voice, and the tiny community of physicians and nurses who cared for the residents were outnumbered and outshouted by the reformists.
Unfortunately, deinstitutionalization failed miserably. It resulted in tens of thousands of people effectively dumped on the streets, where they died. It is a shameful episode in the history of American medical care that has still not been fully exposed and understood.
Trite, shallow observations like "It's Reagan's fault" are unconstructive. It was a lot of people who foisted that terrible policy on the country; Reagan simply signed the orders, as did many other governors and other public policymakers.
The Snake Pit was another movie that has stayed with me for many years . I still see Olivia de Havilland cowering in a corner . With that in mind, many of us - me included - were not dismayed at closing those places down. Of course all of the mental health clinics that were suppose to supplant those Snake Pits never opened.
It is true that in many places 'mental hospitals' became foetid garbage cans overseen by undpaid, poorly trained and abusive staff. But that is not an argument for closing them, it's an argument for doing better.
i agree - the setting for The Snake Pit was carmallio state mental hospital in california -supposedly some of the doctors andnurses who worked there wanted to clean iit up and keep it open but they were overruled - i would guess that once the conditions were exposed as being a STATE hospital, most of the people in power wanted it closed immediately before the next elections. There was a hospital in nyc - i think dammarra or something close to that, theat was also a snake pit and closed once exposed.
So 1) you're defending Reagan, the worst and most evil president in my lifetime? 2) Are you seriously claiming that Reagan was a deinstitutionalist? I can assure you that he was not.
I have no opinion regarding your claim about deinstitutionalization regarding the closing of mental hospitals in California. I was didn't move here until 1983, well after this had already happened. But my friends here all told the same story about Reagan closing the mental hospitals and the resulting explosion of homelessness that it caused. Reagan wanted to shrink government as much as possible, and closing state mental hospitals would be right in line with that. This is very far from being a priority issue for me, so it's not an observation, trite, shallow, or otherwise. It's just what people told me a little before I moved here.
The closing of most of California's state hospitals was a bipartisan measure; Democrats were concerned about involuntary hospitalization, and Republicans were easily sold on deinstitutionalization as a cost-saving measure.
Meanwhile, it became almost impossible to compel psychiatric treatment, largely because of litigation campaigns by the ACLU, et al. Even if new psychiatric hospitals were built on a large scale, most of the people who need treatment the most would refuse to go there, and couldn't be compelled to go. See "Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill", by Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat.
Sadly that mental hospital reform issue was sweeping the nation and the Gov just followed along. Sounded good at the time, particular since the care worker were often equally mentally disturbed and abusive. Baby-bathwater issue.
How can you say that putting mentally ill people who can't take care of themselves on the street "[s]ounded good at the time"? And Reagan was totally evil, worst president in my lifetime. The only one close was Cheney, and he technically wasn't president even though he ran all the important stuff (foreign affairs and energy).
We have a rooming house near here. I watched as a woman in her 30s descended into complete madness, shitting in her room, threatening the other tenants with knives, rampaging through the neighbourhood, stealing anything she could get her hands on and then storing those goods (after shitting on them) in people's yards. If you said anything to her she would explode into rage, spit and run at you. Eventually the landlord literally boarded up her room until she went 'somewhere'.
I'm just commenting on the national mood at the time which was appalled about abuses in those hospitals. We can disagree about Reagan. Causing the Soviets to over spend led to the eventual collapse of that empire, Reagan set that in motion.
You make the false assumption that destroying the Soviet Union was a good thing. Of course if you support an evil pig like Reagan, that makes perfect sense. But objectively, it's one of the worst political events of my lifetime globally, because it allowed the U.S. to act with impunity around the world instead of having a balance of powers. I didn't like the Soviet Union, but it was no more evil than the U.S. -- probably less so -- and one country gaining hegemonic power over the entire planet is never a good thing.
Woodhouse provides factual, common sense information & solutions, and Spielberg makes my head feel like it's about to explode.
I remember that feeling well,. As a nurse, I watched in horror & disbelief as the left created & grew a cottage industry of self aggrandizement, while promoting & fostering this nightmare.
Their "compassion" drove these folks from institutions, where they were being cared for to the streets, where they were a danger to themselves & others. The trail of suffering & death furthered by Soros's DA are well documented & promote evil beyond comprehension for ALL concerned.
As long as the Spielbergs of the world continue to distort reality, accountability, & common sense solutions; the suffering, death & danger to innocent people continues. God Help Us!
I’m a nurse too who’s worked in the field of psychiatry & addiction for decades. The public health clinic I was in helped people with housing, medication & a day program to learn simple skills & have a community connection. George Bush (Texas is in the 90s) pulled the rug out from under them & their lives crashed.
Then you know firsthand the horror & disbelief we felt at watching the few available resources & lifelines these folks had being destroyed along with the lives of innocent people caught in the line of fire. CA is a perfect example of the results of the heinous acts of the 90s, with more insanity heaped on & the same insane destructive arguments in it's defense..
This despite the glaring results of the suffering & death they've wrought. Bush had plenty of help dismantling not only clinics, but in patient facilities & other safety nets, all in the name of compassion. Add Soros's destructive forces parading as DAs & you have suffering & death all around.
We’ve avoided Soros DAs (at least so far) in Texas but all the homeless, drug addicted misery is on full display in our major cities. Dismantling the safety net was sold to the public as a major reform to “allow the mentally ill more autonomy in their lives.” Instead of coming to the clinic to see the doctors they knew & trusted , they were given a list of “preferred providers” , told to pick one & handle it themselves. We’re talking about schizophrenics who needed guidance to find the right bus.
I have been deeply involved with NGO aid and help to the homeless in my city in the Central Valley of California for around 4 years. Our estimated 500 unsheltered homeless in proportion to my city’s population is close to equivalent to that of San Francisco. Our rent is much lower than San Francisco rent though it has been rising. My contact with the homeless and what a close friend has told me who was addicted and homeless for 15 years shows that drug use - tobacco, alcohol, opioids and meth is utterly widespread. Mental illness and self sabotaging behavior patterns and emotional hang ups are equally widespread, plus for some homelessness is a lifestyle choice. Because of this, even with free housing, support, aid, counseling - rehabilitation is a slow process with fits and starts and failures, and trying it again and again. No easy solution. A local motel was remodeled and made available and despite attempts to manage and help and guidelines the place was a scene of police action and drama and rule breaking. Of course there are exceptions to these patterns and causes, but they are in the minority. The solution is time, a lot of money per person helped, patience, generosity, accepting that money and effort will be”wasted” and failure will be part of the process, and a peculiar blend of kindness and strictness and giving and accountability.
This comment summarizes the difficulty of helping addicts in a meaningful way. There is no solution that will save everyone and the unfortunate truth is, there are addicts who don’t want to be saved but can disrupt & sabotage the ones who do.
This part of the debate was something of an improvement over the first part, I think. Spielberg's post was pretty good, and rightly went into specific questions to get the debate back on track after Woodhouse moved a bit away from the main issue. It was also helpful when Woodhouse responded to those questions, but Woodhouse didn't answer all of them. (More on Woodhouse in my reply to this post.)
Spielberg still retains a few of his flaws from the first part of the debate. He continues to maintain, without adequate justification, that a law-enforcement system should not have "incapacitation" as one of its aims, even though incapacitation just means physically preventing people from carrying out more crimes. This view of his is so bizarre that he needs better arguments for it than he's given. And although Spielberg conceded in his very first post that "it is the job of people who recognize the problems with our criminal legal system to provide a better, equally concrete answer" on how to keep people safe, he's still basically no closer to doing that.
I gather, although he doesn't say so directly, that Spielberg is emotionally invested in thinking that surely most people's safety issues (including the problems that non-dealers experience in the Tenderloin) will be adequately addressed if we just focus enough on "prioritizing" things the way that typical lefty people want and apply that approach diligently. Spielberg constantly makes me suspect that, in the end, he doesn't really feel he has to be convincing on the specific point that Boudin would help these Tenderloin safety issues as much as a typical prosecutor would, because he has faith that a lefty-style prioritization will fix most things overall regardless. And when he tries to make his readers feel this way, he's kind of trying to reduce the need for him to be fully convincing on Woodhouse's more challenging points.
Woodhouse is shifty on homelessness vs. unsheltered homelessness. In his very first post from July, he had said that "the problem of unsheltered homelessness in San Francisco is driven overwhelmingly not by the high cost of housing, but by the crisis of drug addiction", but then he immediately conflated that point about "unsheltered homelessness" with the issue of homelessness in general. Today, he starts out saying that he's only talking about unsheltered homelessness, and that he's willing to grant for argument's sake that the majority of sheltered homeless are not addicted. But he still can't stick to that. He ends up saying "I’ve argued that the homelessness problem in the Bay Area is mostly about drug addiction."
Woodhouse is unconvincing when he says he doesn't stigmatize addicts and doesn't judge them for being homeless. His tone shows the opposite. I realize that nowadays it's common to hear people say that they don't stigmatize or judge some group when they obviously do. But if you say that you don't stigmatize or judge simply because saying that will make you look better, it doesn't help anyone. Woodhouse's words show an eagerness to use coercion against addicts, and even if he maintains the coercion will help them, that doesn't mean he doesn't stigmatize. His view is actually that addicts have traits which make it at least a bit desirable to use coercion against them, even apart from whether the addicts are committing crimes like shoplifting. One telling example is when Woodhouse says "the low-level crimes like shoplifting that inevitably accompany a life of addiction create an opportunity for the public to intervene [that is, intervene coercively] in the lives of people who desperately need that intervention". Since he says "create an opportunity", it's clear that he thinks coercive intervention would be at least a bit desirable even if crimes like shoplifting didn't provide a legal opportunity for coercive court-system intervention. And since he considers addicts, as a group, to be a population for whom coercive intervention is at least a bit desirable even apart from crimes like shoplifting, I can see that he is stigmatizing them, despite his false claim to the contrary.
Here's a few further examples of the way Woodhouse talks about homeless people and addicted people:
1. "...the person who’s living in a tent because they have meth-induced psychosis and think aliens implanted a chip in their brain. That person will not be able to live functionally and autonomously in their own apartment even if the rent were a fraction of the market rate, until their addiction is treated."
2. "I don’t believe it’s ok for someone to just pitch a tent on the sidewalk in front of your house, or in front of your kids’ school, and live out of it indefinitely."
3. "The criminal justice system, for better or for worse, is the only real tool we have to force people into the care they’re unable to seek for themselves, due to their chemical enslavement."
These examples show some willingness to help what Woodhouse conceives to be the interests of homeless and addicted people -- always in ways that would also help the goals of non-homeless non-drug-addicted people such as Woodhouse. But Woodhouse's tone is not all that friendly to homeless and addicted people. He does think in these examples that he's acting in the interests of these low-status populations, but he doesn't show a lot of warmth, or caring, or respect, or signs of valuing their ability to guide their own life and find a way to flourishing according to their own thoughtful values. So, when he claims to be using coercion against these low-status people in their own interest, I have to wonder if it's just a coincidence that his course of action just happens to suit the interests of higher-status people who are felt to be more like himself, or whether his determination to use coercion against lower-status people "for their own good" kind of reflects some sort of closer identification with a higher-status community. I notice that Woodhouse's language, "force people into the care they're unable to seek", invokes the word "care" and uses it as a justification for force. But by now, most of us know that when the word "care" is used in an institutional context, it doesn't necessarily involve much actual caring. Actual caring requires being very open to how the person's needs might diverge from what you and people like you already want to do. I see no sign that Woodhouse's approach is driven by actual caring more than by the interest of people who aren't homeless or drug-addicted.
It's clear enough that Woodhouse is just not honest with himself about how he's stigmatizing and judging. He hasn't put in the emotional work needed to truly value the interests of addicts and homeless people, and to seriously and caringly face how that might diverge from the interests of the higher-status people that he is clearly concerned about.
Likewise, when Woodhouse is asked by Spielberg "Do you believe incapacitation and retribution – and not deterrence – should be the primary goals?", Woodhouse more or less says yes to incapacitation but never addresses the part about retribution. In Woodhouse's July post, he said that retribution has an "affirmative social purpose" even apart from incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and restoration. So he values the suffering of those who he sees as wrongdoers even apart from any benefit it gives to deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and restoration; that's what it means to say you think retribution has a purpose of its own. Again, there's a willingness to use force and suffering and to assume too hastily that the low-status person doesn't have rights or needs that may go against your goals.
Woodhouse is definitely unfair when he says that Spielberg and others are "cynics, who will lead you to false solutions based on transparently dishonest assumptions." He can't say anything to show that Spielberg is being cynical or dishonest, even though he claims that Spielberg's dishonesty is transparent. So, he's hurling ungrounded accusations.
And it's significant how Woodhouse dismisses one of the best points in Chesa Boudin's favor. When Spielberg asks Woodhouse about how Boudin, unlike many DAs, was willing to prosecute police as a way of "holding police officers accountable for misconduct", Woodhouse just replies "Boudin didn’t get a single conviction so I don’t see the value in this." It's well known that most prosecutors' reluctance to bring charges against police is only one of the reasons why abusive cops are often hard to convict, but when Boudin goes further than other DAs would, Woodhouse just cheaply dismisses it on the grounds that other factors prevented a conviction. Here Woodhouse fails to meet his own standards. When discussing homelessness and addiction, Woodhouse wants to appear like he's following the principles of rational discussion, arguing that correlation doesn't amount to a causal argument and so on. If Woodhouse's opponent said "Look, the San Francisco DA's office moved away from Boudin's policy but some measures of safety remain unimproved", Woodhouse would argue that there are other factors involved and that the change in policy may be worthwhile even if it's not immediately sufficient to make a dent in one measure of safety. But he refuses to use the same obvious logic to Boudin's prosecution of cops.
In fact, when Woodhouse says, "Boudin didn’t get a single conviction so I don’t see the value in this", that's the best example in this whole debate of the "cynicism" and "transparently dishonest" approach which he falsely accuses Spielberg of.
Careful. You talk about people who favor fewer arrests of homeless addicts or street-level drug dealers, who actually think that reducing these arrests is "compassionate", and then you rush to describe those who think that way as "cynics" who are using "transparently dishonest assumptions".
If that's not unjustified "mind-reading", then what is?
You admitted yourself that the people who you accuse of cynicism actually "think" the policies they favor are the compassionate thing to do. So, no reason to presume that they're being "dishonest" -- maybe you think their assumptions are wrong, but you provide no evidence for thinking their assumptions are dishonest.
But despite your lack of evidence for dishonesty, you go so far as to say that the dishonesty is "transparent". You're just being careless and getting carried away with emotion into saying something conspicuously unfounded. Likewise, someone who acts out of (their sense of) compassion can't be fairly accused of being a cynic, I would say, even though you rush to call them that.
As I mentioned, your comment on Boudin's courageous prosecution of abusive police was "Boudin didn't get a single conviction so I don't see the value in that" -- which sure sounds kind of cynical to me. It would be more fair to call your words cynical here than to describe as cynics those who act out of their sense of compassion. In fact, moving as rapidly as you do from "they think it's compassionate and they do it" to "they're cynics" sounds, in itself, like kind of a cynical move.
I studied your tone carefully, when you talk about unsheltered homeless people who may be addicted. I noticed the complete lack of expression of some things I think are important: (1) warmth, (2) caring, (3) respect, (4) valuing their ability to guide their own life and find a way to flourishing according to their own thoughtful values, (5) putting in the emotional work needed to truly value their interests and to seriously and caringly face how their interests might diverge from the interests of people who have housing and aren't drug-addicted. These 5 things stand out for not being explicitly expressed. If you'd written only a little about homeless addicted people, I might not think the lack of explicit expression of these 5 things is significant. But you wrote at considerable length, arguing consistently for a coercive policy towards them which just happens to coincide with keeping these people from disturbing non-homeless non-addicted people. So, I'd say I've seen enough to be fairly sure that at least some of these 5 things are not, in your current thinking, given as much consideration as I think they should be.
You write "Addiction is a disease, and those who suffer from it are victims of their afflictions". And I'm sure you're sincere in believing that, and in believing that you're not stigmatizing or judging drug-addicted homeless people. But social customs nowadays are so heavily in favor of saying "I'm not stigmatizing, I'm not judging" that I have to realize that we don't always live up to these claims of being non-judgmental: some of the people who deny that they're stigmatizing/judging actually are stigmatizing or judging at least in a way.
Here's an analogy. Suppose Jim has a cousin who became addicted to drugs and started living in the streets. Jim wants his cousin to recover, and like the people you describe, he is glad when his cousin is arrested and forced to enter treatment. Jim's love for his cousin is compatible with favoring a coercive use of the criminal-justice system to make his cousin go into addiction treatment. Jim sees his cousin as, in a way, a victim of drugs and of the dealers, and he sees his cousin as having an illness that needs to be treated. He loves his cousin, and doesn't love the use of force; he only favors force because he's concluded that this is the only realistic chance for his cousin to get better.
And yet this isn't all that Jim believes and feels. Jim also believes that his cousin isn't simply a "victim", as you put it. Jim thinks that his cousin made some bad choices that weren't simply drug-induced. His cousin may not have been a completely passive victim of the drug during the time he was addicted. And in particular, Jim thinks his cousin made some wrong choices before the addiction took hold, while he was on the way to getting addicted. Jim isn't a fan of how his cousin made those choices, which Jim feels helped lead the cousin into the problematic way of life that his cousin had as an addict.
Jim's cousin, while he was addicted on the streets, was more or less aware that Jim saw him that way, and it didn't exactly help the cousin in wanting to recover. Even after going through rehab, Jim's cousin still feels that Jim sees him in something like this negative light, and that is an obstacle to Jim's cousin getting his life more back on track. Jim really does see addiction as an illness and see his cousin as a victim. But beyond that, there is also a sense in which Jim is judging his cousin, a sense in which Jim feels there's a stigma to his cousin's choices. Jim says "I'm not judging, I'm not stigmatizing", but that isn't necessarily enough. I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong to think Jim's cousin has responsibility for starting the addiction, but I am saying that Jim's attitude may not be the best. Some kind of full fellowship between Jim and his cousin is missing (even if Jim himself may not see it's missing), and if this full fellowship was present it would help Jim's cousin.
Similarly, when a journalist discussing policy takes the positions you do, it's not enough just to say that coercion is necessary sometimes to overcome addiction. Simply instituting coercion for drug addicts through the courts isn't always enough, as Spielberg recognizes. I've talked earlier about the need to treat these people (who currently have a very low social status) with (1) warmth, (2) caring, (3) respect, (4) valuing their ability to guide their own life and find a way to flourishing according to their own thoughtful values, and (5) putting in the emotional work needed to truly value their interests and to seriously and caringly face how their interests might diverge from the interests of people who have housing and aren't drug-addicted. Now, it may be true that we can't always fully devote ourselves to these 5 things at every moment of treating someone with an addiction problem. But I think that if society's approach to addicted people displayed more of these 5 things, more people would make it out of addiction. It's sort of like how Jim's seeing his cousin in kind of a negative light didn't always help the cousin to fully get back on track. So it seems problematic when these 5 things don't show up in your article.
To be fair to you, I'll add some corrections to my original post in a self-reply -- almost all of these corrections are for mistakes of mine that I noticed before your post went up.
Wanted to correct a few things from my initial, hastily-written, long post about Woodhouse, and I'm putting this correction in a self-reply because I want it to be visible.
(1) I was incorrect in saying that Woodhouse never addressed Spielberg's question about retribution: in fact, Woodhouse makes clear enough that he doesn't insist that retribution should be a primary goal.
(2) My point that Woodhouse was shifty about homelessness vs. unsheltered homelessness was overstated. Woodhouse's initial post in July kind of blurred the difference between homelessness and unsheltered homelessness, but I now think his current post makes clear that he wants all his references to "homelessness" to denote only unsheltered homelessness. So there's no shiftiness in his current post.
(3) I initially thought Woodhouse was calling Spielberg one of the "cynics" with "transparently dishonest assumptions", but after reading more closely I see that Woodhouse officially is not including Spielberg in that criticism; I'll leave open whether Woodhouse is quietly hinting that the criticism may kind of apply to Spielberg too.
Wanted to correct a few things from my initial, hastily-written, long post about Woodhouse, and I'm putting this correction in a self-reply because I want it to be visible.
(1) I was incorrect in saying that Woodhouse never addressed Spielberg's question about retribution: in fact, Woodhouse makes clear enough that he doesn't insist that retribution should be a primary goal.
(2) My point that Woodhouse was shifty about homelessness vs. unsheltered homelessness was overstated. Woodhouse's initial post in July kind of blurred the difference between homelessness and unsheltered homelessness, but I now think his current post makes clear that he wants all his references to "homelessness" to denote only unsheltered homelessness. So there's no shiftiness in his current post.
(3) I initially thought Woodhouse was calling Spielberg one of the "cynics" with "transparently dishonest assumptions", but after reading more closely I see that Woodhouse officially is not including Spielberg in that criticism; I'll leave open whether Woodhouse is quietly hinting that the criticism may kind of apply to Spielberg too.
speaking from personal experience. my sister was caught up with addiction during the early 2000s in northern CA .. i believe if she didnt get arrested for low level usage and ultimately jailed for failing mandated drug tests she would be dead today.
she got the help she needed while incarcerated and today lives a healthy life as a grandmother.
Good discussion. My confirmation bias has become much too great. If people can't afford to live where they are we need to help relocate them to a more affordable area. Bus tickets and meal tickets seem suitable.
Drug addiction has become a way of life with no respite until the addict dies wherever that might be. For those on the streets, we need to provide dormitory facilities where they can live and the government provides food, shelter and drugs; the addict can stay until they wish to leave but return with a 30 day wait. The addicts clean themselves/personal area and are assisted in meals by staff. Staff are available for those who wish escape to reality. We may find psychedelics help rewire brains beyond talk work; 12 -step programs on-site. The cruelty of society for these lost people is astounding and tolerance for the illegal trade involved relates to many levels of corruption.
We seem to have tried a lot of things that don't work. Sadly some of us can't be saved by simple caring. But the shame of the streets is cruel in itself. Take the profit motive away from addict creation and there might be fewer addicts.
I reject this approach of simply giving everything, including drugs, to addicts. It will make things even worse, and it represents the same pity approach that is killing them now.. I know that addicts can recover. I see it every day. This approach gives up on them. It also fails to recognize the reality of what addiction is by clinging to the falsehood that addicts are doing anything “voluntarily.” Addiction is the loss of the ability to volunteer for anything. That’s not my definition. That’s the definition of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. If we continue to refuse to accept what addiction is, we will never make a dent in it.
Unfortunately there are in fact people who are utterly incorrigible. Nothing can be done for those who will do nothing to help themselves Though it is a pity, it is not worth establishing a socialist state for the sake of this segment of society. Religious institutions should be relied upon, not government handouts.
Insitutionalizing those who are clearly psychologially unfit is one solution that is long past due, And yes Reagan was largely at fault for dismantling the institutions in California. He was also responsible for a lunatic war on drugs that kept marajuana as a schedual one drug on the books for much too long. In fact according to federal law it is still illegal:
Some thoughts, based on my experience, on how the homeless would behave in the environment you propose. Some would take advantage of the help and move on. Many would take the situation as an opportunity to remain irresponsible, lazy, unmotivated rather degenerate teenagers - the developmental stage many are stuck in. Get into fights and conflicts, have sex, gossip, hang out as friends, play games, live on their smart phones. They would leave during day, find ways to get some money - recycling, begging, minor thievery - to spend on more drugs, alcohol, as most likely the amount of those items given to them they most likely would find inadequate. This isn’t judgment or condemnation but observations of where many homeless are at.
Criminal justice destroys as many lives as it saves. The across the board corruption of law enforcement in major American cities, from the cop on the street ,to the judge on the bench is legendary. Gang culture is prison culture. Drugs and prisons are an industry. Drug cash flows upward and there's lots of it. It's global. Remember the special teller windows Bank of America and other banks created so cartel leaders could stuff boxes of cash through to be laundered? Busted and fined at a fraction of what they made. Just like the elite financial criminals who gutted American industry and destroyed the American economy in '08, they walked. And, the "rules for thee-not for me" crowd is still walking and laughing all the way to the cushy office of their Swiss banker. The bag man and the cashed stuffed envelope is the definition of the real American dream. When there is no human moral center (think of the shining exemplars of virtue on the Potomac) chaos rules. The broken and discarded human beings inhabiting our drug fueled homeless encampments are just one of the countless canary's in the coal mine of American disintegration discussed across the board on Substack every day of the week. Be shocked and concerned. Hire and fire as many District Attorney's as you want. This is bubble land. Some poor little bubbles are homeless. Some still contain food and shelter. Some bubbles float way up above the world so high they're hard to see. The fix is in. Save yourself.
" ... these are days of miracle and wonder....medicine is magical and magical is art..the boy in the bubble and the baby with a baboon heart... and there are lasers in the jungle somewhere..a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires..the way we look to a distant constellation dying in the corner of the sky...these are days of miracle and wonder..and don't cry baby...don't cry.."
I’m so tired of hearing that homelessness is due to high rent costs/lack of affordable housing. As a recovering addict I can tell you- homelessness is due to addiction/ mental illness.
My drug addiction fueled my mental illness. Which in turn fueled my anti social behavior. Which in turn fueled my problem with keeping a job. Which left me homeless and unable to function as a human being. If you don't take care of the first, nothing else can follow.
We need to change the game by changing the vocabulary. Calling people "homeless" implies causality and solutions that we know are wrong. Call them MIDAS, Mentally Il/Drug Addicted Street people.
When I hear or use the term "homeless" I think of, or am referring to, a person without a home. Nothing more, nothing less.
The DA's focus in SF has been to ignore quality of life crimes in an attempt to decriminalize homelessness - their reasoning not mine. As someone who has at times over the last 40+ years lived in, worked in, been actively addicted to drugs and alcohol in, and been briefly homeless in, the TL I can assure you that not holding people responsible for their actions is not doing them or the rest of us any favors.
The DA's abdication of duty vis a vis promoting the general welfare was a gross dereliction of duty. That the mayor was fine with turning a blind eye to the problem until the day her photo opportunity met the same excrement and needles the rest of us navigated on a daily basis implicates her as well.
When one stops enforcing quality of life crimes it should come as no surprise that quality of life will lessen. I watched it happen in the TL (quality of life was low when I started working there in the mid-70s} and SF in general. That means the quality of my life as a sane and sober constructive member of society was diminished on a daily basis, not only by the property crimes I was a victim of, but more importantly by the horrible soul sapping exposure to the unfolding human tragedy and the filth and violence to which we, who were or are there, were continually exposed.
About mental illness... I lost my mother to it right after I was born. I have a soft spot in my heart for all people affected by it. While mental institutions of the past have a bad reputation, deservedly so IMHO, there is no reason to believe we can't care for the mentally ill in a more compassionate way. But, from a treatment perspective, that compassion can never devolve into "letting the inmates run the asylum".
But back to homelessness. When I encounter the word I don't think of any type of person other than one without a home. Until further investigation of that person's circumstances their lack of a home is all we know about their circumstances. If the problem is to be solved it will be on a case by case basis. It will not be one size fits all. Tent cities and public camping are not the answer.
My quality of life as a San Franciscan who does not live in the Tenderloin has steadily increased during the 30 years I have lived here. Violent crime has plummeted, the quality of Muni, parks, libraries and public schools had increased and there are more things to do every year (excepting Covid). The only bad thing is the rising real estate prices. People wouldn’t pay this much to live here if the quality of life was as bad as you claim.
People have to live somewhere. Throwing people in jail for using a drug that happens to be illegal doesn’t do anyone any good. How many lives have been destroyed by “reefer madness”?
I never claimed the quality of life was bad everywhere in SF. Based on your experiences I'm pretty sure I can guess where else you don't live or work in SF... But what you seem to be arguing is that as long as you can avoid the filth and soul sapping human suffering it's not a problem. Presenting addicts with a choice of rehab or jail (assuming they've violated the law) will do a lot more good for all parties than letting them die on the streets.
I have lived in San Francisco and worked here most of that time. Currently I live in Bernal, a block from Mission Street and two blocks from some subsidized housing. It's not the best neighborhood in San Francisco but its not the worst either. My point is that San Francisco stopped enforcing quality of life crimes and the quality of life has continued to improve, at least citywide. You claimed that not enforcing quality of life crimes has caused the quality of life to decline, presumably citywide. It's a different story for the Tenderloin to be sure, which has become a containment district.
I don't think locking up a bunch of addicts will do them any good. People in prison don't have any tough time finding drugs. Poor people have to live somewhere and if they can't afford rent, it will be sleeping rough, usually in a tent. Instead of looking down their noses at poor people, rich people should vote more taxes for themselves to get more basic housing. We also need to collectively decide that building housing is a priority and make it easier to do so. San Francisco is the hardest place in the nation to build housing and that is part of the reason it is so expensive here.
The DA's in most major cities are not there to help the people, they are there to help the political establishment. In states like VA the attorney general position tends to become the governor or other higher political offices.
This is why George Gascon went from SF to LA. Why would you change DA jobs and cities unless you were up to something? Why is the DA office in LA a more attractive job than the DA office in SF?
I mean after Mike Nifong fake charged those Duke kids for the fake racist scandal, and ruined their lives, who needs to put any type of laws around bullshit prosecutors I mean just ask Roy Moore, right?
https://apnews.com/article/roy-moore-wins-millions-from-democratic-pac-defamation-suit-5aeb9f28a4b7c67ef35f8eefed0c39c5
Thanks for the comments. I think the larger point is that activists try to solve the "homelessness" problem by offering shelter. That's the reason for a need for a vocabulary change. It follows your logic that we need to address individuals' issues, but the main issue to be addressed for most of the people who you stress should be held accountable for actions is other underlying issues, not lack of shelter.
Why the fuck wouldn't we offer "homeless" people shelter?
What the fuck are you even on about???
I see that the article's many points speaking to this were lost on you.
Most homeless people do i fact get back on their feet if they are offered shelter. So that’s the solution for most homeless.
A significant minority has some other issues like mental health or drug use that needs to be addressed as well.
Exhibit 2.7 Causes of homelessness among single adults, top answer with 68% "substance abuse"
http://www.ncdsv.org/images/USCM_Hunger-homelessness-Survey-in-America's-Cities_12%202008.pdf
Deb, I hope you are well now and enjoying a better life. We all are proud to see you overcome and value your perspective.
I completely disagree. All too often "changing the vocabulary" is an empty gesture designed to distract from the lack of meaningful progress in important issues. Recently The Woke Mob here in LA have insisted that for reasons they never have bothered to explain that the term "homeless," despite being perfectly accurate and non-pejorative is now "demeaning" to the -- well, the homeless, and that the term the "unhoused" is more appropriate. The words mean the exact same thing. The ONLY purpose of the word change is to make those who insist we use it feel morally superior.
You replying to me and saying that means you didn't understand my point. I am saying something completely different from those people you came in already having a beef with. You are complaining about situations where they change the word but the new one means the same thing. I am recommending changing the word very much because the thing it means today is not very descriptive and I want to call it something entirely different that meaningfully describes things. Very much not a case where "the words mean the exact same thing".
"Homeless" is exactly descriptive and "implies no "causality" like you claim it does. It means that the person is currently without housing. Period. It could be because of fire, lack of funds, drug addiction, personal preference, or any other reason a person can be left without shelter. YOU are the one imputing a meaning to the word which doesn't exist.
I wrote hastily but activists and the bulk of our nation spend tons of time and energy pitching shelter projects as solutions to "homelessness". The average person hears the word "homeless" and agrees that this sounds like a good idea to solve the problem, or at least does so in numbers too great because no one tries another solution. Time and again, projects successful at providing shelter have not solved the problem.
Whereas your first post made it sound like I was simply proposing a PC wording change a la "mental disability" instead of "retarded". I have written long breakdowns on the path from clinical term to insult of "idiot", "retard" and onward, their use on the playground, and the uselessness of changing them, which agrees with the principle you were espousing despite that principle not applying to my point. I have explained to many others why the AKC should always retain the use of "bitch", because as soon as they change it the new word is simply going to become an insult itself anyway.
"The ONLY purpose of the word change is to make those who insist we use it feel morally superior."
It's nothing more than a dreadful dictational dictatorship!
If you persist in calling it a "dictational dictatorship" instead of a "diction dictatorship", to the stocks with you!
I stand corrected.
call them whatever the fuck you want god knows all this talk is doing them so much fucking good I mean liberals have talked about this problem since the 1960s but in the cities which the DNC control, there is NOT ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE OF SUCCESS IN SOLVING THE PROBLEM
Accurate.
Many people take illegal opiates after being prescribed opiates.
Illicit drug use is quite often self-medicating. It's amazing how many people on prescribed psychotropic meds smoke tobacco and pot "to relieve the jitters" from the prescribed drug.
Evidence suggests decriminalizing allows for de-stigmatizing the issues involved here which is the first step to solutions. Both of these perspectives are simple...but one was relying on the oversimplification for their point to be internally consistent. The other did not to anywhere near the extent.
Last year I had a kidney stone and had to go to the emergency room. After telling them I was a recovering addict/alcoholic, they then tried to give me morphine and got offended when I asked if they were trying to kill me. So I asked for whoever was in charge at the time. This doctor came in to see what the problem was so I told him I was in recovery and that they wanted to give me morphine, he looked at the chart and found that they didn't put that in it. He ordered some toradol which worked great. They had to admit me because I had a infection, you better believe that everything they gave me afterwards was double checked. When I was released they give me the prescriptions and what do they give me for pain. Fucking oxycontin. I called the nurse who was taking care of me showed her the list and said what do I really need. Out of seven I needed three. If that wasn't crazy enough they gave pamphlets on all the drugs they had prescribed. The one for the oxycontin said that if you think you might abuse it you could die, so if you think you might abuse it they would give you a prescription for naloxone. Thankfully I had a good sponsor, and people in recovery to keep me humble, that the next month I celebrated twenty nine years clean and sober. Was it easy? Hell no. Was it worth it? Absolutely!!
Damn, Deb! Pretty cool to be communicating with you.
I, for one, very much appreciate really important posts like the last two you dropped.
Thank u
Sad to see that you have to work so hard to stay clean and that the system works against your success. It's a testament to you that you steer clear of the rocks.
Wish our leaders could get to know stories like this, to imagine what happens to those less aware and careful as you are, Deb, and work to fix the system.
I think that the system works against all of us at one time or another. The system back in 93, is totally different than 2022, at least they weren't encouraging people to die.
The overwhelming majority of people who use drugs never become addicted and do not have any serious problems with them. This is even true with alcohol, which is one of the most dangerous drugs there are.
TRVTH
But you dont say why you got addicted to drugs so you are only talking about symptoms of the problem not root cause analysis
I wrote this long screed about root causes, then my late sponsors voice entered my head and said KISS, keep it simple stupid. When someone shares at a meeting, they don't share root causes. That's therapy talk. If you go to a meeting what you're gonna hear is experience, strength, and hope. You're gonna hear what happened, what they did to change, and what its like now. You're gonna hear shit that'll curl your toes, and people laughing about it. You'll hear about sorrow, fear, and encouragement. The person sitting next to you who just strung together a week of clean time, losing a family member and not knowing what to do, so you do the only thing you can. Hug her and offer her a place of refuge. Not once have I heard root causes. Responsibility sure, root causes nope. What I learned was that I was a little narcissistic asshole who knew how to get what I wanted, and if I didn't I'd make your life miserable, and hold you hostage until you caught on and escaped. When my sponsor pointed this out to me my first emotion was pissed off, how dare she. The second was despair, I've been like this since I can remember what now. Keep it simple stupid!!! If you wanna use, help someone. If things don't go your way, help someone, etc,etc,etc. I'd ask her why? It was always why,why,why. Sometimes you're not ready for the answers, and sometimes you'll never know. I'm fine with that. I don't need root causes to live a contented life. All I need to know is that I'm an recovering addict/alcoholic and if I do certain things I will continue to be. But I also don't kid myself into thinking its any better out there. Oh yeah, my root cause was, I was a narcissistic little asshole who liked doing drugs.
2nd attempt as original reply seems lost:
That's hilarious, Iconoclast! Like the guy that wants to run six sigma on number of coffee cups to order for the breakroom. Very funny. : )
For those that might have missed Iconoclast's humor, a root cause analysis is inappropriate here for two reasons:
1. Root cause analyses are type of deductive inference that require a firm understanding of all of the underlying possible causes AS WELL AS the problem. Of course issues like addiction are anything but well understood and the "causes" are almost never well defined like say a faulty bridge gusset plate weld.
2. Root cause analysis can help one determine the HOW, but never the WHY (Iconoclast wrote: "But you dont say WHY you got addicted" (sic, but emphasis mine)
people like you are part of the problem
how many addicts have you helped recover and never relapse?
my guess is 0 which is far far less than my own number
There are very few virgins in the program. Most people are in and out. A guy my husband sponsored took ten years to get one. Sadly my husband had 18yrs and decided to give it another whirl. He died of end stage liver disease on August 28 2012. The guy my husband sponsored now has11yrs. Life is funny like that.
It is relatively easy to get clean and incredibly hard to stay there
Iconoclast wrote: "people like you are part of the problem"
I take it then you were not joking. Sorry for my misinterpretation. No need for the ad hominem.
I do not work in that area, specifically, but spent almost a decade studying treatment and the techniques of those that help with treatment within SSCP. So while I did not do what you supposedly have done, I have studied it a lot more in depth than most practitioners or clinicians.
However, none of the reply above has any relevance to my criticism of confusing root cause analysis techniques for what is instead an inductive reasoning pursuit...whether you call it that or not.
Let's agree to disagree. :)
Part of the problem is that people sometimes mean different things by "homeless." Some (myself included) use the word to mean people living on the street, in train stations and homeless encampments and I agree this is largely a mental illness and drug addiction issue. Others use the phrase more literally to include the itinerant poor. People sleeping on friends' couches, maybe getting stuck sleeping in their car some nights, people who have short-term stays in shelters, temporary hiccoughs with section 8 housing eligibility/availability etc. People can find themselves in these situations for a variety of reasons, some of them economic.
Cities where landlords require good credit checks and substantial security deposits can contribute to temporary "homelessness" in this group - a trend which in turn is exacerbated by some jurisdictions establishing absurd burdens to successfully evict non-paying tenants.
Most us are two paychecks away. I get that.
People without a home are homeless. If you sleep in your car or on a friend's couch you are homeless. That's what the word means.
“As a recovering addict I can tell you- homelessness is due to addiction/ mental illness.”
Congratulations on your recovering; nothing that follows can or was intended to detract from your accomplishment.
As for your general observation, You certainly can tell us about YOUR addiction, YOUR recovery, YOUR homelessness, and/or YOUR mental illness. But that doesn’t qualify you to make broad generalized conclusions about all others or even most others. Even if you think everyone you encountered on your road to recovery suffered the same problems you do or did, that can only tell us something about the very small subset of addicted and homeless people you encountered. Your observations may not be applicable to the much larger group of people you never encountered.
Like that of a cancer survivor, your story is inspiring. You deserve credit and accolades for what you’ve done. But surviving cancer doesn’t make one a cancer specialist, and your recovery doesn’t make you an addiction specialist or an expert on homelessness and mental health.
Wood house falls into the same trap in his argument. He presumes his observations, his visits to homeless camps, and his interviews amount to a representative unbiased sampling. They don’t.
Very sensible, fair and balanced analysis. Thanks!
Great post and far less surly than mine.
As a formerly homeless person, I can tell you homelessness is mostly due to not having enough money to pay the rent.
Almost all people who are homeless are not homeless for very long: they get a job, find a couch to crash on and become productive members of society. That's what happened to me. Prosecuting me and throwing me in jail for the "crime" of not having enough money to scrape together a security deposit would be counterproductive. But that's exactly the policy you espouse. You will fill our jails, destroy the liberty of hundreds of thousands of people who have only committed the "crime" of being poor and impoverishe our society in the long run by giving a criminal record to people who would otherwise get jobs later on in life.
Your confusion about the different reasons that people become homeless can be forgiven, given your own personal experience. But the evidence does not support your claims, unless you twist the word "homeless" to the point where it means something entirely different than the way it is used commonly and by the government.
Karl Marx stated that the capitalist society produces two prominent classes which are in conflict with each other: the bourgeoisie and proletariats.
The bourgeoisie are the oppressors who own the means of production and the proletariats are the oppressed workers who labor for the bourgeoisie.
Capitalism is distinguished not by privilege but instead by individuality of property ownership and that those who create the conditions of the oppressed group express this power in the form of laws that function to serve the bourgeoisie’s interests.
Therefore, capitalism is responsible for the manifestation of certain social conditions that have led to homelessness (see Marx on alienation, 1844 Philosophical Manuscripts) and I would add addiction.
The argument that we need to arrest street dealers is as old as it is bankrupt.
And going after the head honchos has made drugs a global industry and created the conditions for illegal governments and narco-states.
The continuance of the phony drug war will increase both the power of the cartels, the further corruption of public officials and the consumption of drugs.
Arguing that addiction causes homelessness is like arguing that workers cause unemployment.
Homelessness and addiction are what capitalism vomits up in its terminal stages.
The binary thinking, that homeless is caused by one single problem, this or that, rather than a confluence of traumas born under late-stage capitalist life is a problem.
There is not one cause for homelessness and addiction: they are symptoms of a society in free fall, of people alienated from themselves, other people and their societies that yes, are capitalist.
I would ask the authors how they would have evaluated and analyzed the great opium addiction of China.
Two wars did little to stave off the centuries of opium addiction.
And both failed.
Did the opium addiction cause homelessness in China?
As in America it certainly was a factor, this can hardly be denied.
Only when the Chinese organized a revolution in 1949 were policies adopted to eradicate both homelessness and addiction.
Any class analysis of society will see that there is now a working class of poor people, many who are homeless.
Any class analysis of society will see that there is now a ‘useless class’ of workers or what Marx termed surplus labor, many who are homeless and addicted.
And both classes are growing.
The grand addiction, of course, is the addiction to the profit system by both citizens with false consciousness and those who profit from it.
Arguing about what causes homelessness is a fool’s errand without seating the issue within a class society and addressing capitalism, a system that puts profits before people, drugs before homes.
Boudin’s failed policies and recall is a reminder that false consciousness and capitalism, now systematized into literal brainwashing by social media and transnational media corporations, which cause and increase homelessness, will not be solved or eradicated by reforms.
“Lock ‘em up” or “compassionate policies for the poor” do little more than hide the class nature of the savagery of homeless and addicted life and individualize what is a social problem.
Asking if drug dealers are better off in SF under Boudin is like asking if drug dealers were better off under Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Jr., Clinton, Obama, Trump or the war criminal we have today in the Whitehouse.
The paucity of debate outside the realm of a failed economy is the providence of academics who doubtfully will visit the homeless, but will never be homeless themselves due to their social class.
Yes. His analysis fails on multiple levels. It's shit really.
That is what is known as "ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE"
so funny how in the poorest communities in rural kentucky, they have homes
whereas in SF they are all on the streets
In your case. Thanks.
I have worked in addiction treatment in the criminal justice system for over 11 years, every day with high-need, high-risk addicts. Everything Mr. Woodhouse says is correct. It’s not compassionate to refuse to accept that addicts are ruled by fear, terror in fact, and that “forceful action” is needed to help them. Addiction is not choice. It’s the loss of choice. Someone needs to make the choices they cannot. Thanks to the false god of “justice reform,” we have abandoned a generation of people to addiction. “Wanting to stop badly enough” is not enough. I’ve met very few late-stage addicts who didn’t desperately want to stop. They can’t. That’s what addiction is. A fear of something greater than the fear of a day without drugs is necessary. Refusing to provide that is not kind or ethical. That is is the last thing it is.
Most homeless people are not addicts. In fact, almost half of them have jobs. You raise a different issue here.
I fully respect your knowledge and experience regarding addition, but I have a different experience. That doesn't at all mean that both can't be true for different people. I've lived with heroin addicts, including best friends and a girlfriend. As much as some of us tried to cut them off from their dealers and supplies, it didn't work. What I learned, over time and the hard way, was that, in order to stop doing heroin, they needed to want to stop doing heroin more than they wanted to do it. In contrast to your comments, it is undeniable that drugs provide certain pleasurable experiences and/or pain relief (the drugs themselves, not the results of doing them or becoming addicted). People won't break their addictions without wanting to do so more than they want to get high.
I have no opinion regarding people who only do drugs because they're addicted and get no pleasure from doing them. I've known some people like that, but not closely enough to opine on this.
50% of people who are addicted in there 20s are no longer addicted in their 30s. Most people “age out” of addiction when they decide the hassle of being an addict outweighs the fun it gives them. Don’t infantalize people. Even addicts make choices and no one forced them to drink or do other drugs in the first place.
I will grant that as an addict gets older and older the chance of them self rehabilitating goes down and down. They obviously need help.
Generally there are also very few active addicts making it to 60.
Addiction is not substance abuse. It’s a whole different animal, and there is nothing fun about it. Many, maybe most, people can use drugs without becoming addicts. They do not have the genetics or trauma history of addicts. AA recognized this 85 years ago when it said it was like some people are allergic to alcohol, while others can drink, a lot, and not ruin their lives. 83 years later, the genetic link to addiction was discovered. One of the worst traits of modern “mental health experts” is refusing to accept this reality.
A deference to that genetic link, please? As with such things there could be pre-disposition that might need management, if you know.
There have been two approaches - a wide-angle statistical approach, which has shown for decades a genetic link in addiction, and a microbiological approach, which is now identifying gene sequences. Lots out there. This article and its citations are a good start. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879628/?target=broweuli.com
Thanks. While is seems alcohol addiction runs in families, it's good to see an effort to understand why. Awareness can be helpful and maybe someday a way to moderate the effects of the genetic tendency.
That's almost exactly what the people at Synanon used to say...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/like-slavery-rehab-patients-forced-into-unpaid-labor-to-cover-treatment/
You can help addicts or you can feel sorry for them. You can’t do both.
Interesting platitude. Besides being an obvious example of a false dilemma (aka false dichotomy), I truly have no idea what that means.
Are you implying that if you felt sorry for someone you had to turn them away? "Sorry folks, I'm feeling sorry for you which means I can't help you." That's seriously twisted.
And aren't people really feeling sorry for a person's *situation*?
I hope you can return and see my comment (https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/crime-incarceration-and-reform-prosecutors-638/comment/8916076). As a counselor, am I way off base?
Ben Spielberg strikes me as one of these highly educated fools who haven't been mugged yet. The very definition of a liberal.
When Ben gets mugged, or home-invaded, or watches as a flash mob strips his store of all its inventory (though, I doubt he has ever run a business, so scratch that one), perhaps he will develop a different perspective.
When Ben's mother gets beaten or worse by an insane homeless man at the train station or in the park or a thousand other public places that they infest, will he change his tune? "Oh if only we had cheaper housing. It's all those greedy white landlords' fault!"
Homelessness is a scourge and a disgrace on our country ever since the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill back in the 1960s-70s, with the closure of hundreds of state-funded residential facilities for mental illness treatment. Thousands of people were thrown into group homes or halfway houses or simply let out on the street, where they experienced violence, drug abuse, and death.
What kind of a civilized society would do such a heartless thing? A society that listens to an educated elite that is totally out of touch with reality. It was the psychiatric profession and the social scientists that infest academia and public administration, that advocated for this disastrous policy.
It has been reported for decades that most of the homeless since the 1970s, except for families, had either mental illness or drug addiction, or both. This is nothing new, and Ben Spielberg should maybe do more research before making silly claims about the economic causes of homelessness.
Of course there are economic homeless. California is a perfect storm of tightening the screws and making it impossible for middle class families and individuals to live there. That's why they're leaving.
In my opinion, California as well as New York and a few other "progressive" states should declare bankruptcy and turn over control to an occupying force composed of business and military leaders who will, as with U.S.-occupied Japan, just rewrite their constitutions, get rid of ridiculous laws, and turn things around.
Business and Military leaders? The people Ike warned us about? No thanks.
I don't understand why so many right wingers flock to Glenn Greenwald's websites or whatever you call this. Greenwald has said that he's a leftist, though he's not the phony type of leftist that most people identify as such, and he has no problem criticizing any side that's full of it. That's one reason that I read or watch him. But he certainly doesn't support this evil law & order crap, and I don't understand all the horrible extreme right wing comments here and to Chris Hedges. Don't these people understand that writers like Greenwald and Hedges are diametrically opposed to their ideologies?
Why do you think people can't be opposed to someone's ideology, but can agree on certain things. It used to be, I don't agree with what you're saying, but I'll defend your right to say it. Sadly that time has been destroyed. Do you know the reason Glenn is on substack? Nowadays we're all expected to belong to a tribe, and to believe in everything that tribe espouses. It's really easy to be shunned and even destroyed by a mere word or two. Climate change, transgender, abortion, immigration, etc,etc,etc. Depending on what tribe you consider yourself in, try speaking for or against whatever ideology they hold, and if its wrong be ready for the repercussions to follow. Maybe we're all starved for the truth (I know I am) that it doesn't matter if its coming from someone who has a different ideology than you.
I don't think that. I'm a radical environmentalist, and I've worked with people whose political ideologies were the opposite of mine except for on environmental issues.
The problem HERE is that when people post essays and ideas on sites that allow comments, trolls come to these sites to be disruptive. Glenn has said he's a leftist, but Rumble and Substack seem to draw a very large number of right wingers/conservatives to even leftist websites like Glenn's, Lee Camp's, Jimmy Dore's, and Chris Hedges's. These people are trolls, because they basically have nothing in common with the author, and are just being disruptive on the website. It's not about engaging in a productive conversation or discussion, it's about being as disruptive as possible. Do you really think that Glenn and the leftists here -- and to be clear, I am NOT a leftist, though I agree with the left on most issues -- haven't heard all the corporate/establishment and right wing/conservative comments about these issues? Posting that kind of stuff here and/or on other similar websites doesn't provide anything useful or constructive. I'm happy to engage in discussions with people with whom I disagree, as long as they don't deny obvious true facts and don't claim false ones.
I'm so disappointed that we have become a nation of tribes out to destroy each other just because we can. I don't live in that world and the people I call friends don't either. I think the glue that holds us together is, none of us are on anti-social media. We might be the only group of friends who haven't banished anyone for some kind of wrong think. We have heated debates, because we're all different but we have respect for each other. I'm sorry I took what you said in the wrong way, but glad that you replied back respectfully. To me trolls are trolls, whichever side they come from I just scroll on by. But sometimes I like feeding them.
Deb, this person Jeff is a chronic self important whiner you can find on many threads. Humor him but take little of what he whines about seriously. He likely still resides in his parents' basement.
I’m not a fan of trolls either-the best thing to do is ignore them and they typically go away. However, I believe the point of this post was to encourage debate and support those who are voicing their opinion even if you don’t think have anything relevant to add-maybe someone else does.
Exactly!! Thank you Deb!! And I don’t know why everything needs to be a “right wing” or “left wing”
And you strike me as a right wing police-state supporter who's never been imprisoned or otherwise screwed by the system. Not that that would change your mind, you're clearly close-minded and mean-spirited. Your final paragraph tells everyone all they need to know about you, and it ain't good. Same for the immoral fools who upvoted your evil comments.
You would rather the U.S. had not occupied Japan after the war?
Big time. And you need to leave now.
Haha, funny.
Not for the women in Okinawa it's not.
One of the most sensible comments I’ve heard on this entire thread. I’m a 76 yo retired neurologist, but did a lot of training in psychiatry, because I felt it was important to also understand the “mind." One of my rotations was through a true psychiatric hospital, separate from the main medical center. It was there one could find the worst afflicted schizophrenics, manic depressive disorders, and other psychiatric disorders you can find in DSM. Thanks to the liberals you can find the same people on the streets of San Francisco and other major cities, particularly in blue states. of course, some of the people in these hospitals had mental disorders brought on by their drug addictions.  I well remember the liberal fools stating that “now we have medications to treat these disorders, so we can let them out of the psychiatric hospitals" followed by closure of the same hospitals. Of course at the time and still that is only half true. Many of these disorders' symptoms and signs are only mitigated by psychiatric medications. there are simply not enough psychiatric wards in main medical centers to house the number of chronic psychiatric patients who had benefit by dedicated psychiatric hospitals. 
Ronald Reagan was very far from being a liberal, and he led the way to closing mental institutions.
Liberals destroyed:
- mental health
- criminal justice
- balanced budgets
- military power
- economic prosperity
- religion
- freedom of speech
It seems that liberalism just doesn't work. It's like a sweet, seductive poison.
You want to dissolve democracy and declare yourself dictator because you disagree with some other peoples choices. Let me guess, you are a Trump voter.
Doesn't have to be a Trump supporter, that's only one option. Democrats/liberals are just as bad in their own ways.
---Our method was simple: talk to anyone who would talk to us, which, as it turned out, was most people we approached. We asked them straightforward questions about how they became homeless, whether they would choose to take shelter if offered and under what conditions, and what their drug use habits were. Almost everyone was as plain and direct with us as we were with them.
From these interviews it was clear as day what we were looking at: the tent encampments in all of these cities are sites where people who are addicted to (principally) meth and fentanyl can acquire and use those drugs. That’s the reason they exist. These are places plagued by brutal violence, rampant theft and human trafficking, as people who live in them will tell you. The only reason people live there at all is because the power of addiction is so relentless that the fear of withdrawal eclipses the fear of any of those things.--
This pretty much ends the debate.
I used to work in corrections in Canada at the national level. Ask a prisoner how he got to be in a cage and they will often tell you it was "drugs" too, and for sure that is often a factor. But their mere opinion, their story, is not, and cannot be accepted as dispositive of anything really.
If someone on drugs says "drugs are keeping me homeless" and someone responds by saying "no, it is high housing costs", I'll take the first-hand testimony.
It's an Occam's razor thing.
That's not what Occam's says.
That's not what Occam's says is what people say when they want to ignore the simplest explanation.
It's only the simplest in your view. Prove it.
That aside Occam's only says that the simplest explanation is the most likely correct one. It does not say, as some think that the simplest explanation is ineluctably the correct one.
Ted Bundy said porn made him do it.
Should we buy that ridiculous and reductive explanation just because he said it and it's simple?
What do you think could be simpler?
Also, what you are missing when you compare homelessness to crime is the motivation to lie.
A person would rather blame an evil act he committed on drugs or porn, than face that it is he who is responsible for the evil.
Being homeless is not evil. Why would a person say drugs is the reason for his condition rather than high housing costs?
Unless, well, drugs is the reason.
Principle of Parsimony (PoP) in science, AKA Occam's razor, utilizes abductive reasoning (CS Pierce) via hypothesis testing which is typically set up as testing competing hypotheses for the *same prediction*. If two hypotheses lead to disparate predictions, PoP (Occam's razor) is largely irrelevant.
The reason for choosing the simplest form of a hypothesis has to do with the scientific method; seeking to falsify one hypothesis as being superior. It minimizes the chance of a "moving goalpost" fallacy arguing a favored hypothesis, as measured, was not sufficiently complex.
You know the articulation of the principle of parsimony preceded the formalization of the scientific method by several centuries, right?
Most homeless people say they aren’t on drugs. By a huge margin in fact, like 3:1. But you prefer anecdotes to facts.
Woodhouse et al aren't claiming to have talked to "most homeless people". They are claiming to have talked to the people living in tent cities on the streets of major West Coast cities who invariably tell them it's the drugs.
Recorded interviews to traceable people, btw, are not anecdotes.
FWIW, you didn't source your 3:1 claim. I'm not saying you are wrong or that you are pulling things out of your ass, but as of now it's just an anecdote.
"Recorded interviews to traceable people, btw, are not anecdotes."
Yes, they are!
"I became homeless because I am drug addict" is isn't a fact. It's an opinion.
Lots of people are drug addicted but don't become homeless. It's a factor for sure, but the mere fact of being addicted is dispositive of nothing really.
That's down to the very common hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the former must have caused the latter.
--"I became homeless because I am drug addict" is isn't a fact. It's an opinion.--
Saying a person attributes his homelessness to drug addiction is a fact. Dismissing this data point is beyond bizarre.
Saying that there are drug addicts who are not homeless is neither disputed nor relevant.
Saying that there are homeless people who are not drug addicts is also neither disputed nor relevant.
Saying that the vast majority of those in the tent cities crapping on the streets are drug addicts and by their own confessions are homeless due to that addiction is what you are disputing.
You are hand-waving away the best explanation for the problem.
It's puzzling why you would do this.
Thanks.
And for those who are 'addicted' (a loaded word) to 'drugs' (an almost meaningless term in this context) is the inflated price of those drugs that in many cases causes more problems for them then the effects of the drugs themselves. Prices are insanely high because some drugs are illegal. *Decriminalise, or better legalise, and drug prices will drop to affordable levels.
In his book "Junkie", William S. Burroughs talks about getting cheap heroin from the government and so there was no need for him to become a real criminal. It's also true that after the Civil War many many soldiers came home addicted to heroin, so much so that heroin addiction was called the "Soldier's Disease". Unlike today though, their addiction caused relatively few social problems as then legal heroin was cheap and readily available.
If cigarettes cost $100 each, we'd see people rendered homeless due to their addiction to same.
But yeah, the entire problem pretty much reduces to not having enough money, for whatever reason, to pay the man his filthy lucre.
*someone will now jump up to argue that affordable, legal heroin, will result in more addicts! It won't of course because the reason most people do not use heroin is not due to the high cost!
Agreed. Unfortunately not in the direction you seem to think...
Here's a clue, one of the two arguments relies 100% on the subjective belief framework of one person...Michael Shellenberger.
That's gotta make it more believable, right?
I mean surely if Occam meant simplest explanations are the best (which he certainly did not)...
It relies on the objective reporting of Shellenberger and Woodhouse unless you're claiming they are lying
--I mean surely if Occam meant simplest explanations are the best (which he certainly did not)..--
It means the simplest explanations are preferred. Your anti-Occam explanation adds multiples of assumptions i.e. Woodhouse (or anybody else) did not have input; Shellenberger is not accurately reporting what he sees; none of his subjects understand their circumstances.
You have made up your mind. I don't think reasoning can change it.
Unlike you, I can't read their minds. I can only know about the arguments as the two writers presented them. The only evidence I remember reading from Woodhouse is Shellenberger.
If by objective you mean the videos they took, I suggest you have to *believe* they were objective because they did not take the basic care to make sure their *evidence* isn't biased.
The reason THAT is important is because researcher bias (probably not what you think it is) is pernicious and very difficult to eliminate even with the best intentions.
I choose to be wary of people that begin with a rigid worldview as such *research* almost can't help but confirm the worldview. But whatever it is, it is not objective.
And on *that* topic, I give you this...a humorous take on the subjectivity of objectivity...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cQcmAtjJ0
Reading words is not mind reading. Hearing words is not mind reading. The only way you can win this argument is to show Woodhouse & Shellenberger made everything up i.e. hired actors or used CGI or whatever.
Go for it.
Win argument? What argument? I only stated that the only evidence provided by Woodhouse was Shellenberger and videos no self-respecting researcher would consider objective. That doesn't bode well for his position. I made no such claims as to which argument was more correct in real life. Doing so would be the quickest way to prove myself a fool which I try to avoid.
As for this:
"The only way you can win this argument is to show Woodhouse & Shellenberger made everything up i.e. hired actors or used CGI or whatever."
Do you know what false dichotomy/false dilemma is? If not, re-read that sentence or watch this video:
https://youtu.be/T-yK2tQdLDw
Occam's the most misunderstood maxim ever. It's a philosophical tool, not a law.
Thanks!
Is there a better way? Does https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/crime-incarceration-and-reform-prosecutors-638/comment/8916076 make any sense?
Of course there is! :)
LIterally anything would be better than our current approach which is to ignore them until they commit a crime and then monetise by feeding them into the huge gaping maw of the US Prison Industrial Complex for processing.
I would add this. We’ve been doing various forms of talk therapy, often called “cognitive behavior therapy,” with addicts for about 60 years. The evidence supporting the stand-alone, long-term effectiveness of these “evidence-based practices” is nearly non-existent. In fact, the primary route to becoming an “evidence-based practice” has nothing to do with its long-term effectiveness. Modalities acquire this label by being popular among peers, not effective. Why do we continue pretending talk therapy alone is “treatment” for addiction? Perhaps money has a lot to do with it. Another reason is the refusal to accept what addiction is and how recovery happens. Addicts don’t think themselves into a better way of living. They live themselves into a better way of thinking. Only the combination of the compulsive power of courts, combined with trauma-based therapy, jobs, drug testing, etc., on a regular basis, for a long time, has shown genuine long-term effectiveness in reducing addiction and its related crime and homelessness. Real treatment is hard, long, and expensive. Those who care are willing to do that work, because they know addicts can recover and lead great lives. Those who pretend to care feel and demonstrate pity, not empathy, and they wax on about “justice reform,” while people die in the streets. Pity kills addicts. I am grateful every day that those who saved my life and gave me a wonderful new one showed me none.
Most addicts cure themselves without any treatment whatsoever. It’s called “aging out” by mental health experts. To be fair, some of those who don’t age out just die instead.
Substance abusers age out. Addicts do not. “Mental health experts” have rarely met a real addict.
I was a nicotine addict. I only managed to get that monkey off my back when one day I noticed that biking up a hill that I normally had no probs with had become hard. Very hard.
I had tried to quit many times in many ways. I always wanted to quit but could not. It took that bike ride to make me understand, at a very deep level, that I was killing myself. That is what often happens to an addict, they finally hit a low that forces them to understand that real change is required if they want to live. (or to stop hurting others that they care about).
Today I would not smoke a cig a gunpoint. It took 20 relapses though to teach me, at a very deep and unarguable level, that I cannot just smoke one cigarette, because I now genuinely understand that if I do that I am finished.
Great job in what I know to be a terrible struggle. I’m not minimizing your accomplishment at all. Please understand that. What I would add is that, while Nicotine is highly physically addictive, with a relatively small psychological element, most addicts have suffered severe and/or persistent trauma, and drugs give them relief, temporarily, from the pain that haunts them. They are really addicted to oblivion, not to just one or a few drugs. When they are not high, the psychological pain, terror, and constant anxiety is crushing, in addition to the physical effects. Many people think the physical effects of stopping are the hard part. No, they’re the easier part of trying to stop.
Thanks, you make some great points!
Yes, it's not the withdrawal symptoms alone that make quitting drugs hard.
From my experience an addict remains so until they decide to change. That can be quite difficult after years of using. Most rehabs have a 20-30% success rate so they often can help. But others continue onward to death at a relatively early age. See https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/crime-incarceration-and-reform-prosecutors-638/comment/8916076 and see if it make sense.
Literally, addiction is the loss of the ability to “decide to change.” If someone doesn’t care enough to decide for them, they will continue to destroy themselves and everything / everyone around them. Refusing to accept this fact is THE problem.
The bottom line is that San Francisco’s DA Chesa Boudin, ran on his policies. He maintained that his policies would help the city and its residents.
But given how things have actually worked out, the majority of SF “voters” came to a very different conclusion and bounced him.
Beyond that, it will doesn’t much matter. After seeing how things were working out, SF voters simply didn’t buy Boudin’s version of the facts.
After a racist anti-Black campaign, most Asians voted to recall Boudin and most Blacks voted to keep him. After 50 years of Asians displacing Blacks there are now more Asians. It’s really that simple.
There were no daily attacks on Asian elders but there was a concerted effort by the corporate media to convince you of this. The propaganda that you gobbled up unthinkingly.
The only hate I see here is the hate in your own heart. I have seen your kind come and go. You will swim back to the suburbs to spawn with your own kind.
San Francisco will continue to be a beacon of tolerance long after your kind has made the money you came here chasing after and left to go back to your true homeland of hate.
So let me see if I have this right. A guy who doesn't live in San Francisco, has never lived in San Francisco, and apparently gets his entire knowledge about San Francisco from the news media is going to tell a second generation San Franciscan with kids in public school all about his city.
My grandfather built Liberty ships here during WWII. His great grandchildren will raise their children here. You came here to make a quick buck and then left as soon as things didn't go your way. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Your racism and hatred isn't welcome here.
There were always addictive drugs but there was never this kind of rampant homelessness.
"The rent is too damn high".
https://youtu.be/79KzZ0YqLvo
Many countries have lots of drug addicts but they do not have the same rate of homelessness.
This is a multifactorial phenomenon that has numerous and complicated etiologies.
Homelessness is caused by more than one thing, and that's not debatable. The big increase in homelessness in California started when Hitler, er, I mean Ronald Reagan, closed the state mental hospitals when he was governor, throwing the patients onto the streets. It has mushroomed from there. People are homeless because they are mentally ill, because they can't afford rent, and/or because they're addicted to drugs. The plurality if not the majority of homeless are now military veterans, so I'm guessing PTSD is also a cause, though that would come under being mentally ill.
The false duality seen here, where people pick a side and stick to it regardless of the facts or reality, is really astounding. This should not have degenerated into arguments about lone causes of homelessness, because there is none.
I have no real answers as to how to solve the homeless issue -only observations, I lived for 9 years in Portland and saw a rise in homelessness with all of its accompanying problems escalating to the point where I finally left. There is enough blame to go around to be sure, but at least in Portland there was and is no functioning government to solve ANY of the problems facing the city. It is a commissioner form of government which means that each commissioner has his/her power base which they are not going to give up ergo nothing gets done. Compassion overflows for the people on the street but what is termed compassion, keeps common sense at bay
I am currently living in Mexico where poverty is on display but homelessness is not. It may be the strength of families who would never allow a member to face the world alone. It may be the strength of religion which is not frowned upon and gives both a sense of community and of pride in self and community. . It may be that everyone is doing something in and for the town be it sweeping the streets, stopping traffic so that oldsters like me can cross the street, selling lollipops or even singing for pay on the bus.
Finally, there is a strong love and commitment to the children who are cherished far more than I saw in the States. They are considered the treasures of the present and the future and are being taught that poverty alone does not justify behavior that shames and ruins the Mexican family/community.
We all know that Mexico has its share of problems and I am sure many comments will list them all, but from what I have seen where I live , it also has a lot to teach the US.
There are still places where shame still functions.
Deinstitutionalization was in vogue in psychiatric circles in the 1960s-70s, which is why state governments like California went along with it. It justified closing expensive facilities that had achieved a terrible reputation among the public, thanks to exposés like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". The residents of those facilities had no political voice, and the tiny community of physicians and nurses who cared for the residents were outnumbered and outshouted by the reformists.
Unfortunately, deinstitutionalization failed miserably. It resulted in tens of thousands of people effectively dumped on the streets, where they died. It is a shameful episode in the history of American medical care that has still not been fully exposed and understood.
Trite, shallow observations like "It's Reagan's fault" are unconstructive. It was a lot of people who foisted that terrible policy on the country; Reagan simply signed the orders, as did many other governors and other public policymakers.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-mental-hospitals-contribute-to-homelessness-here#:~:text=1967%20Reagan%20signs%20the%20Lanterman,outside%20state%20hospitals%20was%20inadequate.
Thanks, the timeline is interesting and seems to outline a series of policy failures as far back as the JFK Administration.
Could not agree more. We used to take 'care' of people who fell down. Those days are so over.
And now we reap that whirlwind.
The Snake Pit was another movie that has stayed with me for many years . I still see Olivia de Havilland cowering in a corner . With that in mind, many of us - me included - were not dismayed at closing those places down. Of course all of the mental health clinics that were suppose to supplant those Snake Pits never opened.
It is true that in many places 'mental hospitals' became foetid garbage cans overseen by undpaid, poorly trained and abusive staff. But that is not an argument for closing them, it's an argument for doing better.
i agree - the setting for The Snake Pit was carmallio state mental hospital in california -supposedly some of the doctors andnurses who worked there wanted to clean iit up and keep it open but they were overruled - i would guess that once the conditions were exposed as being a STATE hospital, most of the people in power wanted it closed immediately before the next elections. There was a hospital in nyc - i think dammarra or something close to that, theat was also a snake pit and closed once exposed.
So 1) you're defending Reagan, the worst and most evil president in my lifetime? 2) Are you seriously claiming that Reagan was a deinstitutionalist? I can assure you that he was not.
I have no opinion regarding your claim about deinstitutionalization regarding the closing of mental hospitals in California. I was didn't move here until 1983, well after this had already happened. But my friends here all told the same story about Reagan closing the mental hospitals and the resulting explosion of homelessness that it caused. Reagan wanted to shrink government as much as possible, and closing state mental hospitals would be right in line with that. This is very far from being a priority issue for me, so it's not an observation, trite, shallow, or otherwise. It's just what people told me a little before I moved here.
The closing of most of California's state hospitals was a bipartisan measure; Democrats were concerned about involuntary hospitalization, and Republicans were easily sold on deinstitutionalization as a cost-saving measure.
Meanwhile, it became almost impossible to compel psychiatric treatment, largely because of litigation campaigns by the ACLU, et al. Even if new psychiatric hospitals were built on a large scale, most of the people who need treatment the most would refuse to go there, and couldn't be compelled to go. See "Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill", by Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat.
Excellent analysis.
Sounds about right!
I live in downtown Ottawa where completely insane people walk the streets.
It's the same all over.
This account, fact filled and logical, makes a lot more sense to me then the simplistic analysis ('it's just drugs') proffered above.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-mental-hospitals-contribute-to-homelessness-here#:~:text=1967%20Reagan%20signs%20the%20Lanterman,outside%20state%20hospitals%20was%20inadequate.
Sadly that mental hospital reform issue was sweeping the nation and the Gov just followed along. Sounded good at the time, particular since the care worker were often equally mentally disturbed and abusive. Baby-bathwater issue.
How can you say that putting mentally ill people who can't take care of themselves on the street "[s]ounded good at the time"? And Reagan was totally evil, worst president in my lifetime. The only one close was Cheney, and he technically wasn't president even though he ran all the important stuff (foreign affairs and energy).
We have a rooming house near here. I watched as a woman in her 30s descended into complete madness, shitting in her room, threatening the other tenants with knives, rampaging through the neighbourhood, stealing anything she could get her hands on and then storing those goods (after shitting on them) in people's yards. If you said anything to her she would explode into rage, spit and run at you. Eventually the landlord literally boarded up her room until she went 'somewhere'.
"Fucking drugs!"
No not really.
I'm just commenting on the national mood at the time which was appalled about abuses in those hospitals. We can disagree about Reagan. Causing the Soviets to over spend led to the eventual collapse of that empire, Reagan set that in motion.
You make the false assumption that destroying the Soviet Union was a good thing. Of course if you support an evil pig like Reagan, that makes perfect sense. But objectively, it's one of the worst political events of my lifetime globally, because it allowed the U.S. to act with impunity around the world instead of having a balance of powers. I didn't like the Soviet Union, but it was no more evil than the U.S. -- probably less so -- and one country gaining hegemonic power over the entire planet is never a good thing.
I can tell we are quite far apart. Regards.
You got it Jeff.
Woodhouse provides factual, common sense information & solutions, and Spielberg makes my head feel like it's about to explode.
I remember that feeling well,. As a nurse, I watched in horror & disbelief as the left created & grew a cottage industry of self aggrandizement, while promoting & fostering this nightmare.
Their "compassion" drove these folks from institutions, where they were being cared for to the streets, where they were a danger to themselves & others. The trail of suffering & death furthered by Soros's DA are well documented & promote evil beyond comprehension for ALL concerned.
As long as the Spielbergs of the world continue to distort reality, accountability, & common sense solutions; the suffering, death & danger to innocent people continues. God Help Us!
I’m a nurse too who’s worked in the field of psychiatry & addiction for decades. The public health clinic I was in helped people with housing, medication & a day program to learn simple skills & have a community connection. George Bush (Texas is in the 90s) pulled the rug out from under them & their lives crashed.
Then you know firsthand the horror & disbelief we felt at watching the few available resources & lifelines these folks had being destroyed along with the lives of innocent people caught in the line of fire. CA is a perfect example of the results of the heinous acts of the 90s, with more insanity heaped on & the same insane destructive arguments in it's defense..
This despite the glaring results of the suffering & death they've wrought. Bush had plenty of help dismantling not only clinics, but in patient facilities & other safety nets, all in the name of compassion. Add Soros's destructive forces parading as DAs & you have suffering & death all around.
We’ve avoided Soros DAs (at least so far) in Texas but all the homeless, drug addicted misery is on full display in our major cities. Dismantling the safety net was sold to the public as a major reform to “allow the mentally ill more autonomy in their lives.” Instead of coming to the clinic to see the doctors they knew & trusted , they were given a list of “preferred providers” , told to pick one & handle it themselves. We’re talking about schizophrenics who needed guidance to find the right bus.
So it’s The Jews right. That’s what you are trying to say right? Spielberg, Soros and the rest. That’s your message here right?
So San Fran defines an area with no rules and offers no positive support to addicts. What could go wrong???
I have been deeply involved with NGO aid and help to the homeless in my city in the Central Valley of California for around 4 years. Our estimated 500 unsheltered homeless in proportion to my city’s population is close to equivalent to that of San Francisco. Our rent is much lower than San Francisco rent though it has been rising. My contact with the homeless and what a close friend has told me who was addicted and homeless for 15 years shows that drug use - tobacco, alcohol, opioids and meth is utterly widespread. Mental illness and self sabotaging behavior patterns and emotional hang ups are equally widespread, plus for some homelessness is a lifestyle choice. Because of this, even with free housing, support, aid, counseling - rehabilitation is a slow process with fits and starts and failures, and trying it again and again. No easy solution. A local motel was remodeled and made available and despite attempts to manage and help and guidelines the place was a scene of police action and drama and rule breaking. Of course there are exceptions to these patterns and causes, but they are in the minority. The solution is time, a lot of money per person helped, patience, generosity, accepting that money and effort will be”wasted” and failure will be part of the process, and a peculiar blend of kindness and strictness and giving and accountability.
This comment summarizes the difficulty of helping addicts in a meaningful way. There is no solution that will save everyone and the unfortunate truth is, there are addicts who don’t want to be saved but can disrupt & sabotage the ones who do.
I'd like your take on https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/crime-incarceration-and-reform-prosecutors-638/comment/8916076. I know it seems rather impossible but all other avenues seems empty.
This part of the debate was something of an improvement over the first part, I think. Spielberg's post was pretty good, and rightly went into specific questions to get the debate back on track after Woodhouse moved a bit away from the main issue. It was also helpful when Woodhouse responded to those questions, but Woodhouse didn't answer all of them. (More on Woodhouse in my reply to this post.)
Spielberg still retains a few of his flaws from the first part of the debate. He continues to maintain, without adequate justification, that a law-enforcement system should not have "incapacitation" as one of its aims, even though incapacitation just means physically preventing people from carrying out more crimes. This view of his is so bizarre that he needs better arguments for it than he's given. And although Spielberg conceded in his very first post that "it is the job of people who recognize the problems with our criminal legal system to provide a better, equally concrete answer" on how to keep people safe, he's still basically no closer to doing that.
I gather, although he doesn't say so directly, that Spielberg is emotionally invested in thinking that surely most people's safety issues (including the problems that non-dealers experience in the Tenderloin) will be adequately addressed if we just focus enough on "prioritizing" things the way that typical lefty people want and apply that approach diligently. Spielberg constantly makes me suspect that, in the end, he doesn't really feel he has to be convincing on the specific point that Boudin would help these Tenderloin safety issues as much as a typical prosecutor would, because he has faith that a lefty-style prioritization will fix most things overall regardless. And when he tries to make his readers feel this way, he's kind of trying to reduce the need for him to be fully convincing on Woodhouse's more challenging points.
Woodhouse is shifty on homelessness vs. unsheltered homelessness. In his very first post from July, he had said that "the problem of unsheltered homelessness in San Francisco is driven overwhelmingly not by the high cost of housing, but by the crisis of drug addiction", but then he immediately conflated that point about "unsheltered homelessness" with the issue of homelessness in general. Today, he starts out saying that he's only talking about unsheltered homelessness, and that he's willing to grant for argument's sake that the majority of sheltered homeless are not addicted. But he still can't stick to that. He ends up saying "I’ve argued that the homelessness problem in the Bay Area is mostly about drug addiction."
Woodhouse is unconvincing when he says he doesn't stigmatize addicts and doesn't judge them for being homeless. His tone shows the opposite. I realize that nowadays it's common to hear people say that they don't stigmatize or judge some group when they obviously do. But if you say that you don't stigmatize or judge simply because saying that will make you look better, it doesn't help anyone. Woodhouse's words show an eagerness to use coercion against addicts, and even if he maintains the coercion will help them, that doesn't mean he doesn't stigmatize. His view is actually that addicts have traits which make it at least a bit desirable to use coercion against them, even apart from whether the addicts are committing crimes like shoplifting. One telling example is when Woodhouse says "the low-level crimes like shoplifting that inevitably accompany a life of addiction create an opportunity for the public to intervene [that is, intervene coercively] in the lives of people who desperately need that intervention". Since he says "create an opportunity", it's clear that he thinks coercive intervention would be at least a bit desirable even if crimes like shoplifting didn't provide a legal opportunity for coercive court-system intervention. And since he considers addicts, as a group, to be a population for whom coercive intervention is at least a bit desirable even apart from crimes like shoplifting, I can see that he is stigmatizing them, despite his false claim to the contrary.
Here's a few further examples of the way Woodhouse talks about homeless people and addicted people:
1. "...the person who’s living in a tent because they have meth-induced psychosis and think aliens implanted a chip in their brain. That person will not be able to live functionally and autonomously in their own apartment even if the rent were a fraction of the market rate, until their addiction is treated."
2. "I don’t believe it’s ok for someone to just pitch a tent on the sidewalk in front of your house, or in front of your kids’ school, and live out of it indefinitely."
3. "The criminal justice system, for better or for worse, is the only real tool we have to force people into the care they’re unable to seek for themselves, due to their chemical enslavement."
These examples show some willingness to help what Woodhouse conceives to be the interests of homeless and addicted people -- always in ways that would also help the goals of non-homeless non-drug-addicted people such as Woodhouse. But Woodhouse's tone is not all that friendly to homeless and addicted people. He does think in these examples that he's acting in the interests of these low-status populations, but he doesn't show a lot of warmth, or caring, or respect, or signs of valuing their ability to guide their own life and find a way to flourishing according to their own thoughtful values. So, when he claims to be using coercion against these low-status people in their own interest, I have to wonder if it's just a coincidence that his course of action just happens to suit the interests of higher-status people who are felt to be more like himself, or whether his determination to use coercion against lower-status people "for their own good" kind of reflects some sort of closer identification with a higher-status community. I notice that Woodhouse's language, "force people into the care they're unable to seek", invokes the word "care" and uses it as a justification for force. But by now, most of us know that when the word "care" is used in an institutional context, it doesn't necessarily involve much actual caring. Actual caring requires being very open to how the person's needs might diverge from what you and people like you already want to do. I see no sign that Woodhouse's approach is driven by actual caring more than by the interest of people who aren't homeless or drug-addicted.
It's clear enough that Woodhouse is just not honest with himself about how he's stigmatizing and judging. He hasn't put in the emotional work needed to truly value the interests of addicts and homeless people, and to seriously and caringly face how that might diverge from the interests of the higher-status people that he is clearly concerned about.
Likewise, when Woodhouse is asked by Spielberg "Do you believe incapacitation and retribution – and not deterrence – should be the primary goals?", Woodhouse more or less says yes to incapacitation but never addresses the part about retribution. In Woodhouse's July post, he said that retribution has an "affirmative social purpose" even apart from incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and restoration. So he values the suffering of those who he sees as wrongdoers even apart from any benefit it gives to deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and restoration; that's what it means to say you think retribution has a purpose of its own. Again, there's a willingness to use force and suffering and to assume too hastily that the low-status person doesn't have rights or needs that may go against your goals.
Woodhouse is definitely unfair when he says that Spielberg and others are "cynics, who will lead you to false solutions based on transparently dishonest assumptions." He can't say anything to show that Spielberg is being cynical or dishonest, even though he claims that Spielberg's dishonesty is transparent. So, he's hurling ungrounded accusations.
And it's significant how Woodhouse dismisses one of the best points in Chesa Boudin's favor. When Spielberg asks Woodhouse about how Boudin, unlike many DAs, was willing to prosecute police as a way of "holding police officers accountable for misconduct", Woodhouse just replies "Boudin didn’t get a single conviction so I don’t see the value in this." It's well known that most prosecutors' reluctance to bring charges against police is only one of the reasons why abusive cops are often hard to convict, but when Boudin goes further than other DAs would, Woodhouse just cheaply dismisses it on the grounds that other factors prevented a conviction. Here Woodhouse fails to meet his own standards. When discussing homelessness and addiction, Woodhouse wants to appear like he's following the principles of rational discussion, arguing that correlation doesn't amount to a causal argument and so on. If Woodhouse's opponent said "Look, the San Francisco DA's office moved away from Boudin's policy but some measures of safety remain unimproved", Woodhouse would argue that there are other factors involved and that the change in policy may be worthwhile even if it's not immediately sufficient to make a dent in one measure of safety. But he refuses to use the same obvious logic to Boudin's prosecution of cops.
In fact, when Woodhouse says, "Boudin didn’t get a single conviction so I don’t see the value in this", that's the best example in this whole debate of the "cynicism" and "transparently dishonest" approach which he falsely accuses Spielberg of.
Fascinating exercise in mind-reading here.
Careful. You talk about people who favor fewer arrests of homeless addicts or street-level drug dealers, who actually think that reducing these arrests is "compassionate", and then you rush to describe those who think that way as "cynics" who are using "transparently dishonest assumptions".
If that's not unjustified "mind-reading", then what is?
You admitted yourself that the people who you accuse of cynicism actually "think" the policies they favor are the compassionate thing to do. So, no reason to presume that they're being "dishonest" -- maybe you think their assumptions are wrong, but you provide no evidence for thinking their assumptions are dishonest.
But despite your lack of evidence for dishonesty, you go so far as to say that the dishonesty is "transparent". You're just being careless and getting carried away with emotion into saying something conspicuously unfounded. Likewise, someone who acts out of (their sense of) compassion can't be fairly accused of being a cynic, I would say, even though you rush to call them that.
As I mentioned, your comment on Boudin's courageous prosecution of abusive police was "Boudin didn't get a single conviction so I don't see the value in that" -- which sure sounds kind of cynical to me. It would be more fair to call your words cynical here than to describe as cynics those who act out of their sense of compassion. In fact, moving as rapidly as you do from "they think it's compassionate and they do it" to "they're cynics" sounds, in itself, like kind of a cynical move.
I studied your tone carefully, when you talk about unsheltered homeless people who may be addicted. I noticed the complete lack of expression of some things I think are important: (1) warmth, (2) caring, (3) respect, (4) valuing their ability to guide their own life and find a way to flourishing according to their own thoughtful values, (5) putting in the emotional work needed to truly value their interests and to seriously and caringly face how their interests might diverge from the interests of people who have housing and aren't drug-addicted. These 5 things stand out for not being explicitly expressed. If you'd written only a little about homeless addicted people, I might not think the lack of explicit expression of these 5 things is significant. But you wrote at considerable length, arguing consistently for a coercive policy towards them which just happens to coincide with keeping these people from disturbing non-homeless non-addicted people. So, I'd say I've seen enough to be fairly sure that at least some of these 5 things are not, in your current thinking, given as much consideration as I think they should be.
You write "Addiction is a disease, and those who suffer from it are victims of their afflictions". And I'm sure you're sincere in believing that, and in believing that you're not stigmatizing or judging drug-addicted homeless people. But social customs nowadays are so heavily in favor of saying "I'm not stigmatizing, I'm not judging" that I have to realize that we don't always live up to these claims of being non-judgmental: some of the people who deny that they're stigmatizing/judging actually are stigmatizing or judging at least in a way.
Here's an analogy. Suppose Jim has a cousin who became addicted to drugs and started living in the streets. Jim wants his cousin to recover, and like the people you describe, he is glad when his cousin is arrested and forced to enter treatment. Jim's love for his cousin is compatible with favoring a coercive use of the criminal-justice system to make his cousin go into addiction treatment. Jim sees his cousin as, in a way, a victim of drugs and of the dealers, and he sees his cousin as having an illness that needs to be treated. He loves his cousin, and doesn't love the use of force; he only favors force because he's concluded that this is the only realistic chance for his cousin to get better.
And yet this isn't all that Jim believes and feels. Jim also believes that his cousin isn't simply a "victim", as you put it. Jim thinks that his cousin made some bad choices that weren't simply drug-induced. His cousin may not have been a completely passive victim of the drug during the time he was addicted. And in particular, Jim thinks his cousin made some wrong choices before the addiction took hold, while he was on the way to getting addicted. Jim isn't a fan of how his cousin made those choices, which Jim feels helped lead the cousin into the problematic way of life that his cousin had as an addict.
Jim's cousin, while he was addicted on the streets, was more or less aware that Jim saw him that way, and it didn't exactly help the cousin in wanting to recover. Even after going through rehab, Jim's cousin still feels that Jim sees him in something like this negative light, and that is an obstacle to Jim's cousin getting his life more back on track. Jim really does see addiction as an illness and see his cousin as a victim. But beyond that, there is also a sense in which Jim is judging his cousin, a sense in which Jim feels there's a stigma to his cousin's choices. Jim says "I'm not judging, I'm not stigmatizing", but that isn't necessarily enough. I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong to think Jim's cousin has responsibility for starting the addiction, but I am saying that Jim's attitude may not be the best. Some kind of full fellowship between Jim and his cousin is missing (even if Jim himself may not see it's missing), and if this full fellowship was present it would help Jim's cousin.
Similarly, when a journalist discussing policy takes the positions you do, it's not enough just to say that coercion is necessary sometimes to overcome addiction. Simply instituting coercion for drug addicts through the courts isn't always enough, as Spielberg recognizes. I've talked earlier about the need to treat these people (who currently have a very low social status) with (1) warmth, (2) caring, (3) respect, (4) valuing their ability to guide their own life and find a way to flourishing according to their own thoughtful values, and (5) putting in the emotional work needed to truly value their interests and to seriously and caringly face how their interests might diverge from the interests of people who have housing and aren't drug-addicted. Now, it may be true that we can't always fully devote ourselves to these 5 things at every moment of treating someone with an addiction problem. But I think that if society's approach to addicted people displayed more of these 5 things, more people would make it out of addiction. It's sort of like how Jim's seeing his cousin in kind of a negative light didn't always help the cousin to fully get back on track. So it seems problematic when these 5 things don't show up in your article.
To be fair to you, I'll add some corrections to my original post in a self-reply -- almost all of these corrections are for mistakes of mine that I noticed before your post went up.
Wanted to correct a few things from my initial, hastily-written, long post about Woodhouse, and I'm putting this correction in a self-reply because I want it to be visible.
(1) I was incorrect in saying that Woodhouse never addressed Spielberg's question about retribution: in fact, Woodhouse makes clear enough that he doesn't insist that retribution should be a primary goal.
(2) My point that Woodhouse was shifty about homelessness vs. unsheltered homelessness was overstated. Woodhouse's initial post in July kind of blurred the difference between homelessness and unsheltered homelessness, but I now think his current post makes clear that he wants all his references to "homelessness" to denote only unsheltered homelessness. So there's no shiftiness in his current post.
(3) I initially thought Woodhouse was calling Spielberg one of the "cynics" with "transparently dishonest assumptions", but after reading more closely I see that Woodhouse officially is not including Spielberg in that criticism; I'll leave open whether Woodhouse is quietly hinting that the criticism may kind of apply to Spielberg too.
Wanted to correct a few things from my initial, hastily-written, long post about Woodhouse, and I'm putting this correction in a self-reply because I want it to be visible.
(1) I was incorrect in saying that Woodhouse never addressed Spielberg's question about retribution: in fact, Woodhouse makes clear enough that he doesn't insist that retribution should be a primary goal.
(2) My point that Woodhouse was shifty about homelessness vs. unsheltered homelessness was overstated. Woodhouse's initial post in July kind of blurred the difference between homelessness and unsheltered homelessness, but I now think his current post makes clear that he wants all his references to "homelessness" to denote only unsheltered homelessness. So there's no shiftiness in his current post.
(3) I initially thought Woodhouse was calling Spielberg one of the "cynics" with "transparently dishonest assumptions", but after reading more closely I see that Woodhouse officially is not including Spielberg in that criticism; I'll leave open whether Woodhouse is quietly hinting that the criticism may kind of apply to Spielberg too.
speaking from personal experience. my sister was caught up with addiction during the early 2000s in northern CA .. i believe if she didnt get arrested for low level usage and ultimately jailed for failing mandated drug tests she would be dead today.
she got the help she needed while incarcerated and today lives a healthy life as a grandmother.
thanks Glenn. praying for your family's health.
Good discussion. My confirmation bias has become much too great. If people can't afford to live where they are we need to help relocate them to a more affordable area. Bus tickets and meal tickets seem suitable.
Drug addiction has become a way of life with no respite until the addict dies wherever that might be. For those on the streets, we need to provide dormitory facilities where they can live and the government provides food, shelter and drugs; the addict can stay until they wish to leave but return with a 30 day wait. The addicts clean themselves/personal area and are assisted in meals by staff. Staff are available for those who wish escape to reality. We may find psychedelics help rewire brains beyond talk work; 12 -step programs on-site. The cruelty of society for these lost people is astounding and tolerance for the illegal trade involved relates to many levels of corruption.
We seem to have tried a lot of things that don't work. Sadly some of us can't be saved by simple caring. But the shame of the streets is cruel in itself. Take the profit motive away from addict creation and there might be fewer addicts.
I reject this approach of simply giving everything, including drugs, to addicts. It will make things even worse, and it represents the same pity approach that is killing them now.. I know that addicts can recover. I see it every day. This approach gives up on them. It also fails to recognize the reality of what addiction is by clinging to the falsehood that addicts are doing anything “voluntarily.” Addiction is the loss of the ability to volunteer for anything. That’s not my definition. That’s the definition of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. If we continue to refuse to accept what addiction is, we will never make a dent in it.
Unfortunately there are in fact people who are utterly incorrigible. Nothing can be done for those who will do nothing to help themselves Though it is a pity, it is not worth establishing a socialist state for the sake of this segment of society. Religious institutions should be relied upon, not government handouts.
Insitutionalizing those who are clearly psychologially unfit is one solution that is long past due, And yes Reagan was largely at fault for dismantling the institutions in California. He was also responsible for a lunatic war on drugs that kept marajuana as a schedual one drug on the books for much too long. In fact according to federal law it is still illegal:
https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/Marijuana-Cannabis-2020_0.pdf
What does it mean to be well adjusted to a pathological society?
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Some thoughts, based on my experience, on how the homeless would behave in the environment you propose. Some would take advantage of the help and move on. Many would take the situation as an opportunity to remain irresponsible, lazy, unmotivated rather degenerate teenagers - the developmental stage many are stuck in. Get into fights and conflicts, have sex, gossip, hang out as friends, play games, live on their smart phones. They would leave during day, find ways to get some money - recycling, begging, minor thievery - to spend on more drugs, alcohol, as most likely the amount of those items given to them they most likely would find inadequate. This isn’t judgment or condemnation but observations of where many homeless are at.
Do you know if this approach has been tried somewhere, or something similar?
Criminal justice destroys as many lives as it saves. The across the board corruption of law enforcement in major American cities, from the cop on the street ,to the judge on the bench is legendary. Gang culture is prison culture. Drugs and prisons are an industry. Drug cash flows upward and there's lots of it. It's global. Remember the special teller windows Bank of America and other banks created so cartel leaders could stuff boxes of cash through to be laundered? Busted and fined at a fraction of what they made. Just like the elite financial criminals who gutted American industry and destroyed the American economy in '08, they walked. And, the "rules for thee-not for me" crowd is still walking and laughing all the way to the cushy office of their Swiss banker. The bag man and the cashed stuffed envelope is the definition of the real American dream. When there is no human moral center (think of the shining exemplars of virtue on the Potomac) chaos rules. The broken and discarded human beings inhabiting our drug fueled homeless encampments are just one of the countless canary's in the coal mine of American disintegration discussed across the board on Substack every day of the week. Be shocked and concerned. Hire and fire as many District Attorney's as you want. This is bubble land. Some poor little bubbles are homeless. Some still contain food and shelter. Some bubbles float way up above the world so high they're hard to see. The fix is in. Save yourself.
" ... these are days of miracle and wonder....medicine is magical and magical is art..the boy in the bubble and the baby with a baboon heart... and there are lasers in the jungle somewhere..a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires..the way we look to a distant constellation dying in the corner of the sky...these are days of miracle and wonder..and don't cry baby...don't cry.."
Paul Simon
GRACELAND
The criminal injustice system now exists as a method of social control and to monetise unwanted populations, like Blacks and Chicanos.
Great comment.