Anyone who thinks funding rehab centers and getting homeless drug addicts into free apartment units are people who have never been around homeless drug addicts. There may be some wonderful examples of this working but 99.8% of the people you will encounter on your commute are not about to participate in rehab, and if you ask them they will give you a history of apartments and homes they've been asked to leave due to…
The other day I read that in a Finish housing first programs they had a success rate of 4/5 and it was much less expensive than in the past. Not sure of the kpi’s, so grain of salt, but sounds promising
What about not freezing to death? That sounds like a Key Performance Indicator to me.
Honest question: Why are mental issues so prevalent in USA? Temptative hypothesis 1: People have less roots than in Europe, so they don’t belong somewhere, and have weak ties with close family and no ties with extended family, so they move, and when they fall off their life, there is no social safety net? Temptative hypothesis 2: Americans classify any bad mood as a mental issue? Temptative 3: Medical aid is too expe…
I think part of it is how isolated the us is. We don't really have walkable neighborhoods in most of the country, which means less spur of the moment decisions to gather at a social place and more isolation since so many people are commuting in single occupancy vehicles and doing drive throughs. Combine that with wealth stratification, Hussle culture, and the complete lack of any real social safety net and if anythin…
There has to be a basis for social unity. Family ties are the natural basis. Ethnic ties (which are defined more so by culture, though extended family ties still play a role) and religious belonging, all form this basis, this matrix. The US and countries like it are adoptive nations, oddballs in that they are not really rooted in ethnicity. Ethnic identity evaporates after a couple of generations, during which assimilation and intermarriage dilute the culture of origin. According to the triple melting pot theory, religious belonging becomes a stand-in for ethnic identity in "artificial" nations like the US (it was originally called "triple" because the three largest religious groups at the time in the US were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but this is incidental to the basic claim). With the atrophy of traditional religious affiliation in the US, you're seeing an identity crisis and the rise of various ideologies and subcultures as attempts to find a substitute.
The first is a hand wavey opinion, the second is basically an anecdote and the third relates to a very different implementation of decriminalisation than Portugal's.
> and giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is a death sentence. sounds very plausible, where is the fallacy?
Alcoholics
Most use until they die of "old age" or long term damage from use.
It's easy to find fallacies if you think about it. For example I could say the opposite > giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is the key that unlocks recovery I've constructed my argument identically and provided the same amount of evidence for my position. When you compare both positions side by side, I think you can easily see that neither is valuable. They are both opinions being presented as facts (begging the q…
your statement doesn't only have to be logic, it should also even remotely resemble reality. it doesn't.
This doesn't fit my Prejudices so it must be wrong
And how long has it been that Reagan is no longer the governor and why hasn't funding been restored?
CA also in that time passed a ballot initiative that made it essentially impossible to raise taxes. It's also the reason college got so expensive.
College became unreasonably expensive after student loan amounts were increased by the federal government and co-singers were eliminated. It was decided that everyone should have access to higher education and it's been a mess since then.
Yeah I've seen the destruction that comes from removing legal/social consequences for drug abuse. Neglected and abandoned children is by far the most tragic. The community of non-addicts bears the responsibility for cleaning up the destruction, the addicts themselves cannot. That's the nature of addiction. To be clear I'm talking about the hard drugs; opiates, cocaine, meth. I believe addiction is a disease, but trea…
Imagine you are suffering day in and day out in crushing poverty, that you see nothing but crime and hopelessness all around you, that your friends and family have been killed or are rotting away in jail, that you are looked down upon, spat upon, and despised, that you see no hope of bettering or escaping your situation. Then imagine you've taken something that infinitely transforms your world and makes you feel amaz…
This is a fantasy, a romance. It very little resembles the reality I've seen.
Many addicts I've known and seen come from stable environments and it isbecause of their incessant drug use that they end up poor, homeless and degraded.
Of course some addicts definitely start in "crushing poverty" but many do not. It affects people from every background, every social strata.
If your hypothesis were correct than the housing and support programs would work. They don't.
Portuguese politicians are doing the same with the public healthcare system there (deliberately underfunding it to be able to claim that it "failed"). They want to follow the "good" example of the US, like most other EU member states are now doing.
Healthcare will always be underfunded though. It costs too much to offer it to the extent we would like to and with the changing demographics and advancements in technology (more treatments that cost more $$$) it's going to only cost more. For example, the UK's public healthcare funding has increased from below 3% of GDP to over 7% from the 1950s until 2018/2019 (so just before covid).[0] And yet the perception is th…
most likely demographics willplay a huge role in this when we start having increased elder care.
"Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.” What's wrong with having a "drug culture" exactly? "Meanwhile, overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent." First, Portland is not Portugal. Second, are the overdoses happening…
I've made that argument for years. Decriminalization doesn't work because it enables the black market - people should do everything in their power to eliminate the black market. This means real legalization. It's the only way to actually fix the overdose problem. Our number 1 priority should be to keep people from dying. I'm open to harsh penalties on public use, though. This shouldn't be happening in front of school…
Imagine still thinking the war on drugs is a good idea in 2023
You can’t just decriminalize owning drugs, you have to legalize selling drugs. That’s how you get rid of the criminals in the system. And selling drugs should not be a fabulous glamorous advertised social endevour like marijuana in the USA. Drugs should be sold like tobacco in Australia…. behind the counter, zero advertising, zero branding.
Except people start reselling legal drugs to the jurisdiction where they remain illegal... For this to work out as intended it would have to be planet-wide.
It's easy to find fallacies if you think about it. For example I could say the opposite > giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is the key that unlocks recovery I've constructed my argument identically and provided the same amount of evidence for my position. When you compare both positions side by side, I think you can easily see that neither is valuable. They are both opinions being presented as facts (begging the q…
> giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is the key that unlocks recovery except that when we talk about privacy for addicts, we are actually talking about extreme loneliness. which is the fastest route towards OD. evidence show that adults with mental health issues are more than twice as likely to experience loneliness as those with strong mental health [1] Loneliness can increase the risk of early mortality by 26% [2…
The 4 walls they get are literally a single room... If you put another person in there outcomes will be even worse.
What everyone's missing is the Quality of the housing.
If the place is so roach infested and you fight bed bugs others bring in and you constantly lose everything you own to the conditions of the building, then in what mind would that have better outcomes than on the street?
The depression that they term loneliness isn't just loneliness, it's a complete sense of defeat and pointlessness resultant directly from environment.