As someone living there right now the article really doesn't properly cover the discontent in the city.
There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done too much to encourage homelessness (particularly with the expansion of policies like this one). "Tent City" has spread so far that it's getting into the suburbs and from a residents perspective it's getting far worse not better. I have routinely seen people shooting up and smoking glass pipes (not marijuana) in broad daylight in the Downtown and Pioneer Square areas. There's shouting, theft, property crime at all hours of the night near my apartment (Though strangely compared to SF I know very few people who have had their cars broken into).
Regardless of the tone of this article, Seattle is not a model to follow, it's a cautionary tale.
The problem was, while not solved, massively improved by providing heroin to hardcore addicts[2]
The only argument against it, really, is that it's morally wrong to hand out drugs to addicts. Leaving this argument aside the approach was (and is) widely successful. Not only for the city, as such, but also for the addicts who get a chance to stabilize their lifes, are much healthier and actually can hold down appartments and jobs.
If homelessness is a problem, why should the alternative be to put them in jail or prison? For something as simple as car camping, it seems like an unjustifiable punishment for a simple offense. Without getting into much of a semantics argument, this post itself puts off a sense of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude when it comes to homelessness. In a city that has a GDP of $231 billion in 2010[1], it seems ineffective to punish the homeless instead of trying to rid the city of the problem in a more productive manner than hauling offenders away. While public consumption of drugs should still be a citational offense, the simple possession of a drug should not be a jail sentence. There are many users that have deeper issues that need to be worked out to rid them of their addiction and putting them into confinement is not always the most effective way. Seattle needs to invest in safe injection sites, public health programs, and they need to build more shelters for their homeless. In today’s society, homeless are looked at as the bottom of the feeder chain, but when we do that, we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.
This sounds like something right out of the "Seattle is dying" propaganda documentary that released lately. Living in White Center, I don't experience any of this. People act like its the lower 9th ward or chiraq or the walking dead around here, and it just isn't.
Seattle, by itself, cannot solve the homeless problem, we can only hope to maintain it to some extent, many of its root causes are far outside of our city limits. 80% of our nation is paycheck to paycheck, until that changes neither will homelessness. We need more housing of all kinds immediately, even if it means imminent domain, and we need clean needle facilities. We also need to give the wealthiest employers in king county a choice, pay better wages or get taxed, and ownership and investors must take the pay cut and the cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Landlords need to have some limits, they are driving the costs up enormously. Free markets were supposed to be free from usury and rentiering, not protections for them.
Could someone please explain what it means to "encourage homelessness"? At a first glance, it looks like a passive aggressive implication that homeless people, if they just tried harder, wouldn't be homeless. Can anyone help me see what I'm missing?
What do you propose? Cracking down on homeless people. Heavy fines and jail time? Is that somehow going to make them less homeless?
The only viable answer is programs like what this article is talking about. Providing consoling/rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one at a time. There is no blanket solution. These are individuals that are suffering and trapped in a cycle.
If you think violently oppressing the already downtrodden is a good solution please leave and go to another city. This is probably not the place for you.
Northwest and West coast governments have acknowledged that the current legal deterrents and consequences do more harm than good: fines being impossible to collect alongside being inadequate deterrent, jail and prison exacerbating the situation and not resulting in holding people for very long anyway. Costing taxpayers even more when they do hold people for long.
They have not reached consensus on what to replace the deterrents with, so now there is a void and no oxygen to even criticize the outcome.
I live here too, and I disagree with you - this is a symptom of an entirely different problem. We should not be screwing people's lives over for simple possession, the rest is the same homeless problem that every city has nowadays.
I lean heavily towards giving people the freedom to do what they want, but in 'private' and without burdening public life of others. If people want to light up or shoot up, so be it. But I think a community must have ways to discourage or push people out of the public sphere who practice unwelcome and unsocial behavior. The gov't fully feeding, clothing, and sheltering large groups of addicts is impractical and unviable in most/all places.
If they aren’t going to charge you for drugs surely they could arrest you for public intoxicating or disorderly conduct. Drunk people get arrested frequently. Put them in the drunk tank, sober them up, suggest or provide rehab options, and let them out with a small cash fine. If they want to get into some kind of treatment or non-profit home waive the fine.
The goal is to provide incentives to get sober but not ruin someone’s job prospects forever for being addicted.
Possession and public use/display are two different things. Do not confuse the two.
It's the same with alcohol, I can legally walk or drive around with a sealed container during transport. If I open that container in public and drink from it, I am breaking the law.
I 100% agree that possession of any drug should not lead to automatic arrest. But public consumption should not go unpunished nor should it be encouraged. Though, what is a good compromise for punishing public consumption? I say confiscate the drugs and paraphernalia while offering help as a good start. Arresting them just wastes time and money as once released they will go right back to doing what got them there in the first place. Jail is useless, they need a complete reboot in life which is extraordinarily difficult. I have no solution for that as there is no one size fits all approach.
I'm a transgender woman. Applying your thought process seems to me, inevitably, to mean I can't live in society.
I work downtown cooking for a bar (despite my deep involvement in tech as a child/teen and early work programming and some infrastructure stuff, life's challenges haven't enabled me access to significant wealth or appreciable social status). I've found survival, and I deal with drug addicts, mentally ill, the deeply traumatized and abandoned. The biggest thing anyone needs in these circumstances is love and acceptance.
Coming from a place of privilege, your leaning to exclude the suffering from society is wildly antisocial and a leading cause of the rise in "eat the rich" mentalities.
Earlier this year I was hanging out at Dolores Park in San Francisco. There was a scantily-clad white guy who kept going up to various groups and obviously masturbating.
Nearby was a POC smoking weed. When a cop came through guess who got a ticket? The guy smoking weed — and this is despite that weed is supposed to be the lowest priority crime in SF.
When laws are enforced this arbitrarily it’s no wonder governments are taking enforcement away from beat cops.
Here's the other important thing: if you want to allow private use and criminalize public abuse, fine. Do that. But don't stop enforcing the law, lest you set (or strengthen) the precedent that the law is bent for political expediency. Change the law, don't just "stop enforcing it". Besides, if the goal is to provide lasting change, it makes more sense: a different enforcer could make a different decision. It's a little more difficult to rebuild support for legislative action (to, say, re-criminalize something) than for an administrator to do it.
Some of the discussion in this thread has brought to light some interesting things.
1) Where is the line for what is socially acceptable to do in public?
2) If a line exists, why does it exist where it does?
3) Should there be a standard that society must follow, so we don’t end up with drug litter, litter, and human waste on the streets and around us all of the time?
Some commenters have brought up that maybe there should not be a standard that we strive to achieve with regards to public behavior and cleanliness. I am concerned that slowly we are becoming so individualistic(in the since of other people can do whatever they want), and liberal with standards of behavior, that the worst kinds of behavior will eventually be permitted because that is “their right” to act that way.
I am curious if other people feel that we are not very far from being a society that keeps saying “everything is permissible, because anyone has the right to do as they please.” Or I might be extremely alone in this regard.
You can still charge people for disorderly conduct and public intoxication. This is just taking away charging people for having fentanyl in their purse.
>The gov't fully feeding, clothing, and sheltering large groups of addicts is impractical and unviable in most/all places.
It's completely viable it's just impractical. There are not THAT many homeless people. However there are diminishing returns for everything... Some people are on the street because they trash any home they're given access to. Also the better you take care of this population the more homeless people move to your progressive enlightened area. It's viable but nobody wants to pay for that shit when there are other social goods you could be doing.
It's really not though. It would probably cost a couple hundred million tops to do that for everyone in the Seattle area. We'd need to raise a tax to do it for sure, but it'd represent a fairly low burden.
Good policies can reduce the number of addicts to the minimum (there will always be a subset of the population that will fall into addiction but it can be low enough to not be a public health concern). Practically everything America does, from extreme inequality, normalised predatory capitalism, no public healthcare, rent seeking drugs companies who push opioids on vulnerable patients, terrible social policies and pathetic public schooling etc etc is counter productive to reducing the number junkies.
The US has 500,000 homeless people. Let's say it would cost about $1,500 per month to provide them with basic lodging and basic needs. That's $9 billion per year, or about $30 per citizen.
As a comparison: The F-35 fighter program is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over 55 years. That's $27 billion per year, or about three times as much as it would cost to fix homelessness.
Let's compare with what you're advocating, which appears to be the status quo. The existence of homeless people (not all of whom are drug addicts, by the way) shows that drug criminalisation doesn't work.
Homeless people don't need more suffering to finally get their act together. Life on the streets is plenty uncomfortable and dangerous, and nobody operating according to your simplistic model of sticks & carrots would chose it.
Further criminalising behaviour you don't like such as being badly dressed or prone to shouting random, schizophrenia-induced nonsense seems not just heartless, but rather close to dividing society into your kind and "subhumans" to be exterminated. Because if you don't think they deserve food or shelter, and you want to drive them out of cities (and, presumably, towns) where are they supposed to go? I want to be as charitable as possible here, but "push[ing] people out of the public sphere" seems to be a euphemism to bus them into the desert and not watch them die.
Being slightly annoyed by homeless people is also the least you can do if you actually believe in the "public sphere" as a community of citizens, and not just the place to get cheap takeout. If others' suffering cuts into your bliss, either through its annoying smells and sounds or because there are remnants of empathy in play, that should be motivation to solve the problem. There are many countries poorer than the US that have far smaller homeless populations, so it is entirely possible.
Seattle is a city that has made a lot of bad decisions. It is suffering from rampant drug abuse, property crime, and gross mismanagement under the current city council, which seems obsessed with following an ideologically-motivated progressive agenda instead of common-sense good governance.
The policy of not enforcing laws, not prosecuting (either certain crimes or certain cohorts of offenders) has caused the city's problems. There are two sets of laws - one is for law-abiding tax-paying residents who are just trying to live their lives without disruption, and the other is for everyone else, who somehow are seen as victims through a twisted social-justice lens, instead of malicious actors. The law-abiding tax-paying residents should not have to give up their public spaces, safety, property, or contribute more taxes in order to accommodate the huge rise of permanently-homeless service-refusing people that want nomadic or drug-centric lifestyles.
Those people do not contribute to society and are making society worse for those who do want to contribute. And yes, there has to be a consequence for that, in order to deter such behavior and lifestyles and not attract an influx of them into the city. This article does not make real the frustration experienced by most residents of Seattle, as it has deteriorated towards SF 2.0 in these last 4 years.
The only thing I've learned from this thread is that there is a vocal group of regressive, probably rich (software developers), complaining about homeless people not being jailed.
In response to the 'dead' reply, you make some points that stick. I'm curious what kind of solution could exist to address the issue(s) you describe. Hoping to hear more thoughts.
People are conflating 'drug decriminalization' with other policies. I'm agnostic on other homeless policies, but strongly support decriminalizing possession. You can be for more social services for the homeless, or, more law-and-order and advocate for more cops on the beat to stop car camping, burglary, etc. All while agreeing that spending thousands on incarceration just for possession is a poor use of societal resources.
I'd advocate for a) outlawing public drug usage (the same way alcohol is legal but public consumption is not). And b) an officer on the scene can still confiscate illegal drugs- motivating addicts/homeless to be discreet and low-key. Both of these will help prevent public spaces from becoming a free-for-all, while not wasting valuable money on arresting an addict for the 20th time
public alcohol usage is very much legal. we manage it by providing regulations on dispensing/selling alcohol. in my city alcohol may be consumed in most parks and in the majority of municipalities it is legal to serve alcohol in public establishments meeting basic business regulations.
alcohol of course, is a deadly and addictive drug that increases incidences of violence, property crime, and other anti-social behavior.
Just finished watching Seattle is Dying. I don't understand why so many American cities suffer so much from drug problems. Everywhere in the world you will find homeless people, but outside of the US I haven't seen anywhere so many drug addicts. Is it all those depressing suburbs with shitty education and people who are bored to death with their life? Is it lack of support from family?
I don't get it.
I feel that's the root of the problem and where the US should invest heavily.
If you can imagine what a crowd of people waiting for Walmart's Black Friday sale behaves like... I think that's a great metaphor for America at large.
Poor social cohesion, poverty traps, excessive materialism and individualism.
I blame Cold War domestic propaganda tactics. Americans stigmatized and undermined cultural values for a generation, the societal equivalent of an autoimmune disease, and ever since we have been shifting further towards a brutal, cold, almost purely economic system with sparse and weakly connected communities made up of individuals constantly bombarded by news and ads (propaganda).
The US drug abuse problem is multiple things colliding over many decades.
Extraordinary wealth & extremely high disposable incomes (very large profit magnet), by far the largest pharma economy, a pharmaceutical culture you won't find anywhere else, a many decades long history of general persecution of drug addicts, and a healthcare system that doesn't take good care of the homeless or drug addicts.
That covers both the prescription abuse and blackmarket issues.
The wealth & income in the system acts as a huge magnet. If you're going to sell drugs somewhere (legal or illegal), you want to do it in the US. The US has nearly double the median personal disposable income of the EU, under one big roof. The culture encourages a drug-solution approach to everything. The doctors, nurses, admin, hospitals, pharma companies and healthcare system overall have been very happy accomplices, feeding the problem for decades to great personal profit. A lot of prescription writers should be in prison for playing assist in murdering tens of thousands of Americans. The persecution of drug addicts makes everything worse on the back-end once a person has become an addict; it pushes them away from treatment, it isolates them from society. The poorly constructed healthcare safety net in combination with the cultural & legal / political persecution, then finishes them off, leaving them little to no proper safe recourse or way back out - ending far too often in death.
I believe that one of the primary causes is the overprescription of opiods by doctors in the USA, who were pressured by a patients (a generation of consumerism and instant gratification who expect doctors to provide instant treatment/remedy) on one side, and drug companies (who saw prescription painkillers as a sudden new cash cow) on the other. An article I've recently read in the Atlantic provides a perspective on this subject:
In one corner, we have people that are absolutely exhausted of the current state of affairs. The trash, the needles in parks, human feces, the tents ... etc. They want someone to do something about it, but it's not clear at all what that something really is or who would do it. If it were clear, we wouldn't be arguing about it. There are real costs to a draconian reversion to hardcore enforcement. People will get hurt, unnecessarily.
In the other, we have people that seem completely convinced that enforcing any kind of norms against anti-social behavior - indeed, outright dangerous behavior - is simply an extension of the War on Drugs, and further criminalizes marginalized people by cycling them through a prison system that seems equally uninterested in actually solving the problem. And there are real costs here, too. People are getting hurt continually by repeat offenders, and by the other social costs of living where parts of the city are unclean or unsafe, or both.
I've lived in Seattle since 2011 (with a 29 month cumulative absence for a deployment and then for school), and I think it's just absolutely nuts to think that decriminalizing usage has done anything but make this problem worse. I understand the impulse behind it. I really do. But we can't keep trying to convince ourselves that this is "working", unless "working" is really "condition people to think that this is the new norm". Obviously, I guess I sit in the first corner. There's no real middle ground between these two cohorts, as far as I can tell. One group sees the other's concerns as reactionary or uncompassionate, and the other see's the first group's compassion as naive and even a deep enabling of the problem.
For me, I don't want to live in a city like this. That's maybe the only middle ground that exists between the two groups - neither want this. But my sense is that we're at a true impasse here, and that, and I'm just being realistic given the political arrangement here in Seattle, we're going to keep doing "more of this", whatever "this" is. The second camp has clearly captured city leadership, and decriminalization, lax or no enforcement of existing laws, and a general apathy (or maybe it's faith) about the situation will guide policy. We'll become the next SF, and then wake up one day wondering "how did this happen"?
> They want someone to do something about it, but it's not clear at all what that something really is or who would do it
> it's just absolutely nuts to think that decriminalizing usage has done anything but make this problem worse
From reading these two statements and others in this thread, it's hard for me to see how you're the one arguing against criminalizing people, and yet that's how you're describing yourself. What does "enforcing norms against anti-social behavior" mean in this context, if not putting people in prison or issuing citations (which eventually lead to prison)? I'm genuinely unsure if there's some third option I'm not thinking of.
The thesis seems to be that if you just do that enough, those people will go somewhere else or decide to stop being homeless. The problem is, that's what we used to do and it didn't work. Those people are from here, and they're not homeless by choice. Even if some do move on, they'll just end up homeless somewhere else.
The frustrating thing is that there is a solution to this, which is called housing first. The basic idea is that you give people housing they can live in, and then provide services like addiction counseling and job training to get them into a better place. But you start with the housing, because without stability in your life, it's hard to tackle challenges like this, and not having housing results in all kinds of other social problems. The problem with housing first of course is that it's expensive, which requires taxation.
To me the real problem is that the council has insisted on sticking to ineffective half-measures. We had the beginnings of a tax for affordable housing last year, although it was still too small, but the council backed down when Amazon and other large companies raised hell. What this ended up doing is making it clear that the council has no solution to this that they're willing to pursue, which has lead to this impasse.
These conditions are exactly what prompted the drug war's start in the first place. Neighborhoods were tired of the addicts and petty (and sometimes not so petty) crime which plagued their day-to-day lives.
I wouldn't be shocked if 10 years from now, these coastal cities are leading the charge on a tough on drugs reversal.
No matter the merits of the case to be made for this specific policy, the state of Seattle isn't one of the highlights.
To clarify: there are all sorts of factors at play in Seattle's troubles, my point is that if you believe a the policy "we should stop charging people for personal drug use", "just look at Seattle!" isn't going to be convincing to most of the country.
[+] [-] dogmatic_di|6 years ago|reply
There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done too much to encourage homelessness (particularly with the expansion of policies like this one). "Tent City" has spread so far that it's getting into the suburbs and from a residents perspective it's getting far worse not better. I have routinely seen people shooting up and smoking glass pipes (not marijuana) in broad daylight in the Downtown and Pioneer Square areas. There's shouting, theft, property crime at all hours of the night near my apartment (Though strangely compared to SF I know very few people who have had their cars broken into).
Regardless of the tone of this article, Seattle is not a model to follow, it's a cautionary tale.
[+] [-] CaptainZapp|6 years ago|reply
The problem was, while not solved, massively improved by providing heroin to hardcore addicts[2]
The only argument against it, really, is that it's morally wrong to hand out drugs to addicts. Leaving this argument aside the approach was (and is) widely successful. Not only for the city, as such, but also for the addicts who get a chance to stabilize their lifes, are much healthier and actually can hold down appartments and jobs.
[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/extern/storytelling/needletraum...
[2] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-12/us-can-learn-lot-zuri...
[+] [-] docbrown|6 years ago|reply
1: http://www.greyhilladvisors.com/gross-metropolitan-product/
[+] [-] russdpale|6 years ago|reply
Seattle, by itself, cannot solve the homeless problem, we can only hope to maintain it to some extent, many of its root causes are far outside of our city limits. 80% of our nation is paycheck to paycheck, until that changes neither will homelessness. We need more housing of all kinds immediately, even if it means imminent domain, and we need clean needle facilities. We also need to give the wealthiest employers in king county a choice, pay better wages or get taxed, and ownership and investors must take the pay cut and the cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Landlords need to have some limits, they are driving the costs up enormously. Free markets were supposed to be free from usury and rentiering, not protections for them.
[+] [-] CodeMage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenocyon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loeg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itslennysfault|6 years ago|reply
The only viable answer is programs like what this article is talking about. Providing consoling/rehab services and helping people turn their lives around one at a time. There is no blanket solution. These are individuals that are suffering and trapped in a cycle.
If you think violently oppressing the already downtrodden is a good solution please leave and go to another city. This is probably not the place for you.
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
They have not reached consensus on what to replace the deterrents with, so now there is a void and no oxygen to even criticize the outcome.
[+] [-] Klonoar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weeksie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opwieurposiu|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gedy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wil421|6 years ago|reply
The goal is to provide incentives to get sober but not ruin someone’s job prospects forever for being addicted.
[+] [-] MisterTea|6 years ago|reply
It's the same with alcohol, I can legally walk or drive around with a sealed container during transport. If I open that container in public and drink from it, I am breaking the law.
I 100% agree that possession of any drug should not lead to automatic arrest. But public consumption should not go unpunished nor should it be encouraged. Though, what is a good compromise for punishing public consumption? I say confiscate the drugs and paraphernalia while offering help as a good start. Arresting them just wastes time and money as once released they will go right back to doing what got them there in the first place. Jail is useless, they need a complete reboot in life which is extraordinarily difficult. I have no solution for that as there is no one size fits all approach.
[+] [-] aisenik|6 years ago|reply
I work downtown cooking for a bar (despite my deep involvement in tech as a child/teen and early work programming and some infrastructure stuff, life's challenges haven't enabled me access to significant wealth or appreciable social status). I've found survival, and I deal with drug addicts, mentally ill, the deeply traumatized and abandoned. The biggest thing anyone needs in these circumstances is love and acceptance.
Coming from a place of privilege, your leaning to exclude the suffering from society is wildly antisocial and a leading cause of the rise in "eat the rich" mentalities.
[+] [-] jdavis703|6 years ago|reply
Nearby was a POC smoking weed. When a cop came through guess who got a ticket? The guy smoking weed — and this is despite that weed is supposed to be the lowest priority crime in SF.
When laws are enforced this arbitrarily it’s no wonder governments are taking enforcement away from beat cops.
[+] [-] mises|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elamje|6 years ago|reply
1) Where is the line for what is socially acceptable to do in public?
2) If a line exists, why does it exist where it does?
3) Should there be a standard that society must follow, so we don’t end up with drug litter, litter, and human waste on the streets and around us all of the time?
Some commenters have brought up that maybe there should not be a standard that we strive to achieve with regards to public behavior and cleanliness. I am concerned that slowly we are becoming so individualistic(in the since of other people can do whatever they want), and liberal with standards of behavior, that the worst kinds of behavior will eventually be permitted because that is “their right” to act that way.
I am curious if other people feel that we are not very far from being a society that keeps saying “everything is permissible, because anyone has the right to do as they please.” Or I might be extremely alone in this regard.
[+] [-] TheOperator|6 years ago|reply
>The gov't fully feeding, clothing, and sheltering large groups of addicts is impractical and unviable in most/all places.
It's completely viable it's just impractical. There are not THAT many homeless people. However there are diminishing returns for everything... Some people are on the street because they trash any home they're given access to. Also the better you take care of this population the more homeless people move to your progressive enlightened area. It's viable but nobody wants to pay for that shit when there are other social goods you could be doing.
[+] [-] foota|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tsubasachan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shaki-dora|6 years ago|reply
As a comparison: The F-35 fighter program is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over 55 years. That's $27 billion per year, or about three times as much as it would cost to fix homelessness.
Let's compare with what you're advocating, which appears to be the status quo. The existence of homeless people (not all of whom are drug addicts, by the way) shows that drug criminalisation doesn't work.
Homeless people don't need more suffering to finally get their act together. Life on the streets is plenty uncomfortable and dangerous, and nobody operating according to your simplistic model of sticks & carrots would chose it.
Further criminalising behaviour you don't like such as being badly dressed or prone to shouting random, schizophrenia-induced nonsense seems not just heartless, but rather close to dividing society into your kind and "subhumans" to be exterminated. Because if you don't think they deserve food or shelter, and you want to drive them out of cities (and, presumably, towns) where are they supposed to go? I want to be as charitable as possible here, but "push[ing] people out of the public sphere" seems to be a euphemism to bus them into the desert and not watch them die.
Being slightly annoyed by homeless people is also the least you can do if you actually believe in the "public sphere" as a community of citizens, and not just the place to get cheap takeout. If others' suffering cuts into your bliss, either through its annoying smells and sounds or because there are remnants of empathy in play, that should be motivation to solve the problem. There are many countries poorer than the US that have far smaller homeless populations, so it is entirely possible.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|6 years ago|reply
The policy of not enforcing laws, not prosecuting (either certain crimes or certain cohorts of offenders) has caused the city's problems. There are two sets of laws - one is for law-abiding tax-paying residents who are just trying to live their lives without disruption, and the other is for everyone else, who somehow are seen as victims through a twisted social-justice lens, instead of malicious actors. The law-abiding tax-paying residents should not have to give up their public spaces, safety, property, or contribute more taxes in order to accommodate the huge rise of permanently-homeless service-refusing people that want nomadic or drug-centric lifestyles.
Those people do not contribute to society and are making society worse for those who do want to contribute. And yes, there has to be a consequence for that, in order to deter such behavior and lifestyles and not attract an influx of them into the city. This article does not make real the frustration experienced by most residents of Seattle, as it has deteriorated towards SF 2.0 in these last 4 years.
[+] [-] voxl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imperialdrive|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] contra-rian|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hash872|6 years ago|reply
I'd advocate for a) outlawing public drug usage (the same way alcohol is legal but public consumption is not). And b) an officer on the scene can still confiscate illegal drugs- motivating addicts/homeless to be discreet and low-key. Both of these will help prevent public spaces from becoming a free-for-all, while not wasting valuable money on arresting an addict for the 20th time
[+] [-] aisenik|6 years ago|reply
alcohol of course, is a deadly and addictive drug that increases incidences of violence, property crime, and other anti-social behavior.
[+] [-] tinyhouse|6 years ago|reply
I feel that's the root of the problem and where the US should invest heavily.
[+] [-] losteric|6 years ago|reply
Poor social cohesion, poverty traps, excessive materialism and individualism.
I blame Cold War domestic propaganda tactics. Americans stigmatized and undermined cultural values for a generation, the societal equivalent of an autoimmune disease, and ever since we have been shifting further towards a brutal, cold, almost purely economic system with sparse and weakly connected communities made up of individuals constantly bombarded by news and ads (propaganda).
[+] [-] adventured|6 years ago|reply
Extraordinary wealth & extremely high disposable incomes (very large profit magnet), by far the largest pharma economy, a pharmaceutical culture you won't find anywhere else, a many decades long history of general persecution of drug addicts, and a healthcare system that doesn't take good care of the homeless or drug addicts.
That covers both the prescription abuse and blackmarket issues.
The wealth & income in the system acts as a huge magnet. If you're going to sell drugs somewhere (legal or illegal), you want to do it in the US. The US has nearly double the median personal disposable income of the EU, under one big roof. The culture encourages a drug-solution approach to everything. The doctors, nurses, admin, hospitals, pharma companies and healthcare system overall have been very happy accomplices, feeding the problem for decades to great personal profit. A lot of prescription writers should be in prison for playing assist in murdering tens of thousands of Americans. The persecution of drug addicts makes everything worse on the back-end once a person has become an addict; it pushes them away from treatment, it isolates them from society. The poorly constructed healthcare safety net in combination with the cultural & legal / political persecution, then finishes them off, leaving them little to no proper safe recourse or way back out - ending far too often in death.
[+] [-] ddenisen|6 years ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/opioid-...
[+] [-] remarkEon|6 years ago|reply
In one corner, we have people that are absolutely exhausted of the current state of affairs. The trash, the needles in parks, human feces, the tents ... etc. They want someone to do something about it, but it's not clear at all what that something really is or who would do it. If it were clear, we wouldn't be arguing about it. There are real costs to a draconian reversion to hardcore enforcement. People will get hurt, unnecessarily.
In the other, we have people that seem completely convinced that enforcing any kind of norms against anti-social behavior - indeed, outright dangerous behavior - is simply an extension of the War on Drugs, and further criminalizes marginalized people by cycling them through a prison system that seems equally uninterested in actually solving the problem. And there are real costs here, too. People are getting hurt continually by repeat offenders, and by the other social costs of living where parts of the city are unclean or unsafe, or both.
I've lived in Seattle since 2011 (with a 29 month cumulative absence for a deployment and then for school), and I think it's just absolutely nuts to think that decriminalizing usage has done anything but make this problem worse. I understand the impulse behind it. I really do. But we can't keep trying to convince ourselves that this is "working", unless "working" is really "condition people to think that this is the new norm". Obviously, I guess I sit in the first corner. There's no real middle ground between these two cohorts, as far as I can tell. One group sees the other's concerns as reactionary or uncompassionate, and the other see's the first group's compassion as naive and even a deep enabling of the problem.
For me, I don't want to live in a city like this. That's maybe the only middle ground that exists between the two groups - neither want this. But my sense is that we're at a true impasse here, and that, and I'm just being realistic given the political arrangement here in Seattle, we're going to keep doing "more of this", whatever "this" is. The second camp has clearly captured city leadership, and decriminalization, lax or no enforcement of existing laws, and a general apathy (or maybe it's faith) about the situation will guide policy. We'll become the next SF, and then wake up one day wondering "how did this happen"?
[+] [-] notJim|6 years ago|reply
> it's just absolutely nuts to think that decriminalizing usage has done anything but make this problem worse
From reading these two statements and others in this thread, it's hard for me to see how you're the one arguing against criminalizing people, and yet that's how you're describing yourself. What does "enforcing norms against anti-social behavior" mean in this context, if not putting people in prison or issuing citations (which eventually lead to prison)? I'm genuinely unsure if there's some third option I'm not thinking of.
The thesis seems to be that if you just do that enough, those people will go somewhere else or decide to stop being homeless. The problem is, that's what we used to do and it didn't work. Those people are from here, and they're not homeless by choice. Even if some do move on, they'll just end up homeless somewhere else.
The frustrating thing is that there is a solution to this, which is called housing first. The basic idea is that you give people housing they can live in, and then provide services like addiction counseling and job training to get them into a better place. But you start with the housing, because without stability in your life, it's hard to tackle challenges like this, and not having housing results in all kinds of other social problems. The problem with housing first of course is that it's expensive, which requires taxation.
To me the real problem is that the council has insisted on sticking to ineffective half-measures. We had the beginnings of a tax for affordable housing last year, although it was still too small, but the council backed down when Amazon and other large companies raised hell. What this ended up doing is making it clear that the council has no solution to this that they're willing to pursue, which has lead to this impasse.
[+] [-] ariehkovler|6 years ago|reply
However, they also are usually unpopular at the same time, leading to a backlash and a drug clampdown again. It's the drug policy circle of life.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] merpnderp|6 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be shocked if 10 years from now, these coastal cities are leading the charge on a tough on drugs reversal.
[+] [-] the_watcher|6 years ago|reply
To clarify: there are all sorts of factors at play in Seattle's troubles, my point is that if you believe a the policy "we should stop charging people for personal drug use", "just look at Seattle!" isn't going to be convincing to most of the country.
[+] [-] lstodd|6 years ago|reply
Can anyone not see it's the other way around? Really?
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pg_is_a_butt|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] qmanjamz|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] egberts|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] eof|6 years ago|reply
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