[gabinator]

I visited NYC and San Francisco. It's appalling and unacceptable in this day and age.

My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag. That's not a lifestyle that we want to enable or perpetuate. I do not understand the mental hurdles that Berkley-educated 'scholars' jump through to rationalize letting people suffer the most potent and deadly forms of addiction. The penal system is the last net to catch these people before they die from OD or blood-borne pathogenc or the consequences of criminal activity. And the "empathetic" west coast intellectuals say "legalize the drugs". Absolute lunacy

[Broken_Hippo]

we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag

Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.

[JumpCrisscross]

> homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight

The best option is treatement. But the worst is leaving them on the streets. They're hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise. But they're also hurting bystanders.

[woodruffw]

Why is the assumption here that big cities (East/West Coast or otherwise) want to perpetuate addiction? I think a simpler assumption (that involves fewer inferential leaps) is that large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there.

[JumpCrisscross]

> large, wealthy cities provide more resources for homeless addicts, and so they end up congregating there

There was some bussing of homeless into city centres. But I haven't seen evidence that a majority, let alone significant plurality, of these cities' homeless addicts became homeless somewhere else.

[bryanlarsen]

Small town America has an overdose rate 48% higher than big city America, despite the fact that many drug users move from small town America to the big cities.

[watwut]

Do you have source for that?

[matwood]

> My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag.

You can search for more articles, but small town America has been hit very hard by opioids and now fentanyl.

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-politics/unbudgeted...

Thinking that it is only a city problem is itself part of the problem.

[kasey_junk]

I visited a couple of West Virginia towns that _shocked_ me with the rampant and obvious drug addiction this summer. And I live in a big city (Chicago) that suffers from homelessness.

My take away from that experience is that we normalize the misery around us but seeing it, even in a nearly identical form, in another context is shocking.

[gamblor956]

The dirty secret about NYC's, SF's, and LA's homeless are that more than 3/4ths of the homeless aren't local, or even regional.

George Lopez at the LA Times used to be a huge advocate of the homeless. And then he tried to do a series of articles about the homeless in Hollywood to highlight their plight and get more people to think like him. When he went out to do his research, it took him over a day interviewing dozens of homeless people to find one who was actually from LA. Less than a quarter were even from California. Needless to say, he's no longer a huge advocate for the homeless.

So yes, it's easy for small towns to talk about how they don't have a homeless problem, because they've shipped their homeless off to the big cities to deal with.

[yencabulator]

I lived in Los Angeles for years and in that time got to know exactly one person who was from Los Angeles (well, Beverly Hills, if you're local). Melting pot cities just simply have people from all over. Including the ones who made a conscious decision to leave small towns in Minnesota that the original commenter thinks are perfect; I knew several.

[Nursie]

I don't think people in these cities want to legalise fentanyl. That's a strawman.

They may want to decriminalise it and treat it as a health problem because empirically this has been shown to actually make a difference in outcomes.

[Hikikomori]

Police brained Americans.

[a123b456c]

OK, but do you realize that the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with?

And you're out here bragging about what you "let" your neighbors and kids do. And bragging about visiting two US cities.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the worst cases from places like yours get exported to SF, NYC and other hubs, for them to deal with?

Source? (I genuinely know nothing about this. But would appreciate hard data.)