Homelessness, drugs, mental illness, and social policy, or the lack thereof

I don’t have any kind of expertise on the issues discussed in this post, beyond reading some books on what has happened to the poorest and most socially marginal people in America over the past few decades. Here are some quotes from a discussion on the Michigan sports board. The politics on that board are pretty liberal, with a leftist or three sprinkled in. (Since 2016 all Republicans have either been converted or expelled, although I suppose there could be a few Marranos.)

From a long-time Seattle resident:

Every summer since 2020 our neighborhood reaches a breaking point on the addicts. I’m not talking people sleeping in cars. I’m talking violent hardened addicts running chop shops and setting up huge encampments in public spaces, even creating semi permanent structures by cutting down trees in green spaces.

It reached a head this week when there were about 30-40 tents in Cal Anderson Park, which is our equivalent of like Grand Army Plaza or something. It’s a historically important area and prior ro 2020 was a beautiful park that occasionally an embarrassed needle user would hang out in during the day.

Now every summer it’s basically a 24/7 drug mart and camping free for all. The city completely lacks the will to keep it clear. They refuse to hire security and in many facilitate the camping by offering so called “outreach”. AKA giving them free food, tents, drug supplies, cigs, condoms, etc. All this stuff is then traded for, you guessed it, drugs!

It is exhausting living around them. It really is. If you don’t live in the harder hit areas of Seattle, Portland or SF or LA not sure how you can really contextualize it. These are not the homeless of the east coast or Chicago. These are people that are here for one reason and that is to do drugs and get “services” to allow them to do more drugs.

Some responses:

TBH I think one thing that reduces our will to address this is that fact that every level of government is still mostly dominated by men. The women in my social circle in Portland viewed it as a safety issue much more than the men did.
Most women can be easily overpowered by most men. This makes the constant mentally unstable men very unsettling.

Just my opinion, and anecdotal from a non-expert, but SF and Seattle are on a different planet

LA is “popular” for the homeless mostly because of the weather, I think. Many of the Westside LA homeless are veterans. The beach people seem pretty harmless. Benign/docile/internal/whatever.

Skid Row is obviously its own ecosystem but there’s none of that Vancouver-style free needle stuff as far as I know.

In my experience Seattle and SF homeless are *extremely* different in personality, aggression, etc

Right wing approaches toward the homeless are cruel and inhumane. The left needs to offer a real alternative. Right now, the policy is to talk about fixing the issue, but do nothing because of NIMBY assholes.
You cannot address homelessness without building more housing. I don’t care how damn nice you are. They have to go somewhere. You also need to address the drug issue, but not with mass incarceration.
Oregon tried to be Portugal a few years ago, but with no extra housing or recovery funding, and no enforcement mechanism. Surprise, it was a fucking disaster. . . .

I should clarify. The increase in housing would also include dedicated shelters with mental health services. Addiction and mental health care are huge components of the issue.

The institutions that Reagan shut down were seriously problematic, but there needs to be *something* in place for the people who aren’t equipped to participate safely (for themselves or others) in society. They need help and they need somewhere to go.

In Pacific Beach [San Diego] the homeless are mostly beach bum winos. Here [Seattle] they mostly aggro’d out meth and fent heads that have long ago burned out any sort of societal norms. They will rob, steal, and otherwise be a menace.

Here’s a Facebook post about the knife attack that injured 11 people in Traverse City, Michigan, a few days ago. (Pellston is a small town north of Traverse City. Somebody from that area who is roughly the same age as the attacker says it sounds authentic fwiw.)

I’m getting on my soap box for this one.
Just like all my other Pellston classmates, I am shocked to see this news coming out of TC today. This also saddens me beyond belief. Both for the victims, but also for BJ himself. BJ Gille was my friend many years ago and so many bad things have happened leading up to this point, and it all could have been prevented.

BJ moved to Pellston when we were in 4th grade from California. He sounded like a surfer. Everyone called him California boy for at least the first year. Every girl had a crush on him. He quickly became a part of our friend group.

Now in middle school and high school, back in the 90s at least, you were allowed to leave for something called “open campus lunch”. And what that essentially meant was how much trouble could you get into in that half hour you had for lunch around town, before coming back to school? A lot of weed, alcohol, cigarettes, etc where the current antique store stands. This was when BJ found out the hard way that he was actually allergic to weed. But that didn’t stop him from smoking it every single day at lunch time. It became a running joke and he saw it as an obstacle to be overcome.

One day, BJ went with two of his friends at lunch time to go smoke their weed. I still remember exactly who those two “friends” were, I’m sure many others do as well. They clam baked him in a car and locked him inside of it. Well, there was some stronger stuff than weed in the car that day. And BJ was so messed up that he couldn’t figure out how to get himself out of that old car. None of us knew that at the time though. It didn’t come out until days later. All we knew was that he didn’t come back after lunch, but the other two did, giggling. No one thought much of the prank.

The next day I was in English class and our teacher came in and told us that BJ did not come home the night before and was missing and did anyone have any information. We all turned to look at his one “friend” in the class, who then went down to the office to tell BJ’s dad where he could find his son.

BJ was still alive, but barely. The drugs had messed up his system so bad that he would never lead a normal life again. His brain was forever damaged. They took him away to the hospital and he didn’t return when I was a student there. He essentially had to be taken care of inside of a mental health institution for the rest of his life. Or he should have been.

BJ has been my worst case scenario story for years that I tell people and my own kids and my own students to never do hard drugs. A story of woe that others should heed so that they do not end up like him.

This was back when Lockwood existed in Petoskey. Well, that has since closed down. There used to be similar places in Marquette, Newberry, Traverse City, and even special homes where people with major mental health challenges could go and be safe. All of them have closed since then. All. Of. Them! Do you want to know what they did with the patients? For the most part, they just opened the doors and let them walk out. “Discharged “. Feel free to refer to the upper peninsula sheriff’s post from a few years ago for more information. The closest place to send people now is Wisconsin I believe?

The last time I saw BJ was around 15 years ago. He was walking down the sidewalk in downtown Petoskey. I was so excited to see him! I even crossed the road, calling out to him to get his attention. I tried to talk to him for a few minutes. He didn’t know who I was anymore. He was paranoid and afraid. He didn’t really know who he was or where he was. He couldn’t really form a coherent sentence. Think “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” style.
When I realized that he was mentally in a completely different reality, I told him bye and let him continue walking. It was a sad moment. There was a woman from one of the shops outside there and she told me that he used to live in a group home for men in Petoskey where they had in home care and so on, but that it had closed. She thought that he had been living on the streets for a while as she always saw him walking around with the same clothes and backpack. She said a lot of people had tried to talk to him or help him, but he would speak gibberish or run away or refuse help in those short moments of clarity.

That was the last time I saw him in person. It seems that he had been living in The Pines in TC for a while. He should have been in a hospital where he could have gotten the care he deserved. It has been YEARS… DECADES for him, without receiving appropriate mental health care! Turns out they closed The Pines in May of this year. So all of these adults were just roaming TC homeless. Most likely all of them needing medical care and mental health care. To quote Thomas More, “You first make thieves, then you punish them.”

Everything that has happened is a horrible tragedy. For the victims. For the people that were there. For the families. But I will tell you this, BJ Gille was this great boy that I knew years ago and everything that has happened to him has been a horrible example of our society failing people with mental health issues. I do not know who he was anymore. I do not condone what he did. It is horrible. But I will say that he is NOT a terrorist! He is a confused adult that was once my friend that has been kicked down time and time again in his life.

Yes, if you do the crime you must do the time. But label it correctly. He is not a terrorist! He probably has no idea what he did or where he is or who he is. Take responsibility for the problem that society has created.

Some of this may sound a bit moral panicky in regard to the damage drugs themselves do to people — I suspect that the causal arrows here are going in a bunch of directions at once — but it seems pretty clear that there’s a tremendous amount of negative feedback effects from, among other things, chaotic deinstitutionalization, criminalization of addiction via the prison-industrial complex, Big Pharma billionaire sociopaths like the Sacklers, NIMBY housing policies, neoliberal economics, and a lot of other stuff too.

This song is almost 40 years old: