So it clearly hasn't worked, but now it's getting worse. Maybe thinking police was meant to solve the problem is the wrong perspective. Regardless of initial motives for using police this way, maybe police was just preventing the problem from getting bigger. Now that those "barriers" are down, there is effectively no downside for trying out that lifestyle. I'm just saying there is a hidden factor at the root of the issue, which the state has not been able to find yet. At this point I'm wondering what if this problem is a societal problem that can only be fixed by the people and not the state.
The solution is not more police.
>no downside for trying out that lifestyle
Is that a joke? you know that the average addict "lifestyle" is literally hell
1) Go the Singapore/China route and make the penalty for both use and dealing extremely harsh. Often execution.
2) Go the Canada/Nordic country route and implement free injection clinics. Undercut the dealers with safe free or low cost drugs in return for counseling.
The evidence seems to suggest that DEA type enforcement where you simply seize drugs and lock up the dealers for 10-20 years is completely ineffective. It's like running a lottery where there's an immense payout, but also a small chance of going to prison for awhile. People are still going to play.
China is...well, China.
Fentanyl was detected in most of the deaths. The city’s minority populations were particularly hard hit. A third of the overdose victims were Black, despite Black people making up only 5% of the city’s population.
1. So the nation as a whole needs to work on resolving the affordable housing crisis.
2. Maybe they could try taking a medical approach and see if the drugs are de facto self medicating for a particular issue or if specific health issues make death by overdose more likely.
https://peterattiamd.com/anthonyhipolito/
We should absolutely address the housing crisis, but I'm skeptical whether that would do much to prevent fentanyl poisoning. It's not just homeless people who are dying.
"When people don’t have a safe place to go, when they’re using in doorways and public places and they’re afraid of getting caught and put in jail, they tend to rush and use more substance," he said. "And when they rush, there’s a higher risk of overdose."
I'm not sure there are simple solutions to this that don't have side effects. Mostly, the goal seems to be to move it out of sight, and to be fair many of the people came to SF on bus tickets provided by other localities with the same goal. At the same time there's a level of permission in some areas that doesn't seem to change (kind of like the smash and grabs in all the tourist areas) what ever they say about law and order.
It's not like police have been motivated to do much about it for at least the last 30 years.
https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-overdose-deaths/
Assuming 900000 people in San Francisco, the national average would say about 190/yr. One every 10hrs would mean 876/yr, or 4.6x the national average.
