Maybe. But my general rule on these things is to listen to people on the ground. The article I posted quotes heavily from a guy who actually lives in the Tenderloin and spends a lot of his day trying to help the addicts on the streets around him. He says the policies aren’t working.
After striking out in San Francisco, Laurie returned to Washington and soon got a critical call. Adam Mesnick, the owner of the Deli Board in the South of Market district, saw one of the flyers she had left behind and called Laurie. He knew Jessica from the neighborhood and worried that the posters meant she was dead.
He and Laurie continued to exchange calls and messages, bonding over their shared assessment of San Francisco’s failed response to its drug crisis — that its live-and-let-live attitude amounts to negligence and makes life far harder for people like Jessica.
Adam runs a controversial, in-your-face Twitter account called @bettersoma that shows the city’s drug crisis close up, angering some advocates who say he is insensitive and exploits homeless people. He argues that the tweets depict a reality that City Hall politicians and homeless advocates are unwilling to face. A recovering alcoholic himself, he said he wants more police presence, incarceration for dealers and far more treatment for people addicted to drugs. He doesn’t think the city’s focus on harm reduction is working.
Maybe this guy is wrong. But I’d bet my life savings he has more actual empathy for the people living on the street than some bureaucrat just throwing money at the problem and trying to be ideologically pure in doing so.
@Surf is another guy who’s opinion I take over just about anyone, since he actually works with people like Jessica and people with mental health issues. I know he doesn’t want to get dragged into this. But his take always seems a lot more grounded and reasonable to me, and it’s very often not the progressive ideal of what should work.
I saw first hand the results of some kind of healthy food initiative in LA public schools. One size-fits-all lunches for K-6. Kindergartners got a calzone, some kind of pear dessert, and a mixed green salad.
The dressing packet for the mixed green salad was the little plastic kind that even adults struggle with. But kindergartners were supposed to be able to get that open for their salad. I walked around and found one kid in the whole cafeteria nibbling on the salad. I’d love to track that kid over her whole life.
The calzone alone would easily have filled me up. Just the Kindergartners and first graders filled up two 55-gallon drums of uneaten food. That’s one lunch, for 1/3 of on elementary school in the second biggest school district in the country. The amount of food waste is mind-boggling.
I guess maybe I’m more annoyed at the execution than the idea. And maybe it’s the same with the harm reduction programs - good idea, terrible execution. But if your good idea is more likely than not the be executed terribly, it’s not a good idea.
