I don’t think - go after the dealers and get treatment for the addicts = bring back the war on drugs.
If “harm reduction” means it’s ok to shoot up and smoke crack in public - that’s just ugly as hell. Maybe that’s something you just have to live with. And yeah it’s the Tenderloin. But people still live there. It’s one of the only remotely affordable places in the city. If I was a resident used to the usual level of squalor, and then it multiplied to open drug use in the streets, I wouldn’t like that at all.
At some point you have to balance the needs of the regular neighborhood residents with the needs of the addicts, right?
I bet if you dropped a bunch of addicts in the middle of Pacific Heights they’d be gone in half an hour.
I thought I knew who Cheryl Hines was, and it turns out I do, she’s just not the person I first thought of (whose name escapes me). I also know Robert Kennedy is an antivax guy so I’m claiming partial credit here.
I took a walk down the Reperbahn about 10 years ago and it was really tame, and pretty lame too. It doesn’t deserve its reputation, or a visit.
The stuff I see in US cities now is starting to remind me of how things were in the 80’s. Like people are aghast at videos of Philly’s Kensington Ave., but I remember when most cities had huge areas like that. I see all the homeless encampments in LA and am reminded of when you could take a northbound train out of NYC and see full blown shanty towns lining the tracks in Harlem and Washington Heights.
I didn’t change channels away from local news fast enough so now I know a student at a local HS was arrested for making threats and taking a gun to school. At another school, some “dud explosives” were found. These incidents appear unrelated to the TikTok stuff though. Just coincidence.
I walked the tenderloin district after going to mikkeller bar and was offered weed every block and saw homeless people drinking and doing drugs everywhere and felt totally safe. When I left mikkeller there was a small group of guys shooting dice or something across the street and when I walked back an hour later some of them were getting arrested
white guy spends vacation walking around sf drunk on drugs while seeing black people arrested for doing the same thing
Amazon seems really fucked right now. I ordered a piece of luggage from these guys: Amazon.com Seller Profile: PORTMANTOS which I was hoping to get before I leave for Kansas City on Monday.
I specifically ordered the suitcase with the shortest estimated shipping time. And it supposedly just got pickled up today at a UPS store in San Francisco.
Reading the feedback, it seems like the tracking number is getting fucked up A LOT. Which has me wondering if this is just some kind of “put the wrong tracking number” semi-scam and then it gets delivered in a month or whatever after we fix the oopsie.
I ordered something else that cost $15. It was late and now it “may be lost”. I can either hope it shows up, or ask for a refund. I wonder if the scam here is just assume a lot of people will forget and won’t ask for the refund.
I even tried to go to a mall to buy a suitcase and the only store they had was some fancy brand that costs $600. Like wtf. I bought my current (but finally falling apart after 20 years of service) suitcase at the Denver airport for $200. I don’t see any other luggage stores in my area. I just want another good $200 suitcase. Why is that impossible to find IRL? Should I go to Target?
Edit: looks like Kohl’s is a good bet. Should be fun on a Saturday before Christmas. Yay.
Definitely Target or Walmart. Try to order online for curbside pickup. Then you won’t have to go into the store. Target curbside pickup is awesome. I do almost all my grocery shopping that way.
It’s possible that there is no better way to deal with addicts than the compassionate way that they are being dealt with in SF, and 100% of the effort should go to attacking the social determinants of drug abuse.
When you have a world that prioritizes the interests of billionaires you end up with social problems. People that actually know what they’re talking about recognize drug addiction as a mental health problem, and that society wide health problems need to be met with a combination of treatment and prevention.
Both my parents were drug addicts and moms worked at a state funded recovery center for like 20 years. It worked really well, but not when it was mandatory. The person had to have hit their bottom and had to have wanted help. Once they want that those places help.
Ive heard good things about ayuhausca helping people quit really addictive drugs.
But in practice this has historically been done by treating drug abuse as a crime instead of as a health problem. It doesn’t end well. Cops aren’t even good being cops, they’re even worse at being health care service providers. If this worked, we could also have cops arrest people for eating fast food to solve the obesity epidemic. Addiction is rarely solved with plan force.
Massive social spending on things that lift people out of conditions that are known determinants of bad health outcomes. There is no political will to do it, but that’s the solution. Like I mentioned before, the root cause is American political machinery is primarily concerned with the welfare of billionaires and the welfare of the upper middle class is an important secondary concern. The disastrous situation of America’s poor is not an accident, it’s part of the design of the society. The only reason that the conditions in SF are getting attention at all is that SF has lots of rich people and they find the drug addicts to be a distasteful eyesore on their beloved city.
Yeah actually experts on the social determinants of health are recommending realistic solutions everywhere all the time. There is a huge gap between “realistic solutions” and “everyone feels always included, is never frustrated, never lacks anything and is basically on a pony farm with rainbows and unicorns”. That gap is actually where basically all good government policy resides.
Edit: Good policy never creates perfection. It’s an intentional conservative misdirection to claim policies are bad if they don’t work perfectly. I know you’re not conservative, but this attitude on policy is basically just like being an anti vaxxer about policy. One bad outcome doesn’t invalidate something that eliminates 100 bad outcomes.