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Originally Posted by Whynotnow
But the sentiment of round em up and lock em up I feel is a concerning one.
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Who’s suggesting we just round up all homeless addicts and throw them in jail?
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Originally Posted by Whynotnow
First of all I can’t figure out what people think we should even charge them with.
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We have all sorts of laws and bylaws around public intoxication, disorderly behaviour, trespassing, and harassment. What we’re seeing is a consequence of a deliberate policy decision to stop enforcing laws we had previously enforced.
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Originally Posted by Whynotnow
It’s unfortunate your wife gets called a name and she shouldn’t have to deal with it, but nobody is going to jail for that. We don’t get to just lock people up because they’ve become a nuisance.
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No, we don’t just lock people for shouting obscenities at strangers. But we shouldn’t just pass it off as part of the rich tapestry of urban life, either. Until recently, we didn’t. And most of the world still doesn’t.
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Originally Posted by Whynotnow
Second, the criminal system is in no way a treatment system, dumping a massive amount if them into the system and saying job well done doesn’t do anything except put them around more criminals.
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The provincial government just opened a residential treatment centre, and is planning three more. The province now has 19,000 addictions treatment spaces (not all residential). It needs more - but we aren’t doing nothing.
The crux of the issue is that only a tiny fraction of homeless people suffering from addiction will voluntarily enter treatment. So the move to treat addiction and its downstream behaviours as
strictly health care issues - a policy first adopted in some American communities over the last 10 years and then taken up in Canadian communities - was doomed to failure.
It began reasonably enough, with the goal of moving from America’s reliance on criminal justice to something like Portugal’s approach to addiction: steer small-scale drug users to treatment rather than charging them criminally. But this being the polarized USA, the approach taken up by progressive American (and subsequently Canadian) cities and states swung way further than anything practiced in Europe, to a completely hands-off approach to public drug use and its associated disorders. The most radical experiment is Oregon’s decriminalization of hard drugs - a move that even many of its original supporters now acknowledge has been a disaster.
So the pendulum swung too far. Time to dial it back and offer support for treatment and housing while restoring our public spaces by enforcing the law. And recognize that in some cases government should employ coercion in treating addiction - that any approach relying on voluntary submission to treatment is condemning most of the addicts on the street to misery and, ultimately, death.