“meth rarely comes up in city discussions on homelessness, or in newspaper articles about it. Mitchell called it “the elephant in the room”—nobody wants to talk about it, he said. “There’s a desire not to stigmatize the homeless as drug users.” Policy makers and advocates instead prefer to focus on L.A.’s cost of housing.”
The middle class seems to want to point towards homelessness as proof of high housing costs and their “obvious” result. If we can’t discuss the multitude of reasons someone might become homeless then solving it will be difficult.
I was having this conversation today. One of the the other issues we wondered is if homelessness has significant inertia such that when it seems like it’s getting worse, it’ll likely continue to get worse before it gets better.
If so, that’s even more unfortunate because (in our city) it’s treated as a fairly acute issue. In all likelihood it seems like it’s probably not at all, though. It is extremely nuanced and people who experience it once are probably at much higher chances of experiencing it again.
There are details like this which really worry me. We want temporary housing, food banks, etc. and we absolutely should address acute issues with those solutions. But imagine the atrocities and unfortunate circumstances occurring now in children who will be homeless in 15 years. What are we doing for them? Food banks and temporary housing likely do nothing to help them, but I think that’s where most of our resources need to be aimed.
I’m sure some places have a better handle on it. In western Canada it doesn’t fill me with much hope.
It seems likely that fewer people would use P2P meth if they knew it was going to destroy their minds in weeks. So a big contributing factor here is that this has not been publicized, which seems like a major failure of both the medical and political worlds in the USA. It shouldn't take more than a decade for news of something this destructive to spread.
Interesting takeway:
“meth rarely comes up in city discussions on homelessness, or in newspaper articles about it. Mitchell called it “the elephant in the room”—nobody wants to talk about it, he said. “There’s a desire not to stigmatize the homeless as drug users.” Policy makers and advocates instead prefer to focus on L.A.’s cost of housing.”
The middle class seems to want to point towards homelessness as proof of high housing costs and their “obvious” result. If we can’t discuss the multitude of reasons someone might become homeless then solving it will be difficult.
I was having this conversation today. One of the the other issues we wondered is if homelessness has significant inertia such that when it seems like it’s getting worse, it’ll likely continue to get worse before it gets better.
If so, that’s even more unfortunate because (in our city) it’s treated as a fairly acute issue. In all likelihood it seems like it’s probably not at all, though. It is extremely nuanced and people who experience it once are probably at much higher chances of experiencing it again.
There are details like this which really worry me. We want temporary housing, food banks, etc. and we absolutely should address acute issues with those solutions. But imagine the atrocities and unfortunate circumstances occurring now in children who will be homeless in 15 years. What are we doing for them? Food banks and temporary housing likely do nothing to help them, but I think that’s where most of our resources need to be aimed.
I’m sure some places have a better handle on it. In western Canada it doesn’t fill me with much hope.
It seems likely that fewer people would use P2P meth if they knew it was going to destroy their minds in weeks. So a big contributing factor here is that this has not been publicized, which seems like a major failure of both the medical and political worlds in the USA. It shouldn't take more than a decade for news of something this destructive to spread.