Homeless Camp In Affluent Neighborhood

[marshwiggle]

This is one of the reasons the "housing first" approach has been shown to be the most effective-- it is much easier to manage a psychiatric condition when you have a stable place to live, can get your prescriptions delivered and always know where your pills are, and have adequate sleep and regular meals (stress and sleep deprivation can trigger psychotic and manic episodes). Better yet these buildings generally have on-site social workers.

There are some tricky issues around autonomy (and some innovative solutions, like having people file care plans when they are lucid for use when they aren't), but that really isn't the primary issue-- house people, provide adequate *voluntary* treatment, and then when we've done all that we can have a debate about the best way to deal with those cases where people refuse treatment.

This is going to cause the same problem as the situation Mamselle described. The "first phase" of a program is popular and gets completed, but the "second phase", which is more difficult but necessary, gets put off or cancelled, leaving things in a mess. Politicians do this so often that voters are extremely skeptical, which makes it hard to get support for these initiatives. If you want to get buy-in, then you have to give people clarity up front about how you will deal with people who refuse treatment, and indeed what constitutes "refusing treatment". Otherwise you're just another salesperson saying "Trust me!", and will be met with the same cynicism.

[mamselle]

I also have not encountered, on balance, so many people unwilling to follow their med protocols  or refusing treatment, per se, as challenged by the roadblocks to getting the meds, having a safe place to store and administer them (where someone won't try to rip them off, or attack them mid-syringe of a legal painkiller for fire-damaged skin-graft pain), and getting accurate refills on time.

Not having a permanent address (now in this state, remedied by permission to use an acquiescing shelter, church, synagogue, mosque or a P.O. box) kept people from getting a replacement ID if one were lost or stolen at night in the shelter. No ID, no refills. Also no safe place to send SSI checks.

People are very aware of their own dietary constraints, so diabetics and those with celiac disease have to be very careful how much shelter food they eat: like many large kitchens, the use of salt, sugar, and pastry flour often become "filler" when funds for protein run short and the U.S. Gov. bread,  cheese and lunch meat are held up in transit, or delayed when grandstanding filibusters hold up a budget approval.

With established housing, services are easier to coordinate. Without it, the person you've been working with for six months to get a job and an approved section-8 apartment gets jailed for loitering on the between-nights the smaller shelters impose to let overflow clients get a bed after 3 days without one...and like chutes and ladders, they're back to square one, because the jail sentence has wiped out their eligibility for the jobs program, and the apartment went to someone else because the forms weren't signed in time.

M.

[Caracal]

I do not much care whether you are offended by the notion that someone who is mentally incompetent should be made to accept treatment that would restore his competency, or at least ameliorate his condition significantly.  Tough.   We make people do all sorts of things for their own good....and for the good of society, and for both of these goods, leaving people in an incompetent state when it is not necessary is a cancer, bolstered by idiot libertarians on the left and right.

As to scumbags who trash communities by selling narcotics, what we gots here be a failyah to communicate.

Yeah, it isn't that simple. Drug dealers are often users themselves and they are often very young. It also just doesn't do anything to reduce the supply of drugs. People don't deal drugs because they are looking for a safe, risk free career option. All you do is end up with more people in jail.

As for forcing people into treatment, I'm not a libertarian, but I do find the idea troubling. I think you're going to these fantasies of state coercion without trying to imagine an actual social safety net.

[apl68]

I do not much care whether you are offended by the notion that someone who is mentally incompetent should be made to accept treatment that would restore his competency, or at least ameliorate his condition significantly.  Tough.   We make people do all sorts of things for their own good....and for the good of society, and for both of these goods, leaving people in an incompetent state when it is not necessary is a cancer, bolstered by idiot libertarians on the left and right.

As to scumbags who trash communities by selling narcotics, what we gots here be a failyah to communicate.

Yeah, it isn't that simple. Drug dealers are often users themselves and they are often very young. It also just doesn't do anything to reduce the supply of drugs. People don't deal drugs because they are looking for a safe, risk free career option. All you do is end up with more people in jail.

As for forcing people into treatment, I'm not a libertarian, but I do find the idea troubling. I think you're going to these fantasies of state coercion without trying to imagine an actual social safety net.

Enforcement of strict drug laws can have only a limited effect in reducing availability once the horse has gotten out of the barn, but elimination of controls on them lets out the rest of the herd and is a sure recipe for flooding a locality with drugs and increasing the amount of harm they do.  It's no accident that some of the cities (San Francisco comes to mind) with the most extreme homeless problems also have gone the farthest down that road.  Unfortunately more and more states are running down that road now.  We're going to continue to see steep increases in drug use and drug-induced deaths and psychoses, despite the expenditure of billions for "harm reduction."

Forcing people into mental treatment is a troubling issue with no easy answers.  The presence of so many seriously mentally ill people on the streets seems to have made some nostalgic for the days of the big state mental hospitals, but those weren't really very good solutions to the problem in their day.  The "housing first" strategy mentioned above for treating the mentally ill homeless does tend to work best.  Manselle's description of how coordinating the treatments of people in medical need in the absence of any sort of stable housing situation becomes a nearly impossible task is all too on the nose.

[downer]

One of the problems with coerced treatment for addiction in the US is that much of the treatment that gets provided is  ineffective. Just a large waste of money. So many badly run expensive rehab centers.

There are reasonably effective treatments available, but people also need a lot of support once they come out of treatment. Until the US grapples more rationally with health care, forcing to get "treatment" is just another phony solution.

[mahagonny]

I do not much care whether you are offended by the notion that someone who is mentally incompetent should be made to accept treatment that would restore his competency, or at least ameliorate his condition significantly.  Tough.   We make people do all sorts of things for their own good....and for the good of society, and for both of these goods, leaving people in an incompetent state when it is not necessary is a cancer, bolstered by idiot libertarians on the left and right.

As to scumbags who trash communities by selling narcotics, what we gots here be a failyah to communicate.

Yeah, it isn't that simple. Drug dealers are often users themselves and they are often very young. It also just doesn't do anything to reduce the supply of drugs. People don't deal drugs because they are looking for a safe, risk free career option. All you do is end up with more people in jail.

How is people who sell hard drugs in jail not a better situation than people selling hard drugs on the street, carrying guns, having gangs and turf wars? Build more jails.
I'm worried about the urban community with the hot weather and long daylight hours ahead and who knows whether the police presence will be sufficient. As we take note of the one year anniversary of a black minimum wage retail worker calling the police to ask for protection from the criminal activity of the late George Floyd.

[Caracal]

I do not much care whether you are offended by the notion that someone who is mentally incompetent should be made to accept treatment that would restore his competency, or at least ameliorate his condition significantly.  Tough.   We make people do all sorts of things for their own good....and for the good of society, and for both of these goods, leaving people in an incompetent state when it is not necessary is a cancer, bolstered by idiot libertarians on the left and right.

As to scumbags who trash communities by selling narcotics, what we gots here be a failyah to communicate.

Yeah, it isn't that simple. Drug dealers are often users themselves and they are often very young. It also just doesn't do anything to reduce the supply of drugs. People don't deal drugs because they are looking for a safe, risk free career option. All you do is end up with more people in jail.

How is people who sell hard drugs in jail not a better situation than people selling hard drugs on the street, carrying guns, having gangs and turf wars? Build more jails.

Because there will just be different people selling drugs.

[mahagonny]

I do not much care whether you are offended by the notion that someone who is mentally incompetent should be made to accept treatment that would restore his competency, or at least ameliorate his condition significantly.  Tough.   We make people do all sorts of things for their own good....and for the good of society, and for both of these goods, leaving people in an incompetent state when it is not necessary is a cancer, bolstered by idiot libertarians on the left and right.

As to scumbags who trash communities by selling narcotics, what we gots here be a failyah to communicate.

Yeah, it isn't that simple. Drug dealers are often users themselves and they are often very young. It also just doesn't do anything to reduce the supply of drugs. People don't deal drugs because they are looking for a safe, risk free career option. All you do is end up with more people in jail.

How is people who sell hard drugs in jail not a better situation than people selling hard drugs on the street, carrying guns, having gangs and turf wars? Build more jails.

Because there will just be different people selling drugs.

It's very depressing, isn't it, the number of people who fall victim to the temptation of street narcotics. However, there are always some who will never use these drugs of their own volition, and if they can be protected from the presence of those who would, I don't see how we do not owe it to the non-users to keep their neighborhoods drug-free at any cost. Or, alternatively, you make the drugs legal and affordable and put the gangs out of business. But you have to decide something. Otherwise, the government and its laws are illegitimate. I have had friends, black white and other, who are determined never to use illegal inebriants, and some whom would never even use legal ones. It can be done.

[Kron3007]

I love the argument that the libertarian viewpoint is a cancer presented with the assumption that we have anything remotely approaching that philosophy being implemented. What we do have is a standard of bilegalism where those of us who can be threatened with state violence to extract money are made to "follow rules" and those who have nothing for the state to extract via threat of violence are left to "do their own thing." To put it simply, if I can be made to have 9 licenses for act of commerce that are voluntary, why can we not tell someone else they can't relieve themselves in the middle of the road, shoot up in public, sleep in such a way that prevents others from utilizing a sidewalk or maintain conditions likely to cause or exacerbate a public health crisis?

The federal register is growing at a rate far quicker than anyone could possibly read it by even devoting their entire time to this endeavor, not to mention similar activity in all 50 states. One in three occupations requires government permission via license. Permits are required for any number of activities including....wait for it....protesting. If you were to ask a random neutral observer from elsewhere what philosophy of government is implemented in the united states, Libertarianism would not be the answer in response during the current or previous administration. There is no major political figure that has a snowball's chance in hell in this country of achieving material control over governance who can even remotely be considered a libertarian, yet this phantom villain still exists. Why? The reason is obvious. You (those on either side of the political debate) have made the argument that a central authority needs to control our lives and its just a matter of finding the "right" people at the helm. After multiple failures to do so in every possible capacity, that argument becomes less and less plausible. Darn. Must be the fault of someone who wants to build their house, run a business or otherwise live their life without intervention from some incompetent and/or psychopathic bureaucratic scumbag.

It's true that the US is not libertarian, but that dosn't mean that libertarian ideals are not used to sell people on things.  The republican party is very adept at this, selling the fear of government coming to take your money, guns, freedoms, etc.  Then, once they are in power, the government expands, deficits continue to grow, but they continue to sell these goods and their loyal base continue to believe what they are selling.  So, it is completely possible for libertarian ideals to be a cancer without your government being libertarian.

As for an actual libertarian government, it seems fundamentally flawed anyway (at least at the scale of the USA). 

[financeguy]

If your definition of a cancer is a philosophical principal that someone can sell without actually implementing, you could say nearly anything is a cancer, "peace and love" for example. Since nearly all things human are flawed, placing this label on the libertarian philosophy is not a particularly high bar. We are choosing between multiple options, all of which are flawed to some degree. 

[mahagonny]

Re: fun metaphors

Government is a vital organ that has grown errantly until it is 75% cancer. Libertarianism is chemotherapy. It fights the disease but also harms the host organism.

[Kron3007]

If your definition of a cancer is a philosophical principal that someone can sell without actually implementing, you could say nearly anything is a cancer, "peace and love" for example. Since nearly all things human are flawed, placing this label on the libertarian philosophy is not a particularly high bar. We are choosing between multiple options, all of which are flawed to some degree.

Yes, you could, but some examples are more problematic than others.  The libertarian pitch is just used in this way far more than peace and love.

[Kron3007]

Re: fun metaphors

Government is a vital organ that has grown errantly until it is 75% cancer. Libertarianism is chemotherapy. It fights the disease but also harms the host organism.

Sure, and too much or used incorrectly will kill you quicker than the cancer.

I agree with some libertarian concepts, but think taken to the extreme it is flawed and it is being used to sell harmful policies.

[mahagonny]

I would think that the reincarnation of 'peace and love' is 'defund the police' which, being a specific prescription for action, is much more dangerous than the original.
ETA: well, instead if inane, actually risky.

[marshwiggle]

From Miriam Webster:

Definition of libertarian
1: an advocate of the doctrine of free will

2a: a person who upholds the principles of individual liberty especially of thought and action

  b (capitalized) : a member of a political party advocating libertarian principles

From libertarianism.org:

A libertarian is committed to the principle that liberty is the most important political value. Liberty means being free to make your own choices about your own life, that what you do with your body and your property ought to be up to you. Other people must not forcibly interfere with your liberty, and you must not forcibly interfere with theirs.

From Wikipedia:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy and movement that upholds liberty as a core principle. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association.

From all of these, it's not clear that causes on the left advocating decriminilization of drugs, access to abortion, marriage equity, etc. do not count as libertarian, just as much as causes on the right about private property rights and so on.

An authoritarian and/or theocratic state would seem to be the only systems that would count as clearly anti-libertarian. In modern democracies, debate is about which choices people should have freedom to make, with the assumption on both sides of the debate that in certain matters there ought to be a great deal of autonomy.