I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.
I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.
I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.
Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.
So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.
Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.
Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.
[0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list.
I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it.
If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1]
> society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them
In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world
Can you cite this? How much does the US spend on entitlements vs other countries?