Addicts In The Faculty Lounge

... are different than addicts in real life.

I'm not including an image in this blog post because I've known several addicts and have too much love for them to use a photo. Every addict was someone's little boy or little girl.

In San Francisco, just to use one example of academics trying to solve the addiction and homelessness problems, they're handing out free needles and putting up needle disposal stations all over the place. The end result is needles everywhere on the ground. It's as predictable as it is possible to be.

Well, only if you know real addicts instead of talk about them theoretically in the faculty lounge.

When an addict uses, they're not rational. They're not going to shoot up and then calmly gather their used paraphernalia and then deposit it, neatly, in some bin. They're not going to use safe procedures for injections, their not going to swab the site with alcohol and they're not going to spray hand sanitizer on their palms in the process. They're going to shoot up so that they can get loaded. And if you've ever known a real, live addict, you'd know that.

You'd also stop expecting them to turn their lives around. Most of them won't. If they're homeless, they're going to stay homeless because their brains are rotted out. If they aren't homeless, they soon will be because they can't manage their lives.

By the time you reach San Francisco / Los Angeles / Seattle levels of homelessness and addiction, the best you can hope to do is build big warehouses to house the poor devils for the rest of their lives.

And, for the love of God, get control of the border so you can stop at least some of the drugs making their way in to the cities.