HELP CLEAN AND SOBER HOMELESS PEOPLE, NOT DRUNKS AND DOPERS!
By Max R. Weller
Read the story in the Daily Camera here.
Excerpt copied below:
Blankets left behind by a homeless individual sit unattended at the Glen Huntington Central Park Bandshell earlier this year. (Jeremy Papasso / Staff Photographer)
Boulder police have noticed a concerning trend among the homeless people they interact with most: More are choosing methamphetamine over other substances.
Boulder police officers on the Homeless Outreach Team estimate that 80 percent of the homeless people they interact with now use meth, versus 15 percent five years ago, according to a report presented to the Boulder City Council on Oct. 2.
Meth use traps some of the city’s most vulnerable in a “vicious cycle” that is difficult to break, Boulder police officer Jenny Paddock said in an interview. The drug makes it easier to cope with living outside, she said, but makes it more difficult to find stable housing.
While heroin might get all the headlines, she said, meth is “just as devastating to individuals and users.”
The numbers from Boulder police are based on anecdotal experience (the Homeless Philosopher also greatly relies on anecdotal experience, but prefers to call it firsthand observation — MRW) and come from the subset of homeless who interact with police, said Paddock, who is one of two officers on the Homeless Outreach Team.
“We try and focus on the people who are the most vulnerable,” she said, which includes “high utilizers,” or those who often get tickets, go to the emergency room or require welfare checks.
Paddock and others attribute the rise in meth use to price. One person told Paddock that “it’s cheap, and it’s the best drug ever.” It can also help those who are homeless stay up at night to avoid camping tickets.
I never had a camping ticket in a decade of sleeping outside in Boulder and its environs, because I kept a low profile by staying SOBER and using common sense. Anyone else could do the same; IT’S A CHOICE!
I think you can point to Boulder County Coordinated Entry as the cause of this new migration of methheads to the Boulder Bubble. Apparently, word has spread far and wide among the worst-behaved transients in America that Boulder, CO wants to give them all of life’s necessities for FREE . . . This has always been the case with chronic alcoholics and potheads, since I arrived here as a clean and sober homeless man in early 2008, but the homeless shelter / services industry has reached a new low in 2018:
WAY TO GO, DO-GOODERS! We can look forward to depraved methheads cooking their poison in taxpayer-subsidized housing costing as much as $300K per unit. WTF? Call it compassion in action, Boulder-style.
A sane public policy would move the lowest common denominator of BUMS on down the road, even paying for bus fare back to wherever they came from, and it would cost only a tiny fraction compared to endlessly supporting the drug addicts’ self-absorbed lifestyle. Treatment for meth addiction is more of a joke than programs which purport to treat alcoholism, with the typical substance abuser recycling through them again and again, until the money from various sources is exhausted.
Continuing excerpt from the DC article:
Paddock has noticed alcoholics now using meth, and Robinson said opioid abusers also are leaning toward meth.
“Meth makes life outdoors more tolerable,” Paddock said. “Yet it makes housing hard.”
Those who use meth have been more resistant to help, according to Paddock, who says “their entire focus is on meth.” Some refuse to get help.
Others who do get help and go to an inpatient program, like the Fort Lyons Supportive Residential Community in Las Animas, often relapse. Paddock said Boulder police have helped send several people to the program only to see them leave within a month.
“I don’t think the people who focus on treatment know of a good way to treat meth,” she said. (Nor anything else, from what I’ve seen — MRW)
Long term use of meth can change the brain’s dopamine system, affecting parts of the brain involved with emotion and memory, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. A 2004 study found that, even if someone recovers and stops using meth, prior use could still affect the person’s dopamine cell activity.
(This is similar to what we call Wet Brain among chronic alcoholics, like those in Housing First at 1175 Lee Hill.)
Despite the Boulder do-gooders’ belief that they can lead our nation and the world in solving problems like homelessness, the sorry results of their hugely expense social experimentation can be seen passed out in shelters and out-of-the-way campsites all over the city.
See also:
Boulder’s Coordinated Entry system for homelessness is a sham
Boulder alcoholics support ‘Right to Rest’ bill
Donna the homeless drama queen at N. Broadway & Laramie Blvd.
