<story><title>Seattle has stopped charging people for personal drug possession</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/no-charges-for-personal-drug-possession-seattles-bold-gamble-to-bring-peace-after-the-war-on-drugs/2019/06/11/69a7bb46-7285-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>docbrown</author><text>If homelessness is a problem, why should the alternative be to put them in jail or prison? For something as simple as car camping, it seems like an unjustifiable punishment for a simple offense. Without getting into much of a semantics argument, this post itself puts off a sense of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude when it comes to homelessness. In a city that has a GDP of $231 billion in 2010[1], it seems ineffective to punish the homeless instead of trying to rid the city of the problem in a more productive manner than hauling offenders away. While public consumption of drugs should still be a citational offense, the simple possession of a drug should not be a jail sentence. There are many users that have deeper issues that need to be worked out to rid them of their addiction and putting them into confinement is not always the most effective way. Seattle needs to invest in safe injection sites, public health programs, and they need to build more shelters for their homeless. In today’s society, homeless are looked at as the bottom of the feeder chain, but when we do that, we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.&lt;p&gt;1: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greyhilladvisors.com&amp;#x2F;gross-metropolitan-product&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greyhilladvisors.com&amp;#x2F;gross-metropolitan-product&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>dogmatic_di</author><text>As someone living there right now the article really doesn&amp;#x27;t properly cover the discontent in the city.&lt;p&gt;There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done too much to encourage homelessness (particularly with the expansion of policies like this one). &amp;quot;Tent City&amp;quot; has spread so far that it&amp;#x27;s getting into the suburbs and from a residents perspective it&amp;#x27;s getting far worse not better. I have routinely seen people shooting up and smoking glass pipes (not marijuana) in broad daylight in the Downtown and Pioneer Square areas. There&amp;#x27;s shouting, theft, property crime at all hours of the night near my apartment (Though strangely compared to SF I know very few people who have had their cars broken into).&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the tone of this article, Seattle is not a model to follow, it&amp;#x27;s a cautionary tale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>natalyarostova</author><text>A tremendous amount of these homeless don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to quit heroin. They don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to live in shelters. They &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to live in a tent and shoot heroin.&lt;p&gt;There is a heroin addict that lives on one street I use to walk to work. He can&amp;#x27;t have more than a few years to live, he&amp;#x27;s as broken as humans get. The street he lives on is littered with literally hundreds of his used needles across bus stops, gardens, yards, paths. He defecates on the street and in bags that he leaves around.&lt;p&gt;Letting people do this legally, which Seattle now de facto does, is not appropriate.</text></comment>
<story><title>Seattle has stopped charging people for personal drug possession</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/no-charges-for-personal-drug-possession-seattles-bold-gamble-to-bring-peace-after-the-war-on-drugs/2019/06/11/69a7bb46-7285-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>docbrown</author><text>If homelessness is a problem, why should the alternative be to put them in jail or prison? For something as simple as car camping, it seems like an unjustifiable punishment for a simple offense. Without getting into much of a semantics argument, this post itself puts off a sense of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” attitude when it comes to homelessness. In a city that has a GDP of $231 billion in 2010[1], it seems ineffective to punish the homeless instead of trying to rid the city of the problem in a more productive manner than hauling offenders away. While public consumption of drugs should still be a citational offense, the simple possession of a drug should not be a jail sentence. There are many users that have deeper issues that need to be worked out to rid them of their addiction and putting them into confinement is not always the most effective way. Seattle needs to invest in safe injection sites, public health programs, and they need to build more shelters for their homeless. In today’s society, homeless are looked at as the bottom of the feeder chain, but when we do that, we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.&lt;p&gt;1: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greyhilladvisors.com&amp;#x2F;gross-metropolitan-product&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greyhilladvisors.com&amp;#x2F;gross-metropolitan-product&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>dogmatic_di</author><text>As someone living there right now the article really doesn&amp;#x27;t properly cover the discontent in the city.&lt;p&gt;There is an overwhelming sense that Seattle has done too much to encourage homelessness (particularly with the expansion of policies like this one). &amp;quot;Tent City&amp;quot; has spread so far that it&amp;#x27;s getting into the suburbs and from a residents perspective it&amp;#x27;s getting far worse not better. I have routinely seen people shooting up and smoking glass pipes (not marijuana) in broad daylight in the Downtown and Pioneer Square areas. There&amp;#x27;s shouting, theft, property crime at all hours of the night near my apartment (Though strangely compared to SF I know very few people who have had their cars broken into).&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the tone of this article, Seattle is not a model to follow, it&amp;#x27;s a cautionary tale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>briffle</author><text>I agree with you in principal, but at the same time:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; we begin to strip people of their humanity and instead we look at them as simply statistics or an nuance.&lt;p&gt;Where I live, the groups of car campers (or often times falling apart RV&amp;#x27;s) seem to attract crime, drug use, theft, vandalism, etc.  I stopped going to one park in the middle of a city with a large group of car campers, when I found a used syringe in the fenced in dog play area, and saw two different heroin deals go down while playing with my dog. (one of them involved prostitution right in the back seat of the car in the middle of a city park)</text></comment>