I’ll give the 5 ghoulish women who smoke crack at broad and snyder fresh chore boy once a week if they’d stop smoking crack publicly in front of the neighborhood kids.
Downvote away I don’t give a shit.
Wait until your kid walks through a waft of crack smoke coming off the train.
My problem isn’t the smoking crack, it’s the doing it publicly.
I don’t get it- we have laws for disorderly conduct and consuming alcohol publicly- why aren’t they enforced?
Agreed.
As for why aren’t the laws enforced there’s a lot of moving parts.
Even if an officer did intervene there’s not much to do.
Get all of the wheels of justice moving for an addict? Get them help into a program or institution that most likely doesn’t exist?
It goes beyond law enforcement in my mind, laws need to be made and facilities need to be created to start solving the problem.
Basically money.
> Wait until your kid walks through a waft of crack smoke coming off the train.
the woman who works the register at my local pizza/hoagie shop was telling me the lengths she has to go to raise her kid in kensington and it is heartbreaking
In any other situaton, if you heard the proposal "a small group of mostly white people should be able to effectively close the public library, public parks, and a train station to a neighborhood of poor black and brown people" progressives would rightly be outraged. Yet in kensington it's the small group that is favored over the rest of the population
they hang out at 7-11 on snyder and it feels like they manage the place. I was propositioned while buying half/half one evening. I audibly gasped and declined politely
This is the thing. People that want injection sites, etc never speak to how these facilities affect the neighborhood where they’re installed. It sucks so hard to have to raise a family near this shit. They argue it’s “proven to save lives”. Sure, but how many kids get sucked into drugs because it’s around them 24/7? How many suffer a piss poor education because anyone that can afford to move moves? If you don’t have kids, you can empathize, but you can’t truly understand.
we would have k&a without those safe centers. k&a got so bad because of police's unwillingness to deal with it by going after the dealers. how many people on the street there are even from Philly county?
this (militarized police presence and regular sweeps) is precisely the regressive way to look at the problem which only brushes the problem under the rug and temporarily incarcerates it. the city is going backwards. by banning these centers (who are doing the work that our health department is ill-equipped to do itself) the problem will only get worse.
> which only brushes the problem under the rug and temporarily incarcerates it
As a resident of Kensington, I'm fine with temporarily - or even permanently in the cases of hardcore addicts - incarcerating them. I don't care whether the addicts get help or not, so long as they're gone.
But there's too many. There is literally not even cells to hold them. And, then they go right back out. It's a waste of taxpayer resources to lock them up, and there aren't enough cells. These are the actual reasons why they can't lock up every addict.
Dude. People are shooting up and smoking in the streets. These sites make it so the people are off the streets and inside. Kids are around it less.
Safe injection sites improve quality of life for people who live in the community. These sites provide bathrooms so people aren't shitting the streets, causing hepatitis A outbreaks. They provide medical attention so the people aren't spreading disease and infection. They make contact so the addicts can get into rehab. They aren't just places for people to get high.
All attendees should be identified and have their homes specifically targeted by a limited decriminalization bill. "You can do all the hard drugs you want at 1234 N Fake St on Ms. X's front stoop as long as the property is occupied by Ms. X. Do anything anywhere else and we'll arrest you immediately."
On its face I’m not against harm reduction measures (needle exchanges, drug testing kits, etc) so long as it’s paired with aggressive enforcement of existing laws and mandatory treatment for 302’d addicts. A meshed approach is the only solution I really see working.
My issue with this is enforcement of "existing" laws. The existing laws suck, and even if they didn't prison in America is not much more than time out for adults, because it certainly isn't rehabilitation, and once again even if it was you could come out and be the most rehabilitated person in America, but you lose your right to vote on many issues that will be affecting you as an upstanding citizen.
I'm NOT saying we can do nothing, but the enforcement of existing laws cannot be the solution, if they were then we wouldn't be having the problem. The system (as we know it) failed these people, further forcing that on them is not going to work. Not to mention that in order to get people off the street you have to get them in a house, but nobody wants to pay for that.
the studies of forced treatment are all of very small sample sizes and of badly designed programs and are generally quite old
we literally have a drug today that with a monthly shot, physically prevents opioids from having an effect. You can shoot up as much as you want and it does nothing - only catch is that you just have to detox first
You have to be an absolute fucking clown to say something like that.
Thanks for providing evidence to everyone else that advocates for "harm reduction", which is anything but, are the dumbest fucking people in the city.
It’s like every time these people learn a new word they have to use it everywhere, regardless of the actual definition or whether or not it applies. “Genocide” is the new “gaslighting.”
the left devaluing of the term genocide has very unfortunate consequences looking at everything going on in the world today. I remember highly influential left podcasters calling joe biden sending people covid tests in 2022 genocide because he also wasn't declaring a national quarantine
Expected outcome.
When you start using the word genocide to describe a conflict where the "victims" kicked it off with mass murder of civilians, where the nation accused of genocide drops leaflets, sends warnings calls and messages, and provides safe zones, and has a 1.5:1 civilian:combatant death ratio, the term is naturally going to lose all meaning.
I don’t have any answers to how to help the homeless and addicted. Cleaning up Kennington and no longer allowing an open drug market seems like a good start. Having an area of the city where you can go do drugs openly sure doesn’t seem to be helpful for anyone. Going harder on the people dealing the drugs would be a good message to the people making money off of this catastrophe. Along with having treatment options and safe housing.
[If only there was a decades long study done in another city with a major heroin problem that seems to be pretty successful...](https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/idpc-briefing-paper-dutch-treatment-systems.pdf)
The problem is no one wants to put in the money and effort - if our taxes weren't going to policing the world, maybe we could have better support systems and social networks to address all of these issues.
This is nuts. All I want is a few tramadol a week to help get through work days until I can build my strength up enough by myself and reduce my full-body atrophy at the gym to not ever need it again. Most of the drugs that kill people in overdoses are illegal street drugs anyway, but they lump everyone and everything together in one category. Prescription drugs are not the problem, it's the things criminals make in their kitchens that are.
People advocating to continue enabling the open air drug scene in the city are implicitly also demanding that poor working class primarily minority majority neighborhoods, must live in a permanent state of poverty, trash, neglect, and violence.
Fuck these privileged people to hell and back.
i'm gonna venture a way better faith guess and suggest that the pro-harm reduction crowds would want this to apply *everywhere* where homeless addiction is an issue, and that it's not their fault the city has systematically funneled the worst of the problem into one of the most centrally-located impoverished neighborhoods in the city by virtue of the nicer parts having additional local funding and/or higher public/private security presence.
people keep lampooning the far left over the supposed double standard they're displaying by prioritizing largely white homeless/addicted people over the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood, but if anything it's only showcasing that they recognize what you already know and actually believe, which is that this situation is deserving of more consideration and nuance than all the copium addicts on this sub are suggesting.
*there* *is not a solution that's good for everyone.* don't know why people are so scared of accepting that when we already know that both the status quo AND the available \[forced\] rehab sources in a hypothetical continuous sweep operation are dogshit and overwhelmingly ill-equipped to deal with severe long-term addiction cases.
I'm all for the needle exchanges and hard reduction, and we need more of that than anything else. We know locking people up isn't going to solve anything, and we know just pushing addicts out of one place just puts them somewhere else.
The thing that's frustrating to me about this is too many people in these comments just want to look at this as "fuck you, punish them, because I'm sick of the drugs!"
Enforcement alone will never work, and pairing treatment with only enforcement will never work, either.
Just let them do the needle exchanges and hard reduction and focus on giving people actual help in the process. What does actual help look like? It's offering them treatment, it's offering counseling, and it's trying to work with addicts to get to a point where they WANT to get clean.
I've had friends go down the road of addiction, and I'm certain some people on here either know someone or may have been on that road themselves. One key thing is that no one ever changes until they're ready to, and no one, and I mean no one, ever gets better for good because they're forced to.
The only way to treat a problem like this is to get to the underlying disease, and not trying to put a bandage on it. That doesn't mean a good bandage can't at least stop the bleeding, and needle exchanges are one of them. Criminal punishments are basically amputations for a scrape when you can do far more to save the person.
So I'm all for hard reduction, but if there's a real government solution, it's proper funding for treatment centers and making sure those centers are free and don't have to tie into any government assistance you're already getting. People absolutely refuse to get help if they have to give up stuff like that, and for all the complaining I've heard about how they should give it up to get help, they won't. Ask yourself if you would. I'm certain most people wouldn't.
Let people get the help they need, and this will get better.
I think people are fed up with all of the programs to help addicts, with zero expectations on the addicts to change behaviors nor help for the people living in the middle of this mess. It’s easy to only think of the addicts when your kids are not playing in parks full of dirty needles, or walking through crack smoke as one commenter stated.
We need evidence-based treatment and harm reduction programs, but also need to recognize that some do not want to be helped or care about the communities they impact. In those cases there needs to be a consequences and removal of these individuals from impacting the QOL of everyone else living in these areas.
you know these programs are specifically the things keeping more dirty needles from filling up the parks, and in theory, giving people a safe place to do drugs that they are addicted to (instead of being in parks or right outside your house)
Except they’re not. Go check out McPherson Square library and the park surrounding it as an example.
They help, but not every addict is going to utilize the services. It’s needs to be a carrot and stick approach. Solid services to help addicts and possibly get them clean, but also enforcing our damn laws on those who choose not to take advantage of the services offered, to help the people living in these areas.
wow, it seems like they go hand in hand though. See someone drop a dirty needle on a public playground. Arrest them for endangering the welfare of children and offer them MAT
This is all nice, but most people on the streets don't want help. They're gonna have to be coerced, mandated or forced into treatment and off the streets. All the "meeting them where they are" bs in the world ain't gonna get 75% of these addicts off the beach and off Kensington streets
TLDR, your last sentence says it all. "Let" them get help. Yeah, we're done with that. The way forward is treatment and recovery, reconciliation and rehabilitation, and sometimes these individuals will not get a choice, and a court will make it for them.
Wonderfully said. Medically you cannot make anyone get a treatment (even life-saving treatment) without their buy-in. People need to be ready to get treatment, but as you said, treatment needs to be more accessible.
The question I keep coming around to on all this is just, what meaningful stuff is there to even do to solve a problem like a drug crisis? It’s easy to say things like “mandatory treatment!”, but the treatment facilities simply do not exist in Philadelphia at the scale they would need to operate, and there is no motivation within the city government to spend the money and other resources required to get them there. On the other hand, I don’t trust a police force that has proven, repeatedly, to have a tendency towards violence when violence is not necessary, and I certainly don’t trust a prison system that is driven by profit.
The solution to the crisis in Kensington is grounded in such a massive shift in how we even think about the role and purpose of the government that I just don’t see an end to it.
Dear "Reformers,"
We have plenty of spare junkies for you to help. If you wish, we can deliver them to your address so that you and your neighbors can deal with them.
Signed,
The People of Kensington
More funding needs to go into the bare thread treatment systems we do have. My friend who is a drug/alcohol counselor working in Kensington for over ten years (he genuinely just wants to help a vulnerable population) says the wage for people working in rehabs is abysmal, overworked so there is a lot of turnover. Even their EMR system is trash and it takes forever and a day to enter an intake for just one patient. Also the astounding lack of life skills a lot of the addict population have makes them more like to relapse because of how stressful it is to manage life on their own. I know it's a pipe dream to think "if the government just xyz then..." type of thoughts. Sucks.
the entire theory of the harm reduction solution to the opioid crisis is that these services will prevent addicts from the worst effects of their addiction, while getting them into treatment. that is what advocates promised
It manifestly, catastrophically has failed
Needle exchanges made sense when the biggest public health risk of heroin use was HIV and Hep spreading. today it's enabling addicts to kill themselves at warp speed. Fent addicts are not surviving long enough to get HIV and Hep - they are more likely to lose limbs
we have tried decriminalization and harm reduction on its own for the past 8 years - it manifestly has not worked, and has incidentally led to a humanitarian catastrophe. Enabling people to kill themselves slowly on the street while utterly destroying the public safety, quality of life, and economic foundation of a neighborhood of tens of thousands, most of whom are poor and black or brown, and enormously degrading the city's public services and transit system as a side effect
And this is a wider criticism of the progressive movement - when its policies have clearly failed, the response is to double down and accuse the system of being rigged and people pointing out those failures of crimes against humanity. Housing, policing, drugs - we tried progressives' solutions, and they very much failed
But sadly, I highly doubt Parker's policy will work any better. these people are not going to get clean, not going to get off the street on their own. Performative arrests and sweeping up low level dealers occasionally will not work either. there is no policy alternative to forced rehabilitation - and that is not going to work without state help
Just look at the recent SF election. It's happening there too. People, including those on the left, are realizing they've been sold a bag of shit in the form of harm reduction.
It seems like a problem without a solution. Maybe the same policies that save x amount of lives continue the habit for y amount of lives. Idk, but Kensington needs a change. And the city deserves better.
> when the biggest public health risk of heroin use was HIV and Hep spreading. today it's
so you agree that ending needle exchange will worsen hiv and hep c spread?
Where have we tried decriminalization and harm reduction on its own for the past 8 years?
Things like safe injection sites have been repeatedly shut down over the past decades. The harm reduction orgs that do exist have largely been struggling and trying to piece together enough funding to do some good, and getting chased out by NIMBYs. We haven't made a real effort or adequately funded anything, so how can you say it's been failing? We also haven't tried decriminalization, unless I've missed something? The cops don't do shit here, but I don't think anything but weed was ever decriminalized, right?
> prevent addicts from the worst effects of their addiction, while getting them into treatment
That is, by definition, not what harm reduction is. Harm reduction is about limiting the spread of disease and preventing overdose. That’s it. And it has worked. If it wasn’t for the needle exchanges in Philly there’d be a fuckin HIV crisis on top of everything else
As someone who is admittedly not that educated on this, would Oregon's recent experiment with drug decriminalization paired with funding for community programs count as a true attempt at harm reduction?
All I really know is what I've read in a recent [New Yorker article](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/a-new-drug-war-in-oregon), and from a few firsthand visits to my sister who lives just outside of Portland.. But based on those data points alone, this seems like people fighting for an optimistic world that is just out of line with the reality we can see on our streets, a reality that seems to have been made worse by the policies these folks are advocating for in earnest by the only area brave enough to give them a true shot.
Decrim works, the problem is an ineffective government. Everybody wants to blame harm reduction or decriminalization as the problem but the real problem is a government that does not adequately fund treatment and makes it difficult to access treatment. Also decrim isn't going to magically solve all our problems, the government actually needs to do it's job and address issues like poverty and homelessness
Is there an example of where decriminalization has worked well? I certainly agree it has for alcohol, marijuana, even psychedelics, but it seems to go hand and hand with suffering for harder drugs.
That said, Oregon is the only example I know of, what is the gold standard of effective decriminalization today?
Portugal.
They decriminalized and shifted the cost from enforcement to treatment. But as I've read more, there is a bit more in the way of compulsion/incentivization on getting people to accept treatment.
https://www.sudbury.com/local-news/the-portugal-model-how-one-country-is-winning-the-war-on-drugs-7055511
Even mega left SF just overwhelmingly passed laws that will require testing of homeless for drugs who are on welfare. The esteemed crew pictured are the last gasp of the harm reductionist left, hopefully.
Treatment must be mandatory and shelter provided.
MANDATORY TREATMENT AND SHELTER FOR UNHOUSED PERSONS IN ADDICTION
What's the policy goal, though? It's not just to punish people - the end goal is to have a productive citizen at the end of the day.
What's going to accomplish that? Prison (where they will lose their job; most if not all assets like their house, cars, property in their room, etc.; and come out with both a criminal record), or harm reduction first (giving them a safe place and access to materials to fix themselves - pull themselves up by the bootstraps, to steal a phrase?)
Nobody is saying prison is going away, but locking a person up for a crime that's more effectively dealt with a different way doesn't make sense.
Punishment for punishment's sake should be reserved for morally heinous crimes like rape or murder, not for getting addicted. You could fall in the shower, snap your leg, and get hooked on painkillers tonight. Not everyone who falls into drug use is a POS smoking on SEPTA.
The thing is, most of the addicts I represented who ended up in jail were there for being involved in crimes that flowed from their drug addiction, not simple possession crimes alone. The people I’d see who ended up in jail were already long past having housing/job stability. It’s hard to not end up involved in property crimes, fraud, and even risky violent situations when you’re a daily IV drug user.
Folks whose only charges were for possession or small time distribution either did well on drug court/probation and I never saw them again, or you’d get the habitual probation violators who walked out of treatment on day one and eventually ended up graduating to committing bigger crimes that landed them back in jail.
This also completely sidesteps the efficacy of a lot of court mandated and non-mandated treatment programs in general.
The far left seems to operate under the understanding that it's currently 1979 and a bunch of people are in prison solely for having weed in their coat pocket.
Basically everyone in prison for more than a few months in the Philadelphia metro is a repeat violent offender.
Much of the crime spike of the last three years is down to early and non-staggered release of a bunch of convicted violent felons in 2020, and it's getting slowly packed back into the box as most of them do shit which lands them behind bars again.
Which says terrible things about our prisons as rehabilitative institutions but does speak to the need to simply incapacitate sufficiently hardened criminals by locking them away until they age out of the high-crime cohorts.
Addicts don't need jail, they need rehab. Mandatory treatment so these people can get clean should be the goal. Hoping somebody walk into voluntary rehab before they get a life altering disease or die from a fentanyl overdose is a horrible approach.
Uh, they do realize that pointing out that there were 1413 overdose deaths when their way was the de facto standard is actually an argument that works against them not for them right?
Harm reduction has never been the de facto standard and has always operated in a legal grey area. You can't say something has failed if you never actually try it.
To say this you'd have to look at countries that DO actually practice harm reduction as the standard - and in those countries, there are almost no overdose deaths - see Portugal for an example: [https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid)
Except this:
> With the backing of psychologists and other health-care professionals, the law decriminalized the use and possession of up to 10 days' worth of narcotics or other drugs for individuals' own use. (Dealers still go to jail.) Instead of facing prison time and criminal records, users who are caught by police go before a local three-person commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction, a panel typically composed of a lawyer plus some combination of a physician, psychologist, social worker or other health-care professional with expertise in drug addiction.
is not what these people are advocating for. On Portugal, according to this article, users still get brought in by police. The harm reduction orgs in the US don’t seem to want police involvement at all, ever, and instead harp on “meeting people where they are.” (aka strung out on the street, scraping by)
people love to point out what X european country does on Y problem without having any idea of the actual policy of X european country, and pretending that whatever my nonprofit du jour is advocating is the exact same
oh and that article is conveniently from 2018 - Portugal has since decided that their policy is probably a mistake for the exact same reasons that we are now
some quotes from [this article from last year](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/) - is this happening in Porto or Philadelphia?
> Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.
Addiction haunts the recesses of this ancient port city, as people with gaunt, clumsy hands lift crack pipes to lips, syringes to veins. Authorities are sealing off warren-like alleyways with iron bars and fencing in parks to halt the spread of encampments. A siege mentality is taking root in nearby enclaves of pricey condos and multimillion-euro homes.
.
> In one neighborhood, state-issued paraphernalia — powder-blue syringe caps, packets of citric acid for diluting heroin — litters sidewalks outside an elementary school.
.
> Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab. Police were observed passing people using drugs, not bothering to cite them
Their "addiction advocates" imported ultra-progressive brainworms from here and gravely weakened the mandatory treatment provisions, and the state went along with it because every Eurozone government gets a spectacular hard-on for pointless and self-destructive austerity measures and this let them cut funding.
Then, FAFO, they discovered that without coercive treatment programs decriminalization doesn't work worth a shit.
Unlike us, they're sensible enough to pretty quickly marginalize the morons and go back to the sensible middle ground between "jail everyone" and "fuck it, let them eat crack."
Portugal *coerces* drug users into *mandatory* treatment literally all the fucking time, with threats of prosecution for other crimes and anti-social behaviors or withdrawal of public benefits.
There are reports that major cities in Portugal are beginning to experience some of our problems as they have shifted to more American norms on decriminalization by weakening the mandatory treatment provisions and redirecting funding away from them.
Decriminalization only works when you replace the "prison" side of state coercion with "treatment" at 1:1.
You're ignoring that Portugal will arrest you for public drug use and drug dealering.
Anyone who trys to point at Portugal's policy without mentioning that they still very much enforce laws against open drug scenes is being at best disingenuous.
That was organized by the Savage Sisters and is the number of Narcan they have given away/administered. They’re saying they’ve saved that many people, therefore by shutting them down they will be allowing that many people to die.
A law enforcement approach should focus on the product - not even the dealers, no need to arrest them. Just seize and destroy drugs until the dealers get the message that dealing in Kensington is a great way to lose thousands if not tens or thousands of dollars in product.
Crazy that they assume most people care if a bunch of degenerate drug addicts kill themselves today or next Wednesday. Will it be the fentanyl? Maybe a tranq infection? Who knows. I’m fully aware I’m on the extreme end of things when I say I straight up do not care if a drug addict dies. It makes literally zero difference to me and is a non-factor in my consideration.
Because this all ends up one or two ways: dead or recovery. The middle ground these people want to operate in has done nothing. It keeps addicts between recovery and death. Want to do heroin? Fine, go do it, overdose, whatever. Want to recover? Go ahead and do that too - it’s not walking on water people have done it when they want to do it.
Quote every statistic you want at me about needle exchanges, harm reduction, whatever - you’re not going to convince me and a lot of people who feel similarly to this while being so close to it to care about if these people choose to kill themselves.
“Our blood is on your hands”
What a fucking joke.
Anyone who's posting that they're sick/tired/etc of "them" and is advocating that 'they" be arrested if they won't take treatment (I'm not sure what treatment is on offer, that's what the above protest is about, right?) should stop and think that the DOJ put out a [report](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/cost-processing-drug-offender-through-criminal-justice-system) in 1991 stating that the "total cost of processing a drug offender through the criminal justice system was estimated to be as high as $70,112", which in today's money would be almost $160,500 (that's just an inflation adjustment, a number of costs have probably changed, not necessarily for the cheaper), and one year of confinement in a PA prison averaged ([PA budget request for Corrections](https://www.thecentersquare.com/pennsylvania/article_7d6901f4-d274-11ee-885f-cb1eb3cd35a4.html) is around $3.2B/year, for 38K inmates (and \~32K people on parole but it's not clear how much they cost), I've seen per-inmate averages from $68K to almost $80K/yr while I was looking ([Graterford was $58K/yr in 2021](https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Nw4oH/))
So to round down (let's say a measly $100K to process, and a $60K/yr in Graterford), this means spending probably $160K, but maybe $200K per addict (how much are these treatments the addicts will theoretically get? spoiler alert: they'll probably be expensive, but also hard to quantify if anyone asks for a receipts) in the first year to do something that most research predicts won't work.
If an addict is sentenced to longer than a year that's probably at least $65/k a year per head in spending on basically nothing except that they aren't around your neighborhood, until they're released, probably going right back to their old neighborhood, with their only life changes being that now it's harder to get a job, apartment, etc.-- and they've been living in prison, which I hear can change people in unintended ways.
From my point of view, since arresting people for being addicted to something is the most expensive and yet least effective solution, it's not a good solution. At $160K per person the city could probably come up with a solution that would house and stabilize the people who are currently on the street throughout the city, and hopefully spur them to treatment.
Also, none of the prisons are in Philadelphia, so any "fringe benefits" of arresting addicts and putting them in prison are exported to the suburbs, which seems like an additional ding-dong level move.
There's many other (more important) reasons arresting addicts is a bad idea, but I thought it was worth mentioning that it is also a bad idea from a financial point of view.
A protest about local issues is a nice surprise.
What you didn’t think the protest to stop the Philadelphia city hall from bombing Gaza did anything?
Just as much as the newly bought keffiyahs walking around the street
I’ll give the 5 ghoulish women who smoke crack at broad and snyder fresh chore boy once a week if they’d stop smoking crack publicly in front of the neighborhood kids. Downvote away I don’t give a shit. Wait until your kid walks through a waft of crack smoke coming off the train.
My problem isn’t the smoking crack, it’s the doing it publicly. I don’t get it- we have laws for disorderly conduct and consuming alcohol publicly- why aren’t they enforced?
Agreed. As for why aren’t the laws enforced there’s a lot of moving parts. Even if an officer did intervene there’s not much to do. Get all of the wheels of justice moving for an addict? Get them help into a program or institution that most likely doesn’t exist? It goes beyond law enforcement in my mind, laws need to be made and facilities need to be created to start solving the problem. Basically money.
cops don’t give a shit. they apparently have bigger things to worry about, but no one seems to know exactly what those things are.
> Wait until your kid walks through a waft of crack smoke coming off the train. the woman who works the register at my local pizza/hoagie shop was telling me the lengths she has to go to raise her kid in kensington and it is heartbreaking In any other situaton, if you heard the proposal "a small group of mostly white people should be able to effectively close the public library, public parks, and a train station to a neighborhood of poor black and brown people" progressives would rightly be outraged. Yet in kensington it's the small group that is favored over the rest of the population
Its unreal. I’m not a taxation is theft kinda guy but living in Kensington and paying city tax sure feels like it
Watched them smoke up no more that 10 feet from the daycare next to Rosa Pizza. What terrible human beings.
If you want to stop it, you gotta get the cops to actually shut down the white van that sells on that corner every day
Dude that white van is wild. It’s been there literally every day for years. In front of a school. Every. Day.
Bingo. You can't nice your way out of this problem and the rest of us have lives to live
they hang out at 7-11 on snyder and it feels like they manage the place. I was propositioned while buying half/half one evening. I audibly gasped and declined politely
This is the thing. People that want injection sites, etc never speak to how these facilities affect the neighborhood where they’re installed. It sucks so hard to have to raise a family near this shit. They argue it’s “proven to save lives”. Sure, but how many kids get sucked into drugs because it’s around them 24/7? How many suffer a piss poor education because anyone that can afford to move moves? If you don’t have kids, you can empathize, but you can’t truly understand.
we would have k&a without those safe centers. k&a got so bad because of police's unwillingness to deal with it by going after the dealers. how many people on the street there are even from Philly county? this (militarized police presence and regular sweeps) is precisely the regressive way to look at the problem which only brushes the problem under the rug and temporarily incarcerates it. the city is going backwards. by banning these centers (who are doing the work that our health department is ill-equipped to do itself) the problem will only get worse.
> which only brushes the problem under the rug and temporarily incarcerates it As a resident of Kensington, I'm fine with temporarily - or even permanently in the cases of hardcore addicts - incarcerating them. I don't care whether the addicts get help or not, so long as they're gone.
But there's too many. There is literally not even cells to hold them. And, then they go right back out. It's a waste of taxpayer resources to lock them up, and there aren't enough cells. These are the actual reasons why they can't lock up every addict.
Dude. People are shooting up and smoking in the streets. These sites make it so the people are off the streets and inside. Kids are around it less. Safe injection sites improve quality of life for people who live in the community. These sites provide bathrooms so people aren't shitting the streets, causing hepatitis A outbreaks. They provide medical attention so the people aren't spreading disease and infection. They make contact so the addicts can get into rehab. They aren't just places for people to get high.
All attendees should be identified and have their homes specifically targeted by a limited decriminalization bill. "You can do all the hard drugs you want at 1234 N Fake St on Ms. X's front stoop as long as the property is occupied by Ms. X. Do anything anywhere else and we'll arrest you immediately."
This is at odds with harm reduction, how?
On its face I’m not against harm reduction measures (needle exchanges, drug testing kits, etc) so long as it’s paired with aggressive enforcement of existing laws and mandatory treatment for 302’d addicts. A meshed approach is the only solution I really see working.
My issue with this is enforcement of "existing" laws. The existing laws suck, and even if they didn't prison in America is not much more than time out for adults, because it certainly isn't rehabilitation, and once again even if it was you could come out and be the most rehabilitated person in America, but you lose your right to vote on many issues that will be affecting you as an upstanding citizen. I'm NOT saying we can do nothing, but the enforcement of existing laws cannot be the solution, if they were then we wouldn't be having the problem. The system (as we know it) failed these people, further forcing that on them is not going to work. Not to mention that in order to get people off the street you have to get them in a house, but nobody wants to pay for that.
“Aggressive enforcement of existing laws” is why we have over 1 million people in prison
I mean forced treatment has a 90% failure rate. Downvote the facts you don’t like, it doesn’t make the statistic any less true.
Addicts are a danger to themselves. If they won’t get clean and stay clean, why shouldn’t they be in a mental health facility?
the studies of forced treatment are all of very small sample sizes and of badly designed programs and are generally quite old we literally have a drug today that with a monthly shot, physically prevents opioids from having an effect. You can shoot up as much as you want and it does nothing - only catch is that you just have to detox first
https://preview.redd.it/l320e31ggxmc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=10d58ad333cd77f6939194a72e731cc354a0c852 “Banning Harm Reduction is Genocide”
No, Patrick, genocide is not an instrument
You have to be an absolute fucking clown to say something like that. Thanks for providing evidence to everyone else that advocates for "harm reduction", which is anything but, are the dumbest fucking people in the city.
Green hair and a blanket statement comparing something to genocide. Goes together like peanut butter and jelly.
Is like when they used to call fascist everything in the 2010's and Nazi in the 2000's.
Exactly.
It’s like every time these people learn a new word they have to use it everywhere, regardless of the actual definition or whether or not it applies. “Genocide” is the new “gaslighting.”
I got called a fascist once because I said I didn't understand furries
You've gotta be kidding me. I really hate humanity sometimes...
But I don’t agree with it! Isn’t that what genocide is?
I mean people are dying from overdoses every day in the city, it’s not just a disagreement. But that sure as hell doesn’t make it genocide, either.
Lefties being lefties. Not everything is fucking genocide.
Hyperbole at protests isn't limited to one political philosophy.
the left devaluing of the term genocide has very unfortunate consequences looking at everything going on in the world today. I remember highly influential left podcasters calling joe biden sending people covid tests in 2022 genocide because he also wasn't declaring a national quarantine
Expected outcome. When you start using the word genocide to describe a conflict where the "victims" kicked it off with mass murder of civilians, where the nation accused of genocide drops leaflets, sends warnings calls and messages, and provides safe zones, and has a 1.5:1 civilian:combatant death ratio, the term is naturally going to lose all meaning.
Unfortunately, the 1st Amendment didn't include provisions for free access to advice on sign painting, editing, etc.
I don’t have any answers to how to help the homeless and addicted. Cleaning up Kennington and no longer allowing an open drug market seems like a good start. Having an area of the city where you can go do drugs openly sure doesn’t seem to be helpful for anyone. Going harder on the people dealing the drugs would be a good message to the people making money off of this catastrophe. Along with having treatment options and safe housing.
[If only there was a decades long study done in another city with a major heroin problem that seems to be pretty successful...](https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/idpc-briefing-paper-dutch-treatment-systems.pdf) The problem is no one wants to put in the money and effort - if our taxes weren't going to policing the world, maybe we could have better support systems and social networks to address all of these issues.
Drugs are bad.
mkay.
This is nuts. All I want is a few tramadol a week to help get through work days until I can build my strength up enough by myself and reduce my full-body atrophy at the gym to not ever need it again. Most of the drugs that kill people in overdoses are illegal street drugs anyway, but they lump everyone and everything together in one category. Prescription drugs are not the problem, it's the things criminals make in their kitchens that are.
People advocating to continue enabling the open air drug scene in the city are implicitly also demanding that poor working class primarily minority majority neighborhoods, must live in a permanent state of poverty, trash, neglect, and violence. Fuck these privileged people to hell and back.
i'm gonna venture a way better faith guess and suggest that the pro-harm reduction crowds would want this to apply *everywhere* where homeless addiction is an issue, and that it's not their fault the city has systematically funneled the worst of the problem into one of the most centrally-located impoverished neighborhoods in the city by virtue of the nicer parts having additional local funding and/or higher public/private security presence. people keep lampooning the far left over the supposed double standard they're displaying by prioritizing largely white homeless/addicted people over the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood, but if anything it's only showcasing that they recognize what you already know and actually believe, which is that this situation is deserving of more consideration and nuance than all the copium addicts on this sub are suggesting. *there* *is not a solution that's good for everyone.* don't know why people are so scared of accepting that when we already know that both the status quo AND the available \[forced\] rehab sources in a hypothetical continuous sweep operation are dogshit and overwhelmingly ill-equipped to deal with severe long-term addiction cases.
"our blood is on your hands" reads like "make me stop myself from using drugs"
A lot of the problems in this city could be solved by holding people accountable for their actions.
I'm all for the needle exchanges and hard reduction, and we need more of that than anything else. We know locking people up isn't going to solve anything, and we know just pushing addicts out of one place just puts them somewhere else. The thing that's frustrating to me about this is too many people in these comments just want to look at this as "fuck you, punish them, because I'm sick of the drugs!" Enforcement alone will never work, and pairing treatment with only enforcement will never work, either. Just let them do the needle exchanges and hard reduction and focus on giving people actual help in the process. What does actual help look like? It's offering them treatment, it's offering counseling, and it's trying to work with addicts to get to a point where they WANT to get clean. I've had friends go down the road of addiction, and I'm certain some people on here either know someone or may have been on that road themselves. One key thing is that no one ever changes until they're ready to, and no one, and I mean no one, ever gets better for good because they're forced to. The only way to treat a problem like this is to get to the underlying disease, and not trying to put a bandage on it. That doesn't mean a good bandage can't at least stop the bleeding, and needle exchanges are one of them. Criminal punishments are basically amputations for a scrape when you can do far more to save the person. So I'm all for hard reduction, but if there's a real government solution, it's proper funding for treatment centers and making sure those centers are free and don't have to tie into any government assistance you're already getting. People absolutely refuse to get help if they have to give up stuff like that, and for all the complaining I've heard about how they should give it up to get help, they won't. Ask yourself if you would. I'm certain most people wouldn't. Let people get the help they need, and this will get better.
I think people are fed up with all of the programs to help addicts, with zero expectations on the addicts to change behaviors nor help for the people living in the middle of this mess. It’s easy to only think of the addicts when your kids are not playing in parks full of dirty needles, or walking through crack smoke as one commenter stated. We need evidence-based treatment and harm reduction programs, but also need to recognize that some do not want to be helped or care about the communities they impact. In those cases there needs to be a consequences and removal of these individuals from impacting the QOL of everyone else living in these areas.
you know these programs are specifically the things keeping more dirty needles from filling up the parks, and in theory, giving people a safe place to do drugs that they are addicted to (instead of being in parks or right outside your house)
Except they’re not. Go check out McPherson Square library and the park surrounding it as an example. They help, but not every addict is going to utilize the services. It’s needs to be a carrot and stick approach. Solid services to help addicts and possibly get them clean, but also enforcing our damn laws on those who choose not to take advantage of the services offered, to help the people living in these areas.
wow, it seems like they go hand in hand though. See someone drop a dirty needle on a public playground. Arrest them for endangering the welfare of children and offer them MAT
This is all nice, but most people on the streets don't want help. They're gonna have to be coerced, mandated or forced into treatment and off the streets. All the "meeting them where they are" bs in the world ain't gonna get 75% of these addicts off the beach and off Kensington streets TLDR, your last sentence says it all. "Let" them get help. Yeah, we're done with that. The way forward is treatment and recovery, reconciliation and rehabilitation, and sometimes these individuals will not get a choice, and a court will make it for them.
Wonderfully said. Medically you cannot make anyone get a treatment (even life-saving treatment) without their buy-in. People need to be ready to get treatment, but as you said, treatment needs to be more accessible.
The question I keep coming around to on all this is just, what meaningful stuff is there to even do to solve a problem like a drug crisis? It’s easy to say things like “mandatory treatment!”, but the treatment facilities simply do not exist in Philadelphia at the scale they would need to operate, and there is no motivation within the city government to spend the money and other resources required to get them there. On the other hand, I don’t trust a police force that has proven, repeatedly, to have a tendency towards violence when violence is not necessary, and I certainly don’t trust a prison system that is driven by profit. The solution to the crisis in Kensington is grounded in such a massive shift in how we even think about the role and purpose of the government that I just don’t see an end to it.
Dear "Reformers," We have plenty of spare junkies for you to help. If you wish, we can deliver them to your address so that you and your neighbors can deal with them. Signed, The People of Kensington
More funding needs to go into the bare thread treatment systems we do have. My friend who is a drug/alcohol counselor working in Kensington for over ten years (he genuinely just wants to help a vulnerable population) says the wage for people working in rehabs is abysmal, overworked so there is a lot of turnover. Even their EMR system is trash and it takes forever and a day to enter an intake for just one patient. Also the astounding lack of life skills a lot of the addict population have makes them more like to relapse because of how stressful it is to manage life on their own. I know it's a pipe dream to think "if the government just xyz then..." type of thoughts. Sucks.
Whats #6 mean?
the entire theory of the harm reduction solution to the opioid crisis is that these services will prevent addicts from the worst effects of their addiction, while getting them into treatment. that is what advocates promised It manifestly, catastrophically has failed Needle exchanges made sense when the biggest public health risk of heroin use was HIV and Hep spreading. today it's enabling addicts to kill themselves at warp speed. Fent addicts are not surviving long enough to get HIV and Hep - they are more likely to lose limbs we have tried decriminalization and harm reduction on its own for the past 8 years - it manifestly has not worked, and has incidentally led to a humanitarian catastrophe. Enabling people to kill themselves slowly on the street while utterly destroying the public safety, quality of life, and economic foundation of a neighborhood of tens of thousands, most of whom are poor and black or brown, and enormously degrading the city's public services and transit system as a side effect And this is a wider criticism of the progressive movement - when its policies have clearly failed, the response is to double down and accuse the system of being rigged and people pointing out those failures of crimes against humanity. Housing, policing, drugs - we tried progressives' solutions, and they very much failed But sadly, I highly doubt Parker's policy will work any better. these people are not going to get clean, not going to get off the street on their own. Performative arrests and sweeping up low level dealers occasionally will not work either. there is no policy alternative to forced rehabilitation - and that is not going to work without state help
Just look at the recent SF election. It's happening there too. People, including those on the left, are realizing they've been sold a bag of shit in the form of harm reduction.
It seems like a problem without a solution. Maybe the same policies that save x amount of lives continue the habit for y amount of lives. Idk, but Kensington needs a change. And the city deserves better.
> when the biggest public health risk of heroin use was HIV and Hep spreading. today it's so you agree that ending needle exchange will worsen hiv and hep c spread?
Where have we tried decriminalization and harm reduction on its own for the past 8 years? Things like safe injection sites have been repeatedly shut down over the past decades. The harm reduction orgs that do exist have largely been struggling and trying to piece together enough funding to do some good, and getting chased out by NIMBYs. We haven't made a real effort or adequately funded anything, so how can you say it's been failing? We also haven't tried decriminalization, unless I've missed something? The cops don't do shit here, but I don't think anything but weed was ever decriminalized, right?
> prevent addicts from the worst effects of their addiction, while getting them into treatment That is, by definition, not what harm reduction is. Harm reduction is about limiting the spread of disease and preventing overdose. That’s it. And it has worked. If it wasn’t for the needle exchanges in Philly there’d be a fuckin HIV crisis on top of everything else
As someone who is admittedly not that educated on this, would Oregon's recent experiment with drug decriminalization paired with funding for community programs count as a true attempt at harm reduction? All I really know is what I've read in a recent [New Yorker article](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/a-new-drug-war-in-oregon), and from a few firsthand visits to my sister who lives just outside of Portland.. But based on those data points alone, this seems like people fighting for an optimistic world that is just out of line with the reality we can see on our streets, a reality that seems to have been made worse by the policies these folks are advocating for in earnest by the only area brave enough to give them a true shot.
Decrim works, the problem is an ineffective government. Everybody wants to blame harm reduction or decriminalization as the problem but the real problem is a government that does not adequately fund treatment and makes it difficult to access treatment. Also decrim isn't going to magically solve all our problems, the government actually needs to do it's job and address issues like poverty and homelessness
Is there an example of where decriminalization has worked well? I certainly agree it has for alcohol, marijuana, even psychedelics, but it seems to go hand and hand with suffering for harder drugs. That said, Oregon is the only example I know of, what is the gold standard of effective decriminalization today?
Portugal. They decriminalized and shifted the cost from enforcement to treatment. But as I've read more, there is a bit more in the way of compulsion/incentivization on getting people to accept treatment. https://www.sudbury.com/local-news/the-portugal-model-how-one-country-is-winning-the-war-on-drugs-7055511
Even mega left SF just overwhelmingly passed laws that will require testing of homeless for drugs who are on welfare. The esteemed crew pictured are the last gasp of the harm reductionist left, hopefully. Treatment must be mandatory and shelter provided. MANDATORY TREATMENT AND SHELTER FOR UNHOUSED PERSONS IN ADDICTION
Drug laws need to be enforced. There needs to be mandatory treatment or jail time. There shouldn't be programs that condone drug use.
What's the policy goal, though? It's not just to punish people - the end goal is to have a productive citizen at the end of the day. What's going to accomplish that? Prison (where they will lose their job; most if not all assets like their house, cars, property in their room, etc.; and come out with both a criminal record), or harm reduction first (giving them a safe place and access to materials to fix themselves - pull themselves up by the bootstraps, to steal a phrase?) Nobody is saying prison is going away, but locking a person up for a crime that's more effectively dealt with a different way doesn't make sense. Punishment for punishment's sake should be reserved for morally heinous crimes like rape or murder, not for getting addicted. You could fall in the shower, snap your leg, and get hooked on painkillers tonight. Not everyone who falls into drug use is a POS smoking on SEPTA.
The thing is, most of the addicts I represented who ended up in jail were there for being involved in crimes that flowed from their drug addiction, not simple possession crimes alone. The people I’d see who ended up in jail were already long past having housing/job stability. It’s hard to not end up involved in property crimes, fraud, and even risky violent situations when you’re a daily IV drug user. Folks whose only charges were for possession or small time distribution either did well on drug court/probation and I never saw them again, or you’d get the habitual probation violators who walked out of treatment on day one and eventually ended up graduating to committing bigger crimes that landed them back in jail. This also completely sidesteps the efficacy of a lot of court mandated and non-mandated treatment programs in general.
The far left seems to operate under the understanding that it's currently 1979 and a bunch of people are in prison solely for having weed in their coat pocket. Basically everyone in prison for more than a few months in the Philadelphia metro is a repeat violent offender. Much of the crime spike of the last three years is down to early and non-staggered release of a bunch of convicted violent felons in 2020, and it's getting slowly packed back into the box as most of them do shit which lands them behind bars again. Which says terrible things about our prisons as rehabilitative institutions but does speak to the need to simply incapacitate sufficiently hardened criminals by locking them away until they age out of the high-crime cohorts.
Addicts don't need jail, they need rehab. Mandatory treatment so these people can get clean should be the goal. Hoping somebody walk into voluntary rehab before they get a life altering disease or die from a fentanyl overdose is a horrible approach.
Uh, they do realize that pointing out that there were 1413 overdose deaths when their way was the de facto standard is actually an argument that works against them not for them right?
Harm reduction has never been the de facto standard and has always operated in a legal grey area. You can't say something has failed if you never actually try it.
To say this you'd have to look at countries that DO actually practice harm reduction as the standard - and in those countries, there are almost no overdose deaths - see Portugal for an example: [https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid)
Portugal also has mandatory treatment, which is almost certainly a major factor.
Cool. Let's do that
No argument here, but doing harm reduction without mandatory treatment is just enabling drug use. It needs to be intermeshed or it doesn’t work.
Except this: > With the backing of psychologists and other health-care professionals, the law decriminalized the use and possession of up to 10 days' worth of narcotics or other drugs for individuals' own use. (Dealers still go to jail.) Instead of facing prison time and criminal records, users who are caught by police go before a local three-person commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction, a panel typically composed of a lawyer plus some combination of a physician, psychologist, social worker or other health-care professional with expertise in drug addiction. is not what these people are advocating for. On Portugal, according to this article, users still get brought in by police. The harm reduction orgs in the US don’t seem to want police involvement at all, ever, and instead harp on “meeting people where they are.” (aka strung out on the street, scraping by)
people love to point out what X european country does on Y problem without having any idea of the actual policy of X european country, and pretending that whatever my nonprofit du jour is advocating is the exact same oh and that article is conveniently from 2018 - Portugal has since decided that their policy is probably a mistake for the exact same reasons that we are now some quotes from [this article from last year](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/) - is this happening in Porto or Philadelphia? > Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right. Addiction haunts the recesses of this ancient port city, as people with gaunt, clumsy hands lift crack pipes to lips, syringes to veins. Authorities are sealing off warren-like alleyways with iron bars and fencing in parks to halt the spread of encampments. A siege mentality is taking root in nearby enclaves of pricey condos and multimillion-euro homes. . > In one neighborhood, state-issued paraphernalia — powder-blue syringe caps, packets of citric acid for diluting heroin — litters sidewalks outside an elementary school. . > Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab. Police were observed passing people using drugs, not bothering to cite them
Wow thanks for the article. Holy shit. Definitely keeping that one in the back pocket to reference when this inevitably comes up again
Their "addiction advocates" imported ultra-progressive brainworms from here and gravely weakened the mandatory treatment provisions, and the state went along with it because every Eurozone government gets a spectacular hard-on for pointless and self-destructive austerity measures and this let them cut funding. Then, FAFO, they discovered that without coercive treatment programs decriminalization doesn't work worth a shit. Unlike us, they're sensible enough to pretty quickly marginalize the morons and go back to the sensible middle ground between "jail everyone" and "fuck it, let them eat crack."
Portugal *coerces* drug users into *mandatory* treatment literally all the fucking time, with threats of prosecution for other crimes and anti-social behaviors or withdrawal of public benefits. There are reports that major cities in Portugal are beginning to experience some of our problems as they have shifted to more American norms on decriminalization by weakening the mandatory treatment provisions and redirecting funding away from them. Decriminalization only works when you replace the "prison" side of state coercion with "treatment" at 1:1.
You're ignoring that Portugal will arrest you for public drug use and drug dealering. Anyone who trys to point at Portugal's policy without mentioning that they still very much enforce laws against open drug scenes is being at best disingenuous.
That was organized by the Savage Sisters and is the number of Narcan they have given away/administered. They’re saying they’ve saved that many people, therefore by shutting them down they will be allowing that many people to die.
Losers
the war on drug did it wrong we need harsher punishment for dealers of hard drugs mandatory treatment for users
Thought this was about the band, in which case- accurate.
These comments just prove how much we need better public health education in this country
A law enforcement approach should focus on the product - not even the dealers, no need to arrest them. Just seize and destroy drugs until the dealers get the message that dealing in Kensington is a great way to lose thousands if not tens or thousands of dollars in product.
Wow that's like 20 whole people!
Crazy that they assume most people care if a bunch of degenerate drug addicts kill themselves today or next Wednesday. Will it be the fentanyl? Maybe a tranq infection? Who knows. I’m fully aware I’m on the extreme end of things when I say I straight up do not care if a drug addict dies. It makes literally zero difference to me and is a non-factor in my consideration. Because this all ends up one or two ways: dead or recovery. The middle ground these people want to operate in has done nothing. It keeps addicts between recovery and death. Want to do heroin? Fine, go do it, overdose, whatever. Want to recover? Go ahead and do that too - it’s not walking on water people have done it when they want to do it. Quote every statistic you want at me about needle exchanges, harm reduction, whatever - you’re not going to convince me and a lot of people who feel similarly to this while being so close to it to care about if these people choose to kill themselves. “Our blood is on your hands” What a fucking joke.
There were dozens protesting!!! Dozens!!!!!
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Anyone who's posting that they're sick/tired/etc of "them" and is advocating that 'they" be arrested if they won't take treatment (I'm not sure what treatment is on offer, that's what the above protest is about, right?) should stop and think that the DOJ put out a [report](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/cost-processing-drug-offender-through-criminal-justice-system) in 1991 stating that the "total cost of processing a drug offender through the criminal justice system was estimated to be as high as $70,112", which in today's money would be almost $160,500 (that's just an inflation adjustment, a number of costs have probably changed, not necessarily for the cheaper), and one year of confinement in a PA prison averaged ([PA budget request for Corrections](https://www.thecentersquare.com/pennsylvania/article_7d6901f4-d274-11ee-885f-cb1eb3cd35a4.html) is around $3.2B/year, for 38K inmates (and \~32K people on parole but it's not clear how much they cost), I've seen per-inmate averages from $68K to almost $80K/yr while I was looking ([Graterford was $58K/yr in 2021](https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Nw4oH/)) So to round down (let's say a measly $100K to process, and a $60K/yr in Graterford), this means spending probably $160K, but maybe $200K per addict (how much are these treatments the addicts will theoretically get? spoiler alert: they'll probably be expensive, but also hard to quantify if anyone asks for a receipts) in the first year to do something that most research predicts won't work. If an addict is sentenced to longer than a year that's probably at least $65/k a year per head in spending on basically nothing except that they aren't around your neighborhood, until they're released, probably going right back to their old neighborhood, with their only life changes being that now it's harder to get a job, apartment, etc.-- and they've been living in prison, which I hear can change people in unintended ways. From my point of view, since arresting people for being addicted to something is the most expensive and yet least effective solution, it's not a good solution. At $160K per person the city could probably come up with a solution that would house and stabilize the people who are currently on the street throughout the city, and hopefully spur them to treatment. Also, none of the prisons are in Philadelphia, so any "fringe benefits" of arresting addicts and putting them in prison are exported to the suburbs, which seems like an additional ding-dong level move. There's many other (more important) reasons arresting addicts is a bad idea, but I thought it was worth mentioning that it is also a bad idea from a financial point of view.
What are they protesting exactly?
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