Answer Addiction

Tag: homelessness

  • One Hit Away: A Memoir of Recovery

    Even though I know a lot of junkies who walk these streets with no life left in them, this is the first dead body I’ve ever seen.

    Sprawled across the side entryway to Beth Israel Congregation, I roll onto my side and wipe a palmful of dew off my clammy face. Everything about this morning is brittle, cold and still. Suspended in limbo, I’m drained from squirming all night on the slick ground like a caterpillar in a cocoon. As first light swirls around me and creeps into the shadows, I’m in no rush to greet it—there’s no point jump-starting the engines until the street dealers kick off their rounds. Having suffered through too many of Portland’s sunrises in recent years, the art on the horizon has either lost its beauty or I’m too jaded to see in color anymore. 

    Peeling my head away from an uncomfortable makeshift pillow made of rolled-up sweatpants, I see that both Simon and the surrounding streets are sleeping in. We’re nestled in darkness, lit only by the headlights of an occasional car that turns down Flanders Street. My sleeping bag is bunched under my hip to help relieve the pressure from the cold stone beneath me, but it’s not the only reason I had a hard time sleeping last night. 

    A few hours ago, I woke up to the alarm of Simon snoring and rattling away in his sleep—it was an eerie and guttural sound like an empty spray-paint can being shaken. I was still fighting to fall back asleep, long after his sputtering faded and drifted away with the breeze. So, while he put another day behind him, I was reminded that long nights take a toll and this life never pays.

    We both went to sleep with full bellies and a shot, so we’re fortunate that neither one of us will be dope sick. It’s nice to catch a break now and then and wake up without wishing I would die already. But it’s never enough—I’m still skeptical about how hard Simon crashed out and wonder if he’s holding out on me. Though if I were in his shoes, there’s no doubt I’d do the same. Riding high comes naturally in a free-for-all where everyone looks out for themselves. We all have it—a grizzly survival instinct to take what we can, when we can and figure tomorrow out if it comes. 

    This isn’t our land, but we periodically come here to stake a claim in the covered alcove guarding the ornate entryway. If unoccupied, I prefer this location because it’s a reasonably safe place to hang my boots. Not only is there protection overhead from the frequent rain that tends to ruin a good night’s sleep, but it’s also set back from the street enough that being noticed, roused and moved by the police is a rarity. 

    The groundskeeper here is a man of quiet compassion. It isn’t in him to run us off outside of business hours, and he refuses to call the police on us. For the most part, we are often gone before he would have to step over our bodies to open the temple doors. Scattering like roaches, we are sent packing by an internal alarm that forces us to get up at first light and attend to our bad habits.

    Simon is still asleep. He’s had it easy after spending all day yesterday collecting free doses from every street dealer he could pin down. This is common for any junkie recently released from a stint in jail. Any time after I’ve been arrested, all I have to do is show one of my dealers my booking paperwork and they’ll set me right. A freebie from them is a cheap investment in their own job security, reigniting the habit that was broken by an unpleasant jailhouse detox. Our dealers also need us back up and running again, racking up goods and on our best game. It’s no secret that a dope sick junkie is unprofitable.

    I pull myself together and pack with purpose, grabbing the dope kit I stashed in a tree nearby and then my shredded shoes that I left out to dry. I often struggle to tell whether my insoles are wet or merely cold, but when water oozes out of my shoelaces as I double-knot them, I take note that at some point today I need to steal fresh socks. 

    “Time to go,” I call out. 

    Simon, in one of the few ways that he is needy, often depends on me rousing him. He’s never been a morning person and is still sound asleep, his face buried in his sleeping bag. 

    “Come on, get up.” I spin in place and scan the ground to make sure I’m not forgetting anything. Eager to start the day, I nudge him with my toe a bit harder than I intended to. 

    When that doesn’t wake him, I reach down to shake his shoulder and feel an unnatural resistance. Something, everything, is wrong. His whole body feels stiff, and as I pull harder, Simon keels over, his rigid limbs creaking out loud like a weathered deck. There is lividity in his face—his nose is dark purple and filled with puddled blood. A pair of lifeless, open eyes stare through me and into nothingness. Instinctively, my hand snaps back and Simon sinks away.

    I stumble back and try to make sense of my surroundings. Nobody is around yet, but soon, the world will rise.

    “No, no, no.” I lose control of the volume of my voice and squeeze my throat. “Don’t be dead, please, don’t do this to me,” I chant as I drop to my knees, pleading over his corpse. 

    My hands hover over him as if trying to draw warmth from a smothered fire. I desperately grasp for a way to fix this. My heart is racing as though I just sent a speedball its way, but the surge doesn’t stop. A decision needs to be made, and fast, but before I can make sense of anything, a wisp of breath rolls down my collar and an invisible hand clutches my cheeks, forcing me to stare down death. 

    I snap the clearest picture in my mind and my eyes sting. Even though I know a lot of junkies who walk these streets with no life left in them, this is the first dead body I’ve ever seen. Looking down at Simon, I finally understand how pathetic this existence is and how lonely this life will always be. I see nothing beyond this moment for Simon, other than being hauled away like trash on the curb. We are forever trapped here, alone and useless, likely remembered only for our crimes, selfishness and former selves. Heaven is out of the picture, and because of that, I am okay with what I have to do next. I know the act is irreversible and unforgivable, but then again, if God has abandoned us, he’s not around to judge me.

    Dropping my sleeping bag onto the ground, I slide my backpack off my shoulders and let it fall like a hammer. I kneel over Simon’s body, steal one last look around and wince as I rummage through the front pocket of his jeans. I know he always keeps a wake-up hit on him. His pocket is tight and fights my hand as I dip into them. My fingers scratch around but keep coming up empty-handed. Time is running out and traffic is increasing. 

    I reach into his back pocket and soon realize the dope isn’t in his wallet either. The longer I search, the more determined I am, but I can’t bring myself to roll him over and disturb him further. By the time I give up, I sit back on my heels. I can’t believe what I’ve become. 

    “I’m so sorry, Simon.”

    Please stop looking at me. I can’t take it. Pulling my sweater cuff over my palm, I reach out with a shaky hand to close his eyes. My hand gets close, then backs off as I turn my head away to exhale. When my hand reaches forward once again, my palm lands on his face but fails to brush his frozen eyelids closed.Backing away, I grab my belongings and shrink into the distance.

    Excerpted from One Hit Away: A Memoir of Recovery by Jordan Barnes. Available at Amazon.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Pandemic Presents New Hurdles, and Hope, for People Struggling with Addiction

    “There’s social distancing — to a limit…I think when someone’s life is in jeopardy, they’re worth saving. You just can’t watch people die.”

    Before Philadelphia shut down to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Ed had a routine: most mornings he would head to a nearby McDonald’s to brush his teeth, wash his face and — when he had the money — buy a cup of coffee. He would bounce between homeless shelters and try to get a shower. But since businesses closed and many shelters stopped taking new admissions, Ed has been mostly shut off from that routine.

    He’s still living on the streets.

    “I’ll be honest, I don’t really sleep too much,” said Ed, who’s 51 and struggling with addiction. “Every four or five days I get a couple hours.”

    KHN agreed not to use his last name because he uses illegal drugs.

    Philadelphia has the highest overdose rate of any big city in America — in 2019, more than three people a day died of drug overdoses there, on average. Before the coronavirus began spreading across the United States, the opioid overdose epidemic was the biggest health crisis on the minds of many city officials and public health experts. The coronavirus pandemic has largely eclipsed the conversation around the opioid crisis. But the crisis still rages on despite business closures, the cancellation of in-person treatment appointments and the strain on many addiction resources in the city.

    When his usual shelter wasn’t an option anymore, Ed tried to get into residential drug treatment. He figured that would be a good way to try to get back on his feet and, if nothing else, get a few good nights of rest. But he had contracted pinkeye, a symptom thought to be associated with the virus that leads to COVID-19, so the evaluation center didn’t want to place him in an inpatient facility until he’d gotten the pinkeye checked out. But he couldn’t see a doctor because he didn’t have a phone for a telehealth appointment.

    “I got myself stuck, and I’m trying to pull everything back together before it totally blows up,” he said.

    Rosalind Pichardo wants to help people in Ed’s situation. Before the pandemic, Pichardo would hit the streets of her neighborhood, Kensington, which has the highest drug overdose rate in Philadelphia. She’d head out with a bag full of snack bars, cookies and Narcan, the opioid overdose reversal drug.

    She’d hand Narcan out to people using drugs, and people selling drugs — anyone who wanted it. Pichardo started her own organization, Operation Save Our City, which initially set out to work with survivors of gun violence in the neighborhood. When she realized that overdoses were killing people too, she began getting more involved with the harm reduction movement and started handing out Narcan through the city’s syringe exchange.

    When Pennsylvania’s stay-at-home order went into effect, Pichardo and others worried that more people might start using drugs alone, and that fewer first responders would be patrolling the streets or nearby and able to revive them if they overdosed.

    So, Pichardo and other harm reduction activists gave out even more Narcan. A representative for Prevention Point Philadelphia, the group that operates a large syringe exchange program in the city, said that during the first month of the city’s stay-at-home order, they handed out almost twice as much Narcan as usual.

    After the lockdowns and social distancing began, Pichardo worried that more people would be using drugs alone, leading to more overdoses. But Philadelphia’s fatal overdose rate during the pandemic remains about the same as it was this time last year. Pichardo said she thinks that’s evidence that flooding the streets with Narcan is working — that people are continuing to use drugs, and maybe even using more drugs, but that users are utilizing Narcan more often and administering it to one another.

    That is the hope. But Pichardo said users don’t always have a buddy to keep watch, and during the pandemic first responders have seemed much more hesitant to intervene. For example, she recently administered Narcan to three people in Kensington who overdosed near a subway station, while two police officers stood by and watched. Before the pandemic, they would often be right there with her, helping.

    To reverse the overdoses, Pichardo crouched over the people who she said had started turning blue as their oxygen levels dropped. She injected the Narcan into their noses, using a disposable plastic applicator. Normally, she would perform rescue breathing, too, but since the pandemic began she has started carrying an Ambu bag, which pumps air into a person’s lungs and avoids mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Among the three people, she said, it took six doses of Narcan to revive them. The police officers didn’t step in to help but did toss several overdose-reversal doses toward Pichardo as she worked.

    “I don’t expect ’em to give ’em rescue breaths if they don’t want to, but at least administer the lifesaving drug,” Pichardo said.

    In her work as a volunteer, she has reversed almost 400 overdoses, she estimated.

    “There’s social distancing — to a limit,” Pichardo said, “I think when someone’s life is in jeopardy, they’re worth saving. You just can’t watch people die.”

    Even before Philadelphia officially issued its stay-at-home order, city police announced they would stop making low-level arrests, including for narcotics. The idea was to reduce contact overall, help keep the jail population low and reduce the risk of the virus getting passed around inside. But Pichardo and other community activists said the decreased law enforcement emboldened drug dealers in the Kensington neighborhood, where open-air drug sales and use are common.

    “You can tell they have everything down pat, from the lookout to the corner boys to the one actually holding the product — the one holding the product’s got some good PPE gear,” said Pichardo.

    More dealers working openly on the street has led to more fights over territory, she added, which in turn has meant more violence. While overall crime in Philadelphia and other major cities has declined during the pandemic, gun violence has spiked.

    Police resumed arrests at the beginning of May.

    Now when she goes out to offer relief and hand out Narcan, Pichardo packs a few extra things in her bag of supplies: face masks, gloves and gun locks.

    “It’s like the survival kit of the ’hood,” she said.

    For those struggling with addiction who are ready to start recovery, newly relaxed federal restrictions have made it easier to get medications that curb opioid cravings and stem withdrawal. Several efforts are underway among Philadelphia-based public health groups and criminal justice advocacy organizations to give cellphones to people who are homeless or coming out of jail, so they can make a telehealth appointment and get quicker access to a prescription for those medicines.

    During the pandemic, people taking medication-assisted treatment can renew their prescription every month instead of every week, which helps decrease trips to the pharmacy. It is too soon to know if more people are taking advantage of the new rules, and accessing medication-assisted treatment via telehealth, but if that turns out to be the case, many addiction medicine specialists argue the new rules should become permanent, even after the pandemic ends.

    “If we find that these relaxed restrictions are bringing more people to the table, that presents enormous ethical questions about whether or not the DEA should reinstate these restrictive policies that they had going in the first place,” said Dr. Ben Cocchiaro, a physician who treats people with substance-use disorder.

    Cocchiaro said the whole point of addiction treatment is to facilitate help as soon as someone is ready for it. He hopes if access to recovery can be made simpler during a pandemic, it can remain that way afterward.

    This story is part of a partnership that includes WHYY, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Lara B. Sharp's Transformation

    Lara B. Sharp's Transformation

    “AA is like parenting for adults. I got to have it as a child. My mom abandoning me in AA was the best thing she ever did for me.”

    Close your eyes for a sec and pretend you’re watching a movie. It’s Christmas Eve, 1975. Lara, a five-year-old girl with white-gold hair, big green eyes, and olive skin, is scurrying to keep up with her mother, a five-foot-eight beauty.

    Noni’s hair is black, her eyes blacker. Her stiletto heels click at a manic pace on the Manhattan pavement. With her large pupils and long-legged strides, she seems to be on speed but could also be soused. Her upper body teeters down Delancey Street. By rote she steps over drunks and around junkies without slowing, oblivious to her daughter racing behind. Lara mimics Noni’s dodges and weaves, also unfazed by the bodies littering the sidewalk. 

    Everybody Has a Screwed-Up Childhood, Right?

    The Lower East Side neighborhood was “kind of peaceful then. Heroin addicts are docile,” Sharp tells The Fix. “They don’t make trouble.” Yet, as she and her Mom laughed at the late shoppers, a speeding bullet whizzed by Sharp’s head.

    “It was so close it blew out my left ear. We never saw doctors so nobody knew I lost my hearing on that side.” Noni frequently exploded at Sharp for “ignoring” her, but the child couldn’t hear much of what was said. Noni mistook the lack of response as proof that Sharp was dimwitted, or willfully not paying attention.

    “Everybody has a screwed-­­­up childhood, right?” Sharp smiles and shrugs. “The only kids I knew were like me—living with a single mom, with no idea who their father was. We were like goldfish in water. You can’t see the water because it’s all you know.”

    When her friend Marisol bragged about getting a letter from her father, Sharp didn’t believe her at first.

    “I was so jealous. Not only did Marisol have a father, she knew his name and where he was. She could go visit him. They had conversations.” In Sharp’s five-year-old brain, it didn’t matter that Marisol’s father lived in prison.

    Today Sharp is a graduate of Smith College and has written for Teen Vogue, Longreads, and is a top writer on Quora. Two years ago, her “Mansplaining Pool Post” went viral.

    Poolside Johnny

    Sharp explained what prompted the post: “Women all know a Poolside Johnny. We’ve met him in a hundred different places in a hundred different ways.” She was engrossed, reading Rebecca Solnit’s book Men Explain Things to Me, when a man walked up and offered to be her mentor. 

    “It was so funny. I started thumb-typing everything he said.” When she told him her name was Gloria Steinem, he responded “it’s too Jewish.”   

    “So I said, ‘How about Betty Friedan?’ He just wasn’t getting it. He didn’t know who they were or that they both went to Smith College. While he’s still talking, I popped the conversation on the internet.”

    When she realized he was not going to stop talking, she left. 

    “I took a long shower,” she said. “When I get out, my phone is blowing up! Facebook alerts. My first thought was a terrorist attack. Then I see it’s my post. It kept going and going.”

    The famous post has now been written about in 6 languages and 20 publications including Glamour, Elle, The Daily Mail, Huffington Post and Refinery29. Sharp was surprised by the attention, especially from literary agents who wanted to rep her memoir, Do the Hustle, about growing up in foster care.

    Love Is…

    “My mom taught me what I needed to know. Like how to falsify documents—birth certificates, marriage licenses. We ran them through tea and let them dry on the window sill to make them look aged.” She also gave Sharp notebooks “to write everything down,” and great advice, like “Sometimes abortions are better than husbands.”

    Beautiful Noni attracted men and married some. Sharp has no idea exactly how many.

    Sharp self-published her first book at age five. She folded pieces of paper into a book and punched holes in it with scissors, tying it together with a ribbon. The book was a gift for Noni’s most terrifying husband, who verbally and physically abused both of them. 

    Sharp’s book was titled Love Is. Each page contained an answer: A hug. A kiss. Asking someone how they are. She thought if he had that information, he would be nice.

    “It didn’t go as planned,” said Sharp. “He accused me of plagiarizing. A five-year-old. So yeah, that was my first book, Love Is for a sociopath.”

    Noni’s struggles with alcohol and drugs started before Sharp was born. “She was that way my whole life, which I think is good because if you had a great parent and then they go downhill, I’m sure it’s a lot harder.”

    Sharp didn’t know any other life: “I met a girl outside of our circle who invited me over. It was strange when we walked in and her mother wasn’t lying face down in a puddle of her own body fluid. I was so surprised when the girl’s mother served sandwiches at a table with matching chairs.”

    Sharp recalls Noni’s feelings were so overwhelming, she couldn’t control her behavior: “When my mother had a feeling, she expressed it by throwing a chair. When I voiced a feeling, even if it was just, I’m hungry, I’m hot, I’m tired, my mother’s immediate response was, ‘No you’re not.’”

    AA and Foster Care

    When Noni found AA, Sharp learned there were people in the world who lived and behaved differently. 

    “Sitting in those rooms, I listened to people express themselves. They did it so clearly, appropriately. Well, despite the cursing,” she laughs. “What I mean is, they’d use words to say what had happened and how it made them feel and talk about what they were going to do. They’d say things like, ‘I’m going to sit with the feeling.’ That’s when, at seven, I realized, ‘Wow, you don’t have to react to a feeling.’”

    By age eight, Sharp understood that Noni wasn’t bad, she was sick. “AA is like parenting for adults. I got to have it as a child. My mom abandoning me in AA was the best thing she ever did for me.” After getting her court slip signed, Noni would leave Sharp in the meeting while she went to the bar across the street. In those rooms, Sharp learned that addiction was hereditary and decided she didn’t want to test her luck. She considers herself an “alcoholic waiting to happen” and has always been cautious about drinking.

    At nine, Sharp went into foster care. At every new place she was shuffled to, she asked if they knew how to reach her mother.” Responses ranged from “No, she couldn’t take care of you” to “She left you and isn’t coming back.”

    “Noni never came to visit me. No one did.” She tried every number in her notebook. None worked. Finally, she reached one of Noni’s friends who said Noni had moved to Florida.

    “Birthdays passed—no calls, no cards. By 12, I started to believe she’d abandoned me,” Sharp said, “I figured nobody wants me because I’m unlovable. I talk too much, get in the way. I’m a burden.”

    Sharp told me, “I think those social workers were trying to help but, as fucked up as my mother was, before foster care, I knew she loved me. Foster care took that away.”

    The places she lived all had one thing in common: Jesus. Most of Sharp’s foster parents were fundamentalist Christians.

    “I didn’t do Jesus. I wasn’t down with that. I knew this hippie guy from Egypt didn’t look like Kurt Cobain. That nonsense never sat well with me. And I’m glad my mother passed on her rabid femininity. She never yelled ‘Oh my God.’ For her it was, ‘Oh my Goddess.’”

    On the Grift

    Some of the families had money, but many just liked collecting a check. They’d take in as many kids as they could but they’d spend the money and not feed the foster kids.

    “We were always so hungry,” said Sharp. “Whenever they gave us anything to eat it was rice.”

    As she got older, her options narrowed.

    “Once you hit double digits, the number of homes that will take you in plummets.”

    The majority of older kids live in group homes, residential facilities. Or, if there’s no place to put them, foster kids are sent to detention homes. Sharp says at group homes, there was a lot of Christianity, too.

    Sharp credits those East Village AA meetings with teaching her that if a situation is uncomfortable remove yourself from the situation. At 14, she ran away. Homeless, she wound up sleeping in Washington Square Park where she met “Gay Cher,” a transgender drug addict and sex worker.

    “We were on the grift together,” said Sharp. “Gay Cher became my BFF. She gave me a makeover so I could pass for 18, get a job, and earn enough to rent an apartment.”

    The plan worked. Sharp found jobs in the nightclub business: waitress, hostess, party promoter and bartender. She tried dancing and recalls: “I was a decent go-go dancer but never great at pole dancing. But I made a lot of money from then on.”

    Doing the Next Right Thing

    On 9/11 Sharp lost friends when the towers fell. Aching to do something but feeling helpless, she credits AA for guiding her to “do the next right thing.” At 31, she examined her life and realized she wanted to quit bartending. For years, she’d been serving alcohol to customers who had drinking problems. But, without any formal education, her opportunities were limited. As an avid reader since the days Noni left her alone in libraries, she decided to take the GED. On the day of the test, she ended up in the wrong room and was given a college exam instead of the high school equivalency placement. She aced it, and enrolled in a two-year associate’s degree program for free. After that she won a scholarship to Smith College. With hard work and luck, she found her way to a career as a writer. 

    “I’m not angry at my mom anymore. I’m grateful that she abandoned me in libraries and AA. Now I have a loving and kind husband. We live in a beautiful home in a safe and friendly neighborhood. I learned everything I needed to know to take care of myself. And I’ve done a damn good job.”

    Lara B. Sharp reads an excerpt from her memoir in progress:

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Addiction and Poverty, Dignity and Friendship: An Interview with Chris Arnade

    Addiction and Poverty, Dignity and Friendship: An Interview with Chris Arnade

    Even in harsh situations people can find dignity, and create these beautiful things. Even in the crack houses, even in the drug spots there is beauty. It’s not just all down and out.

    In 2011, Chris Arnade was a successful bond trader, working on Wall Street and experiencing a level of success most Americans only dream of. He seemed to have it all – a degree from a prestigious university, a nice home, and family. And yet just a year later, he began a project that would eventually morph from distraction to obsession: photographing and documenting the lives of the drug addicts who were then denizens of Hunts Point, thought at the time to be one of the roughest neighborhoods in New York’s South Bronx. 

    Arnade had become disillusioned with the financial industry during the mid-2000s financial crisis, and he left Wall Street for good in 2012. In 2013, he published a series of photographs titled “Faces of Addiction” on the image hosting site Flickr.

    In 2014, Arnade began taking long road trips across America, documenting “the back row” – his term for the people who had fallen through the cracks of the Great American Success Story, those who are routinely ignored, marginalized, and demonized. At oases of calm, like local McDonald’s restaurants which often serve as places of refuge for the down-and-out, Arnade found unexpected resilience, dignity, and even humor in the lives of America’s forgotten.

    Photographs, interviews, and observations from these journeys comprise Arnade’s latest book, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. I once again had the opportunity to talk with Arnade about how he went from being a cog in the finance industry machine to the lens that strives to expose the worth in people so many think of as worthless.

    The Fix: You’re a scientist, you worked on Wall Street, where you had a very successful career. What made you decide to make the transition from Wall Street to becoming a documentarian? Actually, you’re more than a documentarian. As I recall, you were very much involved in the lives of the people that you met in Hunts Point. What was the catalyst for that transition?

    Chris Arnade: A combination of curiosity and frustration. Frustration with Wall Street and how, especially after the financial crisis, how the industry was, and how much damage it had done, and how closed-minded people on Wall Street were to the fact that they had done damage. So, I kind of, in some way, blew off my job and just starting walking around the town, and that’s kind of what led me to Hunts Point. Not just Hunts Point, but other neighborhoods like Hunts Point where people tell you not to go to.

    Then it became somewhat political, where I was seeing things that are very different to what people had said I would see. Neighborhoods [where] there’s a lot more sense of community. It wasn’t as dangerous as people said it was, it was far more inviting, friendly, than people said it would be. But also people were screwed over, and so the neighborhood had been kind of unfairly stigmatized. And it made me kind of frustrated that people here weren’t necessarily any different that the people on the Upper East Side, but they were treated a lot different.

    It was an area that people judged quite harshly, but you saw another level, you saw the community, you saw other pieces.

    Right. And also…it was the first time I was really spending a large amount of time around hard-core addicts, and so the stereotypes for addicts were all wrong. They were no less intelligent, no less hard working, no less decent than any other people. Here they were, being in this awful situation, and being treated like shit. So, some of that was going on, just being kind of like, “Oh my God, this is so wrong.”

    Did your experience in Hunts Point change your thoughts about and viewpoints of addiction?

    Yeah, I became a lot more sympathetic. I certainly understood a lot better how stigmatized the community is. This is, I guess, seven years ago now. A lot has changed in the seven years, for the better. I think seven years ago, you’d regularly hear people saying, “Addicts deserve this.” I don’t think you hear many people say that anymore, thankfully…The biggest change I saw was, if you had asked me before, I would’ve thought it would’ve been pretty easy to get clean, to get sober. Life sucks for them and this is unfair, but why don’t they just get clean? When I was in Hunts Point, I realized just how hard that is, it’s impossible sometimes.

    Did you have a sense of addiction from the medical model?

    Yeah. From that perspective, I’m in the minority I think. I don’t want to get people angry and say it’s not a medical condition, [but] I don’t see it that way. I see it as more of a cultural issue, in the sense that you’re surrounded by it. You grew up in these neighborhoods. I see it as a response to basically being either traumatized, or stigmatized. The sense of being cast aside, and feeling like you don’t really fit in anywhere, and that life is kind of meaningless. 

    So, one of the things I write about in the book is: I talk about how— and people don’t want to admit it— there’s a strong community in the drug houses. You walk into a crack house or drug trap, or you crawl underneath a bridge and hang out with people shooting up, it’s a real community. Friends, there’s people, it’s a place where you fit in. And, I think there’s a lot of people who don’t feel like they fit in, or are not accepted in other clubs. Nobody wants to let them in their club, so why not go to the club underneath the bridge?

    McDonald’s became almost a symbol while you were in Hunts Point. Why McDonald’s?

    I think there’s two reasons. One is, well, it’s been the place addicts go. It’s often the only place that is opened to all people, when you’re really pushed to the margins. That’s where the addicts were, that’s where my friends were. People who would spend all day there. They’d go pick up a newspaper out of the garbage can and maybe a soda cup, and refill the soda, sit in the corner, and maybe shoot up in the bathroom, clean up, and just otherwise get lost alone for maybe four or five hours, and no one bothering them. No one telling them “move,” nobody telling them to get out; do this, do that. As I say, a place to regain a sense of dignity, where people don’t stare at you. 

    And the second one, it’s one of the few places that worked. I think Hunts Point’s doing better now. I don’t know, haven’t been there in a while, but I think back then [McDonald’s] was one of the few places that actually was functional, that you could just go to. It was open, and had a bathroom.

    And McDonald’s remained a touchpoint for you in your travels across the country.

    I didn’t really want it to necessarily, but it was for the same reasons as I found myself at McDonald’s in Hunts Point. I found myself in McDonald’s in Portsmouth, I found myself in McDonald’s in other places, because that’s the place where, if your goal was to write about people who were living in the margins, you go to McDonald’s. That’s where they were. I also wanted to be there because I could charge my phone, charge my computer, and I could use the bathroom, and I could clean up. And also, I like the coffee there. You had free WiFi, all those things that people want.

    You also visited many community churches across the country, how did that affect your experience with faith?

    I’m not an atheist anymore, but I’m certainly not religious. I write a lot in my book about how I grappled with thinking about the role of faith, and what I believed before that. I’m a lot more open minded about people. I certainly have a lot more respect for religion, for faith, than I did before.

    It’s interesting, because very often science seems to be at odds with religion and you are a scientist. 

    I’m not doubting that the science community is extraordinarily well-intentioned and does great things, and wants to help the people, the homeless, and they want to help the addicts. Certainly, doctors do and certainly, people do. The average scientist doesn’t understand how, on the street it doesn’t feel like you’re being helped by science. Even a lot of readers won’t understand this. Detoxes, certainly ones that serve the poorest of people, are not necessarily accepting places. They can be sterile cold places, not very welcoming. Hospitals are the same way.

    The places you would think would be the least judgmental, very often are the most.

    The thing is, it’s just a matter of legwork too. If you’re in the worst neighborhood, worst stigmatized, worst drugs, worst crime…the groups that go in there and talk to them on their level and don’t treat them like things they don’t understand are churches. They really go into these communities and do outreach. Some people might be upset with that outreach, but I think the reality is they’re there, they’re boots on the ground.

    And I noticed, in the book, it wasn’t like you visited homeless shelters or spent much time in treatment programs.

    No. I think McDonald’s are the homeless shelters during the day, the day shelter. When people can’t be in the shelter, they walk over to the McDonald’s and hang out there. There are certain McDonald’s that were open 24 hours, especially ones in the inner states. That’s where they hang out. They try to hang out all night there.

    Was your experience of this kind of journey different than what you expected it was going to be? Did you have a sense of what you were going to see or what you might encounter? 

    I didn’t think I would see as much pain as or as much frustration as I saw. Every town has a neighborhood, or multiple neighborhoods that are like – this isn’t a blue-state, red-state or urban thing, it’s everywhere. You go into any town, and there’s going to be a problem, a place where there’re drugs, and where there’s frustration, and where there’s poverty. I guess, what I found, what kind of shocked me or disappointed me in some ways, is just how easy it is to find. You don’t have to go searching for it. And how out of touch politicians are, with what’s going on in their own country. 

    So, the magnitude was greater than you expected yet, it seems like you have hope. In your book, that sense of hope comes across, despite the fact that as you said, the problem was greater, the magnitude larger, but there’s hope, still.

    People are resilient. So, even faced with these awful structural problems that are kind of put on them, they do their best. It’s like in Hunts Point. 

    The things I worried about that didn’t get a lot of attention are like the pigeon keepers, right? People who take pigeons and make beauty out it. A lot of people think it’s nothing, they’re just rats with wings, but if you go up on a roof and watch the pigeons fly, they’re gorgeous. The same with the guys who fix up Schwinn bicycles, which are literally being tossed out by wealthy people, or ignored, they turn them into these really cool things. 

    So, I think what I appreciated is the resilience. Even in harsh situations people can find dignity, and create these beautiful things. Even in the crack houses, even in the drug spots there is beauty. Where there’s people putting together small works of art, and there’s humor. It’s not just all down and out. There are funny moments, people have fun. It’s not just all evil.

    The tragedy of the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that “we don’t and never will have this under control.” It is far easier to see religion not just as useful but true.

    From Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Philadelphia Clears Out Another "Heroin Camp" As Winter Hits City

    Philadelphia Clears Out Another "Heroin Camp" As Winter Hits City

    It’s the third homeless camping spot cleared out in the Kensington neighborhood in recent months.

    Last week, police in Philadelphia shut down another of the city’s so-called heroin encampments, forcing the area’s homeless from under a railroad bridge and urging them into a local shelter. 

    It’s the third homeless camping spot cleared out in the Kensington neighborhood in recent months, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the forced relocation comes just as the city’s settling in for the cold with the first snowfall of the season. 

    Residents at the encampment were warned last month that they’d need to move, but a few dozen were still on scene Thursday when police, outreach workers and homeless advocates showed up to supervise the relocation. 

    Close to 40 people agreed to enter the low-barrier shelter, a place where residents don’t have a strict curfew keeping them inside at night and they aren’t required to stop using drugs, the newspaper reported. 

    In some parts of the city, the opioid-addicted homeless population has surged in recent months, the Inquirer wrote in September. In Kensington, the number of people living on the street more than doubled in the course of a year, bumping up from 271 in 2017 to 703 a year later, authorities said. 

    “We certainly recognize that things have gotten worse, that the neighborhood is under siege,” Brian Abernathy, the city’s first deputy managing director, told the Inquirer. “People are suffering. We have to do better, and we’re exploring new approaches. We expect to have something soon.”

    The uptick in Kensington homelessness comes even as homelessness in the rest of the city appears to be declining. City officials accounted for 1,355 people living on the street in August of this year, an increase from the 983 counted at the same time last year. 

    The increase in Kensington alone could account for all of that, and officials said the uptick isn’t simply the result of displacement from other areas of the city. 

    “It’s not just a reshuffling,” said Liz Hersh, the city’s Office of Homeless Services director. “It’s an influx.”

    Now, with the clearing of the Frankford camp under the tracks, there’s only one big homeless hotspot left in the neighborhood—the Emerald Street encampment.   

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Homeless Shelter Will Start Requiring Sobriety

    Homeless Shelter Will Start Requiring Sobriety

    Under the new policy anyone who appears intoxicated or has alcohol on their breath will not be allowed in.

    A Montana homeless shelter will begin turning away people who are using drugs and/or alcohol, reversing its previous policy and highlighting the issues that homeless people with substance use disorder face as they try to find shelter during the winter months. 

    According to The Billings Gazette, the Montana Rescue Mission in downtown Billings will no longer allow people who have been using drugs and/or alcohol to stay inside during “code blue” night, when it is particularly cold or snowy and people on the street could be at risk.

    Previously, the Mission would accept anyone who wasn’t very drunk — it had a policy of refusing people with a blood alcohol level higher than 0.2. Under the new policy anyone who appears intoxicated or has alcohol on their breath will not be allowed in. 

    “The only change we’ve made is we expect to them to be sober,” said Perry Roberts, executive director of the mission. “We just decided [on the change] in order to maintain peace.”

    Individuals who are turned away will be referred to the nearby the Community Crisis Center, a facility that only has room for 45 people and has already begun filling up on cold nights this year. 

    “It really does create a capacity issue,” said MarCee Neary, the Crisis Center’s program director. 

    The Montana Rescue Mission provides two separate long-term shelters: one for men and one for women and children, in addition to the code blue openings. Participants in those programs are required to be sober, and Roberts said that having people around who are abusing drugs or alcohol could be triggering for them and compromise the progress that they have made while at the shelter.

    “Our purpose, our mission is we’re trying to transform lives,” he said.   

    In addition, Roberts pointed out that the staff at the shelter are not able to provide the support that intoxicated people might need.

    “We don’t have medically trained staff,” he said. “We don’t have a professional security guard.”

    The conversation around the policy change at the Mission reflects a wider discussion about providing shelter to people with substance use disorder. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, about two-thirds of people who are chronically homeless have a primary substance use disorder. Shelters often have different requirements for their residents, from total sobriety to not using drugs or alcohol on campus. There are also some wet shelters that let homeless people drink. 

    In 2015, a Connecticut homeless shelter opted to close down rather than accept people who were using drugs or alcohol, according to NPR.

    “The organization lacks the staff and funding to supervise active alcohol- and drug-abusers overnight, Stafford said, and there are concerns about the safety of the two people — a staff member and a volunteer — who manage the place each night,” the shelter said at the time. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Fox & Friends" Pundit Blames Legal Pot For Teen Drug Use, Homelessness

    "Fox & Friends" Pundit Blames Legal Pot For Teen Drug Use, Homelessness

    Studies regarding marijuana’s impact on social concerns do not appear to support all of Joe Peters’ claims.

    A guest on the popular Fox & Friends morning news and opinion program appeared to lay the blame for a host of social ills, from increased drug use among teens to emergency room visits and even homelessness, on marijuana legalization during a recent appearance.

    Joe Peters, a former Pennsylvania police officer, federal prosecutor and White House Drug Czar official, suggested that efforts to legalize marijuana in the United States like the recent legislation in Canada would send numbers for the aforementioned issues, as well as impaired driving, to stratospheric levels.

    However, as High Times reported, studies regarding marijuana’s impact on these and other concerns did not appear to support all of Peters’ claims.

    Peters, who is a current Congressional candidate for Pennsylvania’s 11th District, was a guest on an October 19, 2018 broadcast of Fox & Friends which examined possible outcomes for marijuana legalization in the U.S. Co-host Steve Doocy put forward the question about whether such a move would be beneficial for the country, which prompted Peters to point to alleged troubles in the state of Colorado as evidence for the dangers of legalization.

    “By every metric, it was a failure, in my view,” said Peters. “Teen drug use is the highest in the country. Drug driving is off the charts, doubled with marijuana impaired driving. Homelessness is up. Emergency room admissions. And the black market is flourishing. Black market arrests – remember the whole notion was we legalize it, we can control it. Black market arrests are up almost 400%.”

    Some of Peters’ assessments are, in part, correct. Federal and local law enforcement have both noted an increase in instances of trafficking in the Centennial State, but the majority of these cases involve the distribution of marijuana to other states like Florida and Texas, where legalization efforts have not taken root.

    Trafficking on the local level has also continued due to dispensary prices – taxes, which range from municipality, can reach 23.15% – which local dealers can easily undercut.

    Statistics have also shown an increase in Colorado traffic fatalities involving marijuana, but again, these results are conflicting: while the number of fatal vehicular accidents who tested positive for marijuana has risen from 75 in 2014 to 139 in 2017, the number of those fatalities in which the active THC level in the driver’s system could be considered at the level of legal impairment dropped from 52 in 2016 to 35 in 2017. 

    But as High Times pointed out, Peters’ other allegations lack concrete evidence. Studies have shown that while cannabis consumption among teenagers inched up 1.3% between 2016 and 2017, the increase in marijuana dispensaries in states like Colorado has had no impact on teenagers’ use.

    Legal marijuana also appears to have had no effect on rates of homelessness in Colorado; a 2016 study of residents in the city of Pueblo, Colorado found that disconnected utilities, not legal marijuana, was the leading cause of homelessness there.

    View the original article at thefix.com