• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    248·
    2 days ago

    the local homeless around the library were either very publicly using drugs

    Biggest drug dealers in America - the Sackler family - weren’t worth our time to punish. So some guy who washed out on Percocets and can only afford Fentanyl shouldn’t have a place to sit.

    There was definitely a big outcry about how the library was being anti-homeless, but it was nuts because there were people on the other side still complaining about how the library always stinks because they let the homeless people in there.

    In America you have two options -

    1. pretend homelessness and addiction aren’t happening
    2. destroy public property in a scorched earth campaign against drug use

    The very idea of housing, treatment, and rehabilitation is too socialist to consider.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      364·
      2 days ago

      Biggest drug dealers in America - the Sackler family - weren’t worth our time to punish. So some guy who washed out on Percocets and can only afford Fentanyl shouldn’t have a place to sit.

      I didn’t say being publicly intoxicated, I said publicly using drugs. As in they were shooting up while kids were being taken to storytime past them on the way to the library.

      The library allows homeless people to be inside it from open to close. They give them free internet. They give them free help filling out necessary government forms. They hang around just to chat. They allow homeless people to sleep outside all around the building. They are literally building a shower and a washer/dryer facility in the new auxiliary library free for anyone to use.

      In America, your local public library does more to help homeless people than anything you have probably done yourself, but I guess since they haven’t personally solved the problem, they’re the worst of the oppressors.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        116·
        1 day ago

        I didn’t say being publicly intoxicated, I said publicly using drugs. As in they were shooting up while kids were being taken to storytime past them on the way to the library.

        We have a solution for this as well.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_injection_site

        Proven highly effective for reducing crime, mitigating the need for emergency response, curtailing disease spread, and channeling addicts to rehabilitation clinics

        But because it comes off as permissive and benevolent, rather than punitive and prohibitionary it remains Haram in much of the US.

        In America, your local public library does more to help homeless people than anything you have probably done yourself

        It’s a public service staffed with dozens of people. Of course a single person isn’t going to do more in spare time than a team of people doing the work professionally.

        But that doesn’t excuse the rest of the state for tearing out local infrastructure as a means of tormenting the homeless.

        “I did two good things so I have permission to do one bad thing” isn’t sounds public policy.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          82·
          1 day ago

          From my initial post:

          Society has absolutely failed those people though. There is no question about that. But at some point, the library had to draw a line at how accommodating they could be.