ANDERSON -- This is not a homeless issue; it is a drug and/or mental health issue. Until we are willing to at least be honest about it, we stand no chance of curing it
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” — Winston Churchill Once upon a time in French Indochina, administrators in Saigon decided to do something about a rat problem that was developing in the city. Their solution was to put a bounty on rats, to be claimed by anyone who could produce a rat tail (since the shelf life of entire dead rats was presumably quite short). Strangely, a few months after the bounty was introduced, the number of rats in Saigon actually increased, although it was remarked that many of the rats were now without tails. Upon investigation it turned out that enterprising Vietnamese had heard about the bounty and turned their talents to creating rat farms on the outskirts of the city, where rats were bred, de-tailed, and set free. What had been conceived as a measure to reduce the number of rats, actually had the opposite effect. So, it is with harm reduction and half-measures at opioid treatment . ...