Show off your favorite abandoned-garbage-riverside-homeless-camps of 2022!

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The thing is it's really not just meth anymore. Meth is a Busch Lite compared to some of this new stuff...
 
Billy said:
Maybe it's time we teach coping and addiction classes in high school with hands on requirements for volunteer time in the community centers to help drive the points home.

I don't know just throwing out ideas. It seems more useful for today's day and age then a lot of what is taught.
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Great idea.

I drove by Helping Hands daily with my son, so he could see the results of drugs and alcohol use/abuse.

I even pointed out a few people that I knew in the 80s…man it is sad.

Life is a thin line and one can fall either way.

Teach your kids yourself…don’t rely on others to do so.
 
Billy said:
The thing is it's really not just meth anymore. Meth is a Busch Lite compared to some of this new stuff...
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If you're looking for the good stuff I got you covered. There an open air drug market/camp in town. It's all very compassionate.
 
Evan B said:
I went through DARE in the early 90s, and don't remember hearing about Meth until adulthood. I remember very well how well they beat it in to our heads that marijuana was quite possibly the worst thing on the planet, though.
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My mom took me to see “Reefer Madness”* when I was in high school. I had heard of marijuana by this time (1965ish). I think that film became a cult classic for many stoners as a comedy classic.

*1934 vintage
 
Evan B said:
There are enough resources for people who truly want to get off the street to seek out. They might need some guidance to get there, but it exists. But there are a WHOLE LOT of them who don't want to climb out of it, don't want help, and don't want to live the lives you and I live.
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I think that a lot of these people have reached a point of depression and after some time, they've just given up. Once someone has reached their low point in life, it becomes extremely hard for them to see any positive outcome and hence they give up trying. They need someone to steer then in the right direction and offer them some hope..

Some of this homelessness can be attributed to drugs or alcohol but there are a lot of them that are just jobless and at the end of their rope trying. Once living on the streets for a year or two this becomes a survival habit for them and extremely hard for them to break, this is their new found way of survival. Mental illness is another matter that the government seem to ignore (cheaper) rather then help them. Drugs do play a major role in homelessness and it will just get a lot worse before it gets better..

As @JayB had mentioned earlier, these homeless need more dedicated people like Kevin Dahlgren to go out to help and steer them in the right direction. A lot of society prefer to just avoid and ignore these people rather then to try to help. We need more dedicated people to go out to these camps to help them rather then wait for them to come into their office. These homeless are very unlikely to know how to help themselves or know where to find it..
 
I remember standing in our assistant safety officer’s office looking at a poster on her wall that listed all the drugs you could be tested for. I was going down the list saying “That one, that one…”. She asked what was I doing. I told her picking out the drugs I had taken and I should be looking for the ones I hadn’t. The list would be shorter. She jokingly told me to get out of her office. At the time I was the network manager of a multi-state, 350 million dollar a year heavy civil construction company.

Prior to working for that company I am a drug addict and I spent a couple years homeless on the streets of Seattle. Very few of you have any understanding of what is happening on those streets.
 
This is a fascinating study done by our neighbors to the North. The most effective way to deal with homelessness is to keep people from becoming homeless. Often, the solutions are not what people think they are. People in crisis do not make decisions like people who aren't in crisis. It may be a better idea to keep people out of crisis mode.

I have said before that the problem with homelessness as an issue is that many people see it as something that someone should be punished for. They believe that the homeless person is at fault and we need to create a larger disincentive as if living like shit isn't a good enough one.

Many others see it as a scenario where society has failed the person and that they bear no responsibility. In fact, we are all a party to our own problems, so they do bear responsibility.

Both dominant perspectives lack critical thinking. It's not a simple problem. However, for $7,500 Canadian it's possible to keep a good amount of people from becoming another person in a tent.

 
JayB said:
Just to tether this back to rivers and fishing - if you were actively fishing in our local riverscapes in the 50's through the early 00's, how common was it to encounter a scene like this? One of my mantras is "Things didn't used to be like this" but you can only see what you see, so maybe I'm wrong and it's not so much that our rivers weren't festooned with encampments as it was that I just wasn't out there to see them.
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i saw it sometimes when i was a kid fishing lake washington tributaries like juanita creek in kirkland, bear creek in redmond, and little bear creek in woodinville. not encampments - but like one guy living under a bridge near a grocery store where he'd have a steady supply of dumpster food - that kind of thing. you'd know you were getting close to one as the trail along the creek became more cluttered with discarded food and packaging. that would have been from around '80 - '84.
 
I haven't read much of this so forgive me if I repeat anything.

I was watching Bill Mayer one night last year and this subject was brought up. His guest was an Englishman. He was appalled at the amount of homelessness here, stating that it was barbaric our government would allow such deplorable conditions to exist within its citizenry. I agree. Are we so destitute in money and compassion we allow our citizens to live like animals? Are we a country in decline or is this just normal for the USA...
 
kerrys said:
I remember standing in our assistant safety officer’s office looking at a poster on her wall that listed all the drugs you could be tested for. I was going down the list saying “That one, that one…”. She asked what was I doing. I told her picking out the drugs I had taken and I should be looking for the ones I hadn’t. The list would be shorter. She jokingly told me to get out of her office. At the time I was the network manager of a multi-state, 350 million dollar a year heavy civil construction company.

Prior to working for that company I am a drug addict and I spent a couple years homeless on the streets of Seattle. Very few of you have any understanding of what is happening on those streets.
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Your perspective is the one we need. The rest of us are just guessing.
 
Coach Potter said:
Your perspective is the one we need. The rest of us are just guessing.
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I dunno. Before I retired I got pretty good at building and supporting midsize WANs and LANs. Prior to that I was good at or at least good enough at surviving on the streets. I have few if any answers to the homelessness issue. I know what I did to get out of the situation. I can safely say I did not do it alone. It took a bunch of people including my family supporting me. I can say with some confidence I am the exception. Most addicts don’t survive. If we think the solution is getting people off drugs we are likely going to continue to fail.
 
candr said:
The drugs are very different these days, synthetic, low cost and powerful + increasing wealth disparity (record corporate profit taking) = recipe for disaster.
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So on my ambulance ride last week they asked me if I wanted 50 or 100 Mike's of fentanyl.. I took 50 because that word makes me nervous. How much is a Mike? Must be a mcg?
 
FontinalisFin said:
So on my ambulance ride last week they asked me if I wanted 50 or 100 Mike's of fentanyl.. I took 50 because that word makes me nervous. How much is a Mike? Must be a mcg?
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mcg, micrograms. 100 micrograms to a milligram. 100 milligrams to a gram.

That's the mass, but the relative amount matters too. The LD50 of fentanyl is reported as 62 mg/kg body weight. Acetyl fentanyl is 9.3. carfentanil is 3.39.
 
Gary Knowels said:
mcg, micrograms. 100 micrograms to a milligram. 100 milligrams to a gram.

That's the mass, but the relative amount matters too. The LD50 of fentanyl is reported as 62 mg/kg body weight. Acetyl fentanyl is 9.3. carfentanil is 3.39.
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Dang, so 1/20th of a fatal dose made me feel pretty good, that would barely be able to be seen on that penny.
 
Coach Potter said:
Your perspective is the one we need. The rest of us are just guessing.
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Lots (like thousands of hours) of first person testimonials from people that have been completely consumed by their (still active) addictions if you've got the stomach for it. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=soft+white+underbelly

FWIW the guy behind the channel estimated he'd interviewed ~5,000 homeless addicts and that he was aware of maybe 4 had managed to get and stay clean.

 
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kerrys said:
I dunno. Before I retired I got pretty good at building and supporting midsize WANs and LANs. Prior to that I was good at or at least good enough at surviving on the streets. I have few if any answers to the homelessness issue. I know what I did to get out of the situation. I can safely say I did not do it alone. It took a bunch of people including my family supporting me. I can say with some confidence I am the exception. Most addicts don’t survive. If we think the solution is getting people off drugs we are likely going to continue to fail.
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Thanks for a first hand perspective. I appreciate it.

Here is the deal as I see it. There is no 1 ethical solution. There just isn't. Every human in this situation is different. How they got there is different. Their path out , if there is one, is different.
Because of who I married, I hear things about how Bellingham serves our homeless. During the last cold weather, I got to hear about a mother and daughter without their own place to get warm. I am a dad. It was frightening and physically painful to think about. If people want to demonize and make assumptions about the mom they can. I don't know her story. I know even less of dads story. The kid though...fuck man. Fuck.
They were able to get warm, but in a roundabout way, we all paid for that at a vastly increased amount vs. a hotel room for the night. It may have even been a good portion of $7,500.00.
If this happens again, I am fairly sure that I will just rent that room. Is that poor kid still homeless?
 
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