Fw: Are we better off?

80 years ago (even 50?) we would arrest people for possession of narcotics, maybe plea bargain to catch the seller. This didn't treat the user, sure, but it removed them from the dangers of the streets, the made the streets themselves a little better. We had asylums for the mentally ill. There were abuses, yes.  But, we had a place to house and treat the most vulnerable. 

Fast forward to the present:  Where, we have shirtless homeless people walking around freezing to death outside safe injection sites where we give them the tools for their addiction, needles in the downtown parks.  Where, we live in a society where we--in the name of individual dignity--won't force people to get help, but abandon the mentally ill to seek/find/chose help over their--many times--better judgement to run into the bush/wooded area.  Where, tweekers wander out into traffic downtown and OD in shelters.  Where, drugs are being legalized because *the experts* tell us that they'll find them anyway and criminalizing drugs is more harmful, while the opioid epidemic has taken over downtowns.  Where, the police and paramedics are powerless to do anything anymore, and we throw more and more money at free narcotics and ever more ballooning bureaucracy while the problem of homeless and drug addiction only grows, worsens, and becomes more physically dangerous.  Where, tent cities and "bumb kingdoms" pop up in wooded urban areas and downtown areas, inside which dismembered body parts have been known to be found and nobody forces people to get help if they don't have to ability to help themselves.  Where, the regulars show up at a shelter, until they don't, and nobody knows where they are or what happened to them.

I ask:  Are we really better off now?  Are we so much more enlightened, so much more woke?  Our elite experts are so much smarter than us.  When we feed tax dollars into this stuff and it grows, is it the Indian Cobra Effect?

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