On recent Mondays, when the weather is nice, I ride my bike to Turtle Bread at Chicago and 48th to meet David Therkelsen. We’re planning a trip to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, July 18–28, where we’ll meet with policymakers and residents to record their lessons on good governance and bring back recommendations for Minneapolis.
One topic on our list is drug addiction. These cities, and Minneapolis, are searching for ways to address the effects of the opioid epidemic and crystal meth. Each has navigated the hazards of encampments and the tangle of contributing factors: housing, mental illness, and the addictive power of fentanyl and other drugs. Cities and counties across the country are preparing budgets and deciding where to allocate funds along a continuum of options for addressing a disease that can reach into any family, pull out a member, and leave them on the street to fend for themselves.
From Turtle Bread, I walk across Chicago to the D-Line bus stop. This “Express” bus takes me downtown through Phillips, Ventura Village, and Elliot Park before my stop on 7th Street between 3rd and 4th avenues. The ride is filled with moral hazard. This week, I wasn’t sure whether to call 311 or 911 because the only other person at my morning bus station was bent double, in a nod against the shelter. I called neither. The bus driver and the few other passengers, I’m sure, did nothing as well.
It’s unclear to me what the truly compassionate action is when encountering people along the route who are either in the deep grip of addiction or searching for their next fix. A young woman boards surrounded by three men with hungry eyes, disheveled, dirty, their clothes torn from nights sleeping in weeds along roadsides. I can’t help but wonder if she’s being trafficked. Identifying trafficking isn’t something I’ve been trained to do. She got on with them; she left with them. Perhaps my sheltered existence warps my interpretation. I hope so. Like the woman who sometimes sleeps behind the electrical box at the top of the off-ramp near our house, I hope there’s somewhere safe for her to go.
The Better Minneapolis editor sent me a story by Michael R. Hatch from Seattle, who lost his sister to a drug overdose. I’ve started following his newsletter. His compassion is rooted in genuine concern to find a solution to this crisis. In a follow-up story titled “The Right Side of Right,” he quotes Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning novelist, who has also struggled with addiction:
“He drives past 12th and Jackson, he told me, and curses a city whose empathetic politics serve only as a placebo for the politicians themselves.”
Hatch then praises the method being tried in San Francisco by Daniel Lurie:
Daniel Lurie told his city the truth it had refused for a decade: the people dying on the sidewalk are not a housing statistic. They are sick, and a decent city gets them well.
Then he built what getting well takes. A stabilization center on Geary Street, open around the clock, where police can bring a person in crisis at any hour and a clinician is waiting. Shelter built around recovery. An end to handing out drug supplies to people with no path to treatment.
His approval sits near 74 percent, because people were never tired of compassion. They were tired of a failed ideology that left only suffering on the sidewalks.
California went further, and closer to home for me. This year the state began allowing conservatorships that hold a person in treatment for a year, renewable as long as the illness lasts: the power to keep someone safe and cared for until they are well, instead of releasing them the moment they can stand.
And:
Seattle has never once enacted the thing that actually saves a life: the conservatorship law, the treatment beds, the intervention Daniel Lurie built in San Francisco. It will not face the fact the whole crisis turns on: these are people who have lost the capacity to act for themselves.
He goes on:
We already intervene for people who cannot keep themselves alive. We do not leave the Alzheimer’s patient to wander into traffic. We do not let a child fend for herself in an alley. We would never call that freedom. The addict dying in the doorway has lost the same capacity to choose. We have simply decided, in his case alone, to look away and call it respect.
We know what is right. That is the unbearable part. San Francisco knows it. California knows it. Every grieving family knows it. The sick have to be rescued, especially the ones too sick to ask, and it takes a law that can hold them, a place that can heal them, and the plain nerve to build both and to stand up to the people who will call it cruelty.
Policy Changes
Hatch's writing, describing his desperation with Seattle, arrives as Mayor Frey announces changes to Minneapolis encampment policy. Police will issue citations and arrest people involved in public drug selling and use. Predictably, social activists called this cruelty and authoritarianism. They cannot grasp that the status quo consists of people unable to make sound decisions. Allowing them to remain is akin to letting someone with Alzheimer's wander into traffic. These are people whose free will has been usurped by a tyrant called addiction. Riding the bus, witnessing the stages of trafficking and addiction, it seems absurd to think intervention and possible conservatorship is anything other than compassionate.
Thursday I will interview Enrique Velazquez, Minneapolis Director of Regulatory Services, to ask what Mayor Frey's new policy means for the city and how the Safe Outdoor Spaces program might be implemented. The idea allows designated spots for the homeless to sleep in their cars or other vehicles. If readers doubt Minneapolis's urgent needs, ride the D-Line. A compassionate city acknowledges the addiction crisis and stands up for its neighbors. We want healing to have a chance, not because watching someone nod off next to us makes us uncomfortable, but because we know they are suffering and unable to choose a different path on their own. For their sake, we're willing to support any policy that brings about meaningful change.
