Decades of disinvestment in services have worsened addiction, mental health, and homelessness. The Drug Policy Alliance advocates for immediate connection to care and long-term investments in addiction and social services.
“ To change conditions on the street, the focus must be on urgent care and lasting solutions. People need immediate access to treatment, shelter, and healthcare, plus long-term housing options, ongoing case management, and real job opportunities.”
Lisa Daugaard
Co-Executive Director, Purpose Dignity Action
These can lead to better and immediate connection to services which helps get people off the street. They can reduce hospitalization rates and lengths of stay, frequency and intensity of future crises, and fewer arrests.
These reduce homelessness and arrests by providing people with a place to go without requiring abstinence. Permanent Supportive Housing has on-site services to address people’s struggles and on-going needs on a long-term basis.
A full range of addiction services—including counseling, medications, long-term treatment, and recovery housing—should be available to individuals. Personalized support reduces overdose risk and improves recovery chances.
Decades of underinvestment in services and social safety nets have worsened addiction, overdose, mental health issues, and poverty. As homelessness rises, these issues have become more visible on our streets. Addressing them requires interventions like crisis response, addiction services, and housing.
Politicians want to criminalize public suffering. But criminalization does not address why people are homeless. Despite laws against public drug use, people use drugs in public because they have nowhere else to go. Homelessness and rents are at all-time highs. Shelters are full or unsafe. When arrested, people cycle in and out of jail, ending up back on the street without meaningful care or support. Without stable housing, it is incredibly difficult for people to access healthcare services, get a job, and hold a day-to-day routine.
Criminalization also contributes to what is happening on the streets. It drains funding from health and supportive services. It creates criminal records that create barriers to housing, jobs, and other essential services that help keep people off the street. Even in jail, drugs are present, effective treatment is limited, and overdose occurs. Despite over 50 years of criminalizing drugs, drugs are more available, cheaper, and potent than ever.
Elected leaders cannot arrest their way out of this problem or just let people suffer on the streets. Public suffering is a complex issue that requires multifaceted solutions, funding, and cross-sector collaboration.
First and foremost, our communities need more humane shelter options and affordable housing. They need jobs and healthcare. Communities also need more services at the street level, like community-led crisis-response teams and overdose prevention centers. These services connect people to care, including addiction services.
The Drug Policy Alliance is committed to advocating for non-punitive approaches to public drug use and street conditions that address the root causes and create lasting change.
We’re all concerned about public suffering and want real solutions. Worsening health, increasing poverty and houselessness is the direct result of decades of underinvestment in public systems, disinvestment in particular communities, and the erosion of the social safety net. Effective solutions focus on health, provide a full continuum of care, and centralize community responses.
People need safe and stable housing. But the U.S. housing crisis has left people to live on the street, putting their daily lives and traumas are on display. For some, this includes their drug use. We asked Dr. David Goodman-Meza, an addiction medicine specialist, to explain the root causes of public drug use and how we should address it.
We all want and deserve healthy and safe communities. The safest places in America have access to the things people need to thrive, such as jobs, education, housing, and health care. They do not have more police, more jails, more prisons, or harsher sentences. We need to fully fund what is proven to create safer, thriving neighborhoods.
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