Do raccoons root through your garbage at midnight?

No, in my neighborhood it's the human remains of the opioid crisis sadly. I live very close to a drug rehab facility.

That sucks. If only they voted for Hillary :(

Nah, she wouldn't have gotten them clean and given them a degree in IT Management like Bernie would have.

Bernie would've fed them into the war machine with nicer clothes.

Do you think the rehab facility is making the problem worse?

Which problem is that?

The problem is that it's a half-baked solution. Ok so you give these people treatment, that's good, but it's not enough to break the cycle. These people had jobs and homes and now they don't. They live on the street, they're tempted to try again because they surrounded by other users without any support system from the medical community.

If they had a place where they could legally use heroin while supervised by medical professionals, people who wanted to break the cycle would have a better chance. Right now it really feels like a show-solution. "Hey we did something!" but they didn't. These programs need to be judged by their success rate. Maybe I'm wrong and these guys are going gangbusters, but the auxiliary issues aren't getting better.

The amount of times we'll find human feces on the sidewalk, or lose needles in the neighborhood is growing. People are still walking around screaming and angry, punching things because they couldn't get a fix. It's honestly sad. I mean you can tell this isn't who they are. Someone gets a broken leg and winds up like this. It's a complete failure on the part of Congress and if we had any sort of justice in this country we'd have hung the pharma executives behind this.

All that said, it's maybe the first time I think white folks had to face up to the fact that the problems facing non-white communities are as money-oriented, and class-based as they've ever been. While I don't see that as an acceptible reasonable to inflict something like this on the current junkie-set here at Methadone Mile, I don't think it's getting us closer to a complete rejection of the current us-vs-them paradaigm. Here's hoping the 2022 mid-term crowd can tie Healthcare to this crisis and pull another Connor Lamb.

It seemed like you think there’s a causal relationship between the location of the facility and the number of junkies doing unpleasant junky things on the block nearby but outside the facility. I don’t think needle littering junkies hang around outside rehab centers and methadone clinics.

Am I wrong?

All I can tell you is what I see here. I don't know how things work in other regions in terms of patterns. But yes, they do. There are encampments about 400 meters outside of the facility itself, and then beyond that (where I am) it's a bit more patchy and migratory.

Here's a few articles from the Boston Globe that paint a better picture than I am.

Life and Loss on Methadone Mile

Life on Boston’s streets during the pandemic

As pandemic wears on, despair at epicenter of addiction crisis deepens

Did it ever occur to you that maybe the junkies were there first and they put in a rehab and methadone clinic to address the problem?

Or was it like a Field of Dreams scenario: If you build it, they will come.

?