Boston gearing up for first Mass-and-Cass tent cleanup early Monday morning

WBZ Radio just reported...

"Tents will not be removed if the individual occupying them cannot be placed in temporary housing or a treatment program."

So for the folks I state above that say no housing or a treatment program... are going to be left alone? I highly doubt that.

Remember folks while horrendous "operation clean sweep" was, it proved that 'banning' tents and telling 'people to just move along" didn't work a few years ago, as now, the issue is just as bad, and in many cases worse.

"moving people along" has never worked, and it wont work again. They need help.

Your thoughts are exactly it...

People will use services when we have services that people, self-select, to use. Part of why people aren't accessing services more is that the services are unbelievably stretched thin (as are the referral points) and with CoVID restrictions, many places have limited groups or activities that are actively happening.

So treatment might just mean sitting in a room all day watching time pass. I have been in a treatment program like that before; I relapsed and got kicked out of care because of it.

The head is the American Psychiatric Association reported in the mid 1950s when asked about the outcomes of strained state run psychiatric facilities: "Service follows the dollar" - you fund better programs and you get better outcomes, whereas when we try to come up with cheap/easy answers, we get this traversty of humanity:

Police, at 7am on a cool wet Monday morning, telling you it's closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here, taking away what may be the only vestiges of a sense of "home".

There are actual ways to address this, and it doesn't involve coercing people through threat of force.

Or to put it a different way, would you feel the same way if this encampment were on Beacham Street rather than on Atkinson Street? Perhaps a third could head over to the other side of the Mystic, a third could head down to Quincy, and a third could say on the Mile.

Last time this happened there were suddenly junkies camped out along the SW corridor in JP.

The solution is to tell the NIMBYs in Quincy to go fuck themselves and build that bridge again.

But yes... this is a societal moral failure packaged to look like individual moral failures.

These are people that were produced by our society, and the numbers are growing.

Meth is being put into pressed street adderall pills now. Why? The cartels realized that there is a shortage of illicit pharmaceutical amphetamines due to tight controls at the distribution level. Even if someone sells their whole script, that's at most 90x30mg pills, 270mg. For reference, people use methamphetamine by the Gram. 270mg is just shy of 1/4 gram. That's not a profitable product and too much of a hassle.

Unless you make pills that look like adderall but fill it with the cheap meth you are already making. "We've already made fentanyl pills that look like perc 30s... why not methderalls?"

Point is - these are issues primarily facing the United States. Fentanyl is barely a thing overseas (other than estonia, which has it even worse than us, and has for a long time). It's a thing here because we've socialized people to self-medicate, and that process results in people self medicating in more and more desperate ways, as their lives become completely unmanageable. What happens to the babies born in these communities...what are those babies like at 22 years old?

Apologies if this is a bit tangential, I have many thoughts and I'm clearly fired up, lol. Thanks for your response <3

Why don't we see tents on the sidewalks
Of Newton, Wellsely, Weston, Belmont etc.

That's what you posted. That's why I focused on the tents. Because that's what you said. Of course, if you are telling us that other parts of the city have those sorts of services also present at Mass & Cass, then I cannot say why that area specifically has become the way it has.

Along the Alewife Brook, although those have been less conspicuous.

Once or twice a year someone will pitch a tent for a few days on the Boston or Cambridge side of the Charles further up river. It normally lasts for a week or two before MSP clears it out one morning.

In the suburbs you'll find people living in their cars.

On the wooded hill overlooking Scarboro pond is home to at least a couple of tents used by homeless people. Not on the sidewalk though: There aren't any sidewalks on that section of Morton Street.