Why do we as go to great lengths and expense to save stranded hikers or kids who fall in wells but dgaf about people dying from drug addiction or homelessness? Or is that a false assumption?

20 comments

  2. The person lost hiking or in the well wants help getting out and then once they are out they can avoid getting back in.

    That isn’t the same as somebody struggling with addiction or homeslessnss who, even if they want to get out in some capacity, have a gravity back to the struggle.

    This is a false equivalency.

  3. You can pull a kid out of a well or a hiker out of a canyon and the problem is over. How do you solve drug addiction or homelessness? You’re comparing apples and oranges. Fuck, you’re comparing apples and monkeys.

  4. Generally speaking, the US spends billions on homelessness while the national parks has only spent $3.4 million on rescues in 2017.

    Also one is far more easy to solve than the other

  5. It’s hard to find an exact number but HUDs 2022 budget is $60.3 billion which obviously doesn’t include state and local funding. We spend a lot of money on homelessness and housing insecurity, it’s just a complicated problem.

  6. That is a false assumption.

    Also get this. It is easier to save a stranded hiker than it is to make someone not homeless. Cheaper too, by many orders of magnitude. Also a stranded hiker can be dead in a day.

    Also I have no idea, but I would bet a lot of money that we spend probably 100 times more money a year on fighting drug addiction and homelessness than on rescuing people hiking. Probably 1000 times more.

  8. The public looks on the stranded hikers or kids in the well as an accident that could happen to anyone. The solution is obvious and immediate. No one looks at drug addiction or homelessness as something that could happen to them (though it is possible). The solution to those problems are varied, long term and expensive.

  9. Ain’t nobody madder than a heroin addict who wakes up from an overdose because of narcan. Doesn’t matter if you saved his life, you ruined his fix

  10. Because drug addicts don’t even give a shit about themselves half the time. I’ve recently began working with Fire & EMS and trust me, you revive a drug addict in an overdose, 90% of the time they ignore your attempts to help (many even get angry you ruined their high even though they were dying lol) and will just overdose again sometime in the near future.

    Much easier to care about about hikers who just got themselves in a sticky situation who (usually) actually give a shit about self preservation and don’t drain our resources by doing the same shit over and over and over again ignoring all attempts for help. You can only care so much when these people don’t even care themselves.

  11. Stranded hikers pretty much always want to be saved. Drug addiction and homelessness are much more complicated. A lot of people are homeless by choice. Treating addiction requires commitment from the addict. It’s not that no one GAF. Addiction and homelessness are complicated, ongoing issues. You really can’t compare stranded hikers to addiction and homelessness.

  12. I have family members with addiction issues, and if I could trade that for “pull them out of a well, once”, I’d do it in a heartbeat. You don’t tend to see the same kids fall down the same wells multiple times, cursing you out for trying to help them.

  13. Two different groups of people are tasked with those things. Both are important and both are being worked on by their respective parties. This is a spit in the face to the many people and organizations who tackle drug addiction and homelessness.

    Also, America has one of the lower homeless rates in the world. Yes there are a lot of homeless people (over 600k) but compared to our population of 330 million, we have one of the lower rates. It’s still a problem, but it’s constantly being worked on, it isn’t an easy overnight fix.

    [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population)

    Also, we have cut our homeless rate almost in half in the last year. It’s been steadily decreasing for over a decade (with some spikes here and there).

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-of-homeless-people-in-the-us/

  14. It’s not a false assumption, it’s a false equivalency.

    Drug addiction and homelessness are not emergencies, they’re results of many symptoms accumulating over time.

  15. False assumption. There is a great deal more help out there for homeless people and addicts than for stranded hikers or kids in wells.

    The problem is that when you take a stranded hiker to their destination or pull a kid out of a well, that problem is solved. I’ve been a stranded, injured hiker, the kind of case that would make local papers if anyone told them about it. Several hours of rescue workers time and I was no longer a stranded hiker but just another injured hospital patient, albeit one with a better story than most.

    When you give a homeless person shelter for the night, they remain homeless. You have to help them find a home, a job, and enough resources to get over the initial hump of housing related expenses when you’ve got nothing. And that’s homeless people who are actively working to not be homeless, by far the easiest group to help. All they need is money and maybe education.

    Drug addicts are even harder. You give them money, they remain addicts. You take their money away, they remain addicts. You lock them up, they remain addicts. You throw hundreds to thousands of hours of counseling, rehab resources, and medication at them, and some subset of them who are willing to put in the incredibly hard work of getting and remaining clean will get better. The rest will remain addicts.

    Basically, the problems that are cheap and easy to solve get solved quickly. The hard problems get more resources thrown at them, but never get fully solved.

  16. Who says we don’t?

    There are extensive resources for addiction recovery. It is very commonly paid for by insurance. There are scholarship programs for those that can’t afford it. AA and other recovery programs like NA, HA, SMART, and others are completely free.

    Other people have mentioned another key difference. Rescuing a kid from a well or a hiker in distress is a one time thing. Addiction and homelessness are long term problems without easy solutions that also require the participation of the individual with the issue. You can yank a kid out of a well and you can sober up an alcoholic. You can’t make the alcoholic stay sober but you can easily cover up the well so the kid won’t fall in again even if they tried.

  17. What does this even mean?

    We spend a ton of money on and enact all sorts of policies to reduce drug addiction and homelessness.

    Those are just complex problems without easy solutions. Rescuing a lost hiker is a lot easier to solve.

  18. It assumes there aren’t hundreds of cold cases of missing hikers in America’s forests, as well as fire & rescue going to great lengths to save homeless or drug ODs – both of which are the case

  19. Oh we do. BUT with drug addicts, you can only do so much. A drug addict will only want to truly be sober if they choose sobriety.

  20. Sometimes I forget just how little exposure some people have to drug addiction and homelessness. These are not easy problems to solve. You don’t solve drug addiction through pure effort and expense thrown at the issue. It’s a legitimately difficult problem to solve and in some cases you can’t do anything but show someone an open door that they themselves ultimately have to choose to walk through. Making sure those doors are there is important, but you can’t make people walk through them and change their lives. There is also never any guarantee that they won’t go right back to it after getting clean.

    You can’t rescue drug addicts, or the chronically homeless for that matter, if they do not want to be rescued. It’s not like pulling a kid out of a well. Most homeless people are homeless temporarily. The chronically homeless would not be able to live in a house and keep it livable if you literally just gave them a house to live in. The reason why their situation is not temporary is because they lack some ability to function in the world. They usually have addiction and/or severe mental health issues both of which you can’t easily force someone to get help for even when the resources are available.

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