Matt Mahan

At some point, if you do have a place for people to go, a shelter bed, a treatment bed, transitional or affordable housing, you should certainly not be allowed to just choose to live outside because you're trapped in a cycle of addiction.

I think that's not a very compassionate or progressive approach.

position to just let people kind of endlessly cycle and ultimately die on the streets.

Yeah, that's well described.

I mean, look, I think it is a massive overcorrection on the left, the kind of progressive wing of the Democratic Party, at least, that has overcorrected on

resisting the previous abuses of the state.

Certainly in the 20th century, we saw the power of the state used coercively and in many places around the world, truly violating people's rights and autonomy.

And I think the left or a part of the left has sort of overreacted to that.

And we've ended up in a really bad place.

I don't know how much liberty you really have if you are deep in the throes of addiction to something like

meth or fentanyl, or you have a severe mental illness.

So I kind of question the very premise that somehow we're protecting people's civil liberties.

And then to your point, there is huge harm to others, to the broader community.

I've talked to folks who are, you know, say running a daycare center in a low-income community where these kids need all the

access and support they can possibly get, but they literally can't go across the street and play in the park because there's rampant drug use all day in the park.

So I think that the answer here really starts with culture.

I mean, it's having this sort of dialogue with people and getting them to understand the truth about the nature of addiction and mental illness, the harm that is caused.

I find that the folks who are the loudest

and resisting solutions to this issue, so building the treatment centers, being willing to intervene, being willing to use the law, use the drug courts, the mental health courts, give a judge the authority to mandate treatment, are the folks who live in the nicest neighborhoods, the gated communities,

are living with this immense privilege of not having to actually deal with this failure, this public policy failure on a daily basis.