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Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

I’m calling bullshit on this one. Too many examples on YouTube of folks interviewing homeless folks en mass and finding that the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning. The “functional” heroin users you may claim exist are almost always functional enough to not be homeless.

Houston for example simply throws your ass in jail if you’re doing drugs and houses you if you aren’t. They claim to have solved homelessness, and they have in that the actual folks you’re talking about end up housed or in shelters every night.

Being married to an immigrant who actually had to struggle in a third world country with almost no social or economic mobility has left me with almost no sympathy for the homeless in America. Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

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> Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

> Folks in far shittier situations than them play their hands far better.

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? If these folks were screwed up from the beginning doesn't this mean they had no hand to play from the start?

There are many, many folks in third world countries that don't make it through life too well either. Life is pretty doomed for you if you're just born in Sudan right now for example. Yet some, very few, of them will succeed in extirpating themselves from the situation.

Statistically there will always be people who fare better than others, through a combination of sweat, blood, and luck. I don't know if it's fair to have "almost no sympathy" for the ones who were too stupid and unlucky to be winners.

TIL extirpating is a word!

Still I think you meant extricate.

Yes I did. Thanks.

> the overwhelming majority of them were not “normal people down on their luck who end up on drugs”. Rather, mostly folks who had terrible home lives and were basically screwed up from the beginning.

Those aren't mutually exclusive, and furthermore, they likely have major overlap.

This reeks of the American brain rot that views poverty as a personal moral failure. Some might couch it as "wealth is the result of hard work and talent". The latter is known as the myth of meritocracy. Those are two sides of the same coin.

Luckily, we have studies we can rely on rather than feelings or Youtuber anecdata eg [1]:

> In many instances, substance abuse is the result of the stress of homelessness, rather than the other way around. Many people begin using drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with the pressures of homelessness

[1]: https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless

I know it’s just more anecdata, but that just does not match my experience at all. I’ve known over a dozen people who have struggled with this over the years, become homeless, had drug overdoses, and several who’ve died.

Every single one of them had a home when they started using the hard drugs, and many had a home through most of their addiction, and only became homeless after the addiction had progressed to severe levels.

If most people have personal experience like mine, then maybe there are issues with the research (people blaming their personal failings on things outside of their control, for example)

> If most people have personal experience like mine

This seems anecdotal too. Very meta.

In any case, I'd rather trust actual research rather than a random HN user and what they feel most people's experiences are like.

It is silly to think that question is one that can be investigated by scientific inquiry. The only thing that study (which you haven't linked to) reveals are the opinions of those who funded it.

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