How cities like San Francisco enable drug addicts

In America, when it comes to a wide variety of self-defeating behavior that leads to bad outcomes, we tend to take one of two different approaches to deal with it. Either…

1) We focus on strongly discouraging people from engaging in problematic behavior.

2) We focus on trying to help people engaged in problematic behavior and reduce the harm it causes in their lives.

Debates about issues like homelessness, single mothers, trans issues, and divorce all tend to revolve, at least in part, around these two approaches to the problem. Both approaches have different strengths and weaknesses.