What I didn't know about homelessness
Over the course of this year, I read Dreamland and The Least of Us by Sam Quinones.
It’s easy to be annoyed by homeless people or frustrated by someone on your street dealing drugs, but how many of us really understand the forces at play in our world that have led to these things?
I do believe in human agency and that the homeless person and the drug dealer have made some pretty bad choices along the way. But I have also come to realize there are many more systemic issues than most of us care to think about or explore. Enter these two books.
Dreamland tells the story of the opioid epidemic and how it went hand in hand with the rise of heroin across the country.
The Least of Us picks up where Dreamland lets off and brings us to our present-day battles with fentanyl, meth, and all of the brokenness in our world as a result of them.
I truly think anyone involved in homeless ministry, addiction recovery, jail or prison ministry... I could go on… needs to read these books. At a minimum, read the second one, Least of Us. It is so important to know why our world is like it is, and not begrudge it with zero understanding and grace.
We need to realize that a homeless person’s story has been and is being repeated thousands of times across the country. It’s both his or her poor choices and systemic issues that most of us are blind to.
Here are things I didn’t know that these books helped me understand:
I didn’t know both of these drugs are made in labs, usually outside the country, and smuggled in.
I didn’t know that the price of illegal drugs dropped significantly over the rise of these crises.
I didn’t know that being homeless is no longer rock bottom. Fifty years ago, being homeless was rock bottom for the town drunk. Today, that is not the case. Fentanyl kills you and meth leaves your mind in such a bad state that you literally do not care you are homeless.
I didn’t know how untruthfully and forcefully opioids were pushed on Americans for more than a decade.
I didn’t know that they measure the amount of Fentanyl that can kill you in nanograms. A nanogram is one billionth of a gram.