A new article in Time magazine describes how teen drug and alcohol rehab centers actually make the problem worse.
This is exactly how San Francisco’s homeless programs are run, especially Randy Shaw’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic and it’s takeover of SROs and the master lease program, literally concentrating hardcore dope fiends with those few who might want to improve their lives. This can also be applied to the entire Tenderloin area which has been repeatedly described as a ‘containment zone’ for this exact same thing. So basically San Francisco is paying 500 million dollars a year to essentially concentrate and increase the very problem it is paying non profits to solve, guaranteeing it will be paying for the exact same thing in perpetuity
from Time magazine
Increasingly, substance-abuse experts are finding that teen drug treatment may indeed be doing more harm than good. Many programs throw casual dabblers together with hard-core addicts and foster continuous group interaction. It tends to strengthen dysfunctional behavior by concentrating it, researchers say. “Just putting kids in group therapy actually promotes greater drug use,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2003160-1,00.html#ixzz0uKGbgpSi
This article also made Fark.com where some people describe their own experiences with very similar programs and in some cases describe results far worse than what’s in Time magazine
There was a big “industry” in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the DC Metro area for “rehabbing” teenage pot smokers. The kids would be sent to rehab facilities for getting caught smoking, and then when they got out of rehab they were told that they must attend as many AA and NA meetings as possible. When they did go to those meetings there was a whole cult that was built up of charismatic meeting-leaders who targeted the cuter teenage chick pot smokers, and would lure then into splinter AA/NA meetings, whereupon these pimps would start sharing the girls as “spoils”. There was a whole community setup, of halfway houses and a network of job procurement, that the pimps would use to isolate the kids and keep them under sway. Once the girls were “used up” or got older, they were utilized for things like housework in the group houses. It was an enormous scandal in the DC area, and went on for years. I think it was called “DC Metro Club”, and only stopped when the pimp/cult leaders eventually died or left town. I knew of at least half a dozen local teens who did nothing worse than smoke pot a few times, and they got sucked into this rehab-12 step cult that completely destroyed their lives a hundred times worse than being a heroin addict on the streets would have ever done.
and I knew of at least half a dozen homeless people in San Francisco that got sucked into the non profit housing in SROs and ended up becoming permanent crack heads on the streets of San Francisco. It happens a lot more than people realize
And it goes further. Originally, some of the support staff in the original ‘supportive housing’ in San Francisco rallied for mixed housing and non-concentration, but Tenderloin Housing Clinic abandoned that within 2 years in 2003, and now is solely concentrating homeless people in SRO’s with those of heavy drug addicts and mentally ill people.
The federally funded Corporation for Supportive Housing strongly recommends against this type of housing for homeless people, that is, if one ever wants to help them get out of the situation
https://www.bluoz.com/blog/2007/10/03/unfree-market-housing/
The largest contractor in San Francisco, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, used to have these documents on file with their management in 2001 when they first started the ‘master lease program’
it was abandoned by 2003, and the rest is history. It is why San Francisco is now geared toward a permanent underclass in the middle of downtown
It is a textbook case of how to create a permanent underclass in the middle of a city
here’s another example from somebody who’s been in quite a few SRO’s