I found this pretty good article over at SFGate.com on the homeless in San Francisco. This particular article follows a woman who has been in and out of drug treatment centers, hospitals and other related support. The 2-year cost to taxpayers for “helping” this individual?
$100,000 (and she still “shoots up” from time to time)!
While the amount spent in her case may be the exception, the cycle isn’t. This further proves the point that throwing money at this growing problem is clearly not the answer.
[excerpted]
(sfgate.com) “A Chronicle reporter and photographer first met Mitchell in June 2003, at a point in her life when she spent her days selling scrounged clothing and toys on Market Street near United Nations Plaza. Usually clad in a turban and a dark dress clinging to her stringy frame, she wheeled a shopping cart full of blankets, a Bible and dolls. The $5 a day she earned went to her crack and heroin habits.
“Life’s not too bad,” she said one hot day that year in a near-whisper. “My friends give me food. I smoke when I need to, get well (shoot heroin) when I have to.”
Raised poor in Hattiesburg, Miss., she met a man named Eddie Banks at age 17. They fell into a cycle of drug use and poverty that landed them in San Francisco. When Banks died in 1986 because of drug abuse, they had been together 17 years, and Mitchell knew little of any other life.
“After he died, I’d clean houses or be an in-home health aide, sometimes lived with my sister here in San Francisco, but then I guess I gave up,” she said.
The sister, Lula, said she moved back to Mississippi in 1990. “When her man died, she kind of died with him,” she said by phone from Hattiesburg. “I love her but haven’t the slightest idea how Georgia stayed alive all these years.” (more…)
