San Francisco Handing Out Free Booze to Homeless
The “experts” say it helps…
It gets better. The city spent over $360,000 per person they claim to have helped. Giving them a place to stay could have been cheaper.
San Francisco Chronicle:
For a small slice of San Francisco’s homeless population that struggles with severe alcohol addiction, nurses offer treatment not in a pill, but in a shot of vodka or a glass of beer.
It may sound counterintuitive, experts say, but it helps keep people off the streets and out of emergency rooms, jails — or the morgue.
San Francisco set up a “managed alcohol program” four years ago as a way to care for vulnerable homeless people who drank excessive amounts of alcohol and were among the city’s highest users of emergency services.
Since its creation, the program, which started out with 10 beds, has served 55 clients, according to officials from the Department of Public Health. The now 20-bed program, which costs about $5 million per year, operates out of a former hotel in the heart of the Tenderloin. Nurses dispense regimented doses of vodka and beer to participants at certain times of day based on care plans.
Such programs don’t focus on sobriety, experts say, but rather on improving participants’ overall health while decreasing hospital stays and calls to police.
This worked really well, just like providing free drugs to addicts and decriminalizing fentanyl worked out great:
UPDATE - Snarky Journalist Chris Chappel had a ball with this:
😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫