President Donald Trump

There are huge swaths of rural/suburban Americans who seem to genuinely believe that ~all cities of significant size are Mad Max-style hellscapes. They subject themselves to propaganda videos which show the worst-off .1% of a city and extrapolate that to the whole place. You will not be surprised to learn that these people are racist and reactionary. Can't speak to England.

I can only assume that you are correct.

Many, many people have asked me what New York is like with Mamdani as mayor. They typically are surprised when I tell them that it seems mostly the same. I wasn't sold on Mamdani as mayor (although I preferred him to Cuomo), but I knew enough about the city to know that it wouldn't change dramatically no matter who was elected.

seattle already spends an obscene amount on this. between shelters, food assistance, medicaid, disability, outreach teams, free medical care, harm reduction programs, sanctioned encampments, tiny home villages, and every other layer of services, we’re already spending hundreds of millions a year on a population in the low tens of thousands - recent estimates are 120k per year per homeless

so spare me the “just give them housing and money” line as if nobody’s tried throwing resources at this

the issue was never that these people get nothing. the issue is that a relatively small number of repeat offenders, violent psych cases, and chronic addicts cycle through police, fire, ems, jails, hospitals, shelters, and back onto the street over and over while everyone pretends the answer is always one more check, one more grant, one more outreach worker

if someone has been arrested eight times for randomly assaulting people and is still back on the street blinding a 75-year-old woman at a crosswalk, that’s not a funding problem, that’s a failure of containment, treatment, and basic public safety

I tend to agree that a lot of the money and services devoted to addressing homelessness, drug addiction, chronic mental health crises, have been ineffective at generating long-term change. That said, I won't pretend to have the all the solutions.

No American city spends enough money on their poor. The measures you describe are widely regarded as wholly insufficient by people who advocate for the poor (as opposed to you guys who wanna "keep them off the streets" by what means, exactly? Throwing them in prison?)

Why do you think this problem is significantly less profound in other developed countries? Some nonsense about culture?

So if "containment" does not mean "prison", I can only figure that you mean to round up these marginalized, victimized, and struggling human beings and dump them all into some kind of hellish open-air area which would functionally be a prison, but without the free meals and shelter one gets there. How else can you prevent them from wandering out into the rest of the city? People on the street tend to move around during the day.

yes, clearly the real solution is to round up and kill anyone wearing glasses

they're all half measures which are only granted begrudgingly by cities, and which are in constant danger of getting reduced or removed

I have "all the solutions". Take a few of the luxurious super-mansions owned by various barons and house the homeless there. Set up treatment facilities, groceries, psychiatric facilities, day cares, etc. within those buildings. Do this on a federal level as part of the federal budget. Devote like 5% of the money we currently spend on blowing up Iranian schoolgirls on this and that may well be sufficient by itself.

Easy game. Particularly in Seattle, as it hosts many of our richest and most Epsteinified barons, like Bill Gates (I mean, maybe he in particular has moved, I don't know or care)

As I said, I won't pretend to have all the solutions, but I do think that the short time horizon and general reactivesness of our politics is a big part of the problem. Sustained policy on multiple fronts over a period of decades is required. Once people get stuck in a vicious cycle of extreme poverty, substance abuse, and mental illness, it is very difficult to pull them out. Keeping people from getting in the cycle in the first place should be a bigger part of the policy focus.

but who will blow up iranian girls if we stop?

I’ve realize rick that you’re just really dumb. You type up some interesting posts but don’t follow arguments well. Name a single person in this thread that said it’s a fringe issue. No one did. No one is debating that fent is causing a lot of damage.

This ^^^^ is really dumb.

no u

That’s a really good point about Seattle. People always forget that Bill Gates lives there…unless he moved or something in which case who cares.

Lets be clear was my 80 % a number for the USA way high and it wasn't made from a girlfriend as an expert but I guarantee you my number is a hell of lot close than the bullshit 1.79% one you presented and yes I should have said opioids and not just fentanyl as the drugs get stronger and stronger .
Try talking to a paramedic and ask them what % of calls and time are spent on overdoses.

The protocol in the city I lived in was a firetruck and ambulance are dispatched and than the ambulance takes them to the hospital and must remain with the victim till they are admitted or fully treated

you and i are probably more politically aligned with each other than to almost anyone else in this thread, and yet somehow every interaction with you turns into the same miserable nitpicking exercise

the 80% number got mocked, the 1% counter got accepted, i point out the actual reality is somewhere much closer to the middle, and instead of engaging with that you go straight to “rick is dumb”

this is the umpteenth time you went hard into personal attacks as well

you’re not here for discussion, you’re here because arguing is your hobby, and the problem is you have the personality of an old divorce lawyer without being attractive enough to pull it off

So, you are just going to ignore the math question?

The number may well be in "the middle," but I strongly suspect that it is much, much closer in absolute terms to the percentages that jjou cited than the percentage than lozen cited. You at least can find underlying support for jjou's percentages, which isn't surprising since it appears that he typed the question into Google and then gave the response he got from Gemini. Is it possible that a decent chunk of EMT calls that were coded as breathing difficulty or whatever were fentanyl overdoses? I think that's entirely possible, but I would be very, very surprised if more than 10-20% of EMT calls in fact related to fentanyl overdoses, and not at all surprised if less than 10% were. In short, I think there was a basis to question jjou's percentages. I don't think there was a basis to mock them as ridiculous on their face. I think there were very obvious reasons to regard an estimate of 80% as ridiculous. If I am correct, then it is hardly surprising that people were more skeptical about what lozen said than about what jjou said.

All that said, it was pretty obvious from context that lozen was guessing (albeit terribly), so I don't think it is necessary to belabor this point. I didn't interpret his post as an attempt to fool people into believing that he had data to support such an extreme estimate.

Lol 80% is way off from 2 % or whatever it is but it's not mu7 fault I'm so innumerate... haVeyoU eveN talKed tO aN emT abouT my MsdE uP nuMbeRS

Where are you getting your 90,000 deaths in 2021? Are you making **** up again so soon?

Fentanyl-involved overdose deaths in the U.S. rose rapidly over the past decade, with synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl) becoming the leading cause of drug overdose deaths. While deaths skyrocketed from 2013 to 2022, recent provisional data indicates a significant decline in 2024 and 2025.Fentanyl Overdose Deaths by Year (Approximate)2025 (12 months ending Oct/Nov): ~68,000–70,000 (Provisional)2024 (Provisional): ~48,422 to ~76,000 (Based on CDC estimates, showing a decrease from 2023)2023: 72,776 (1.4% decrease from previous year, representing the first decline since 2018)2022: ~70,600 to 76,000+ (Peak year)2021: ~65,000 - 70,000+2020: ~43,000+2019: ~36,000+2013: 3,105 (Start of the third wave of the opioid epidemic)

As far as I know, I have only met one person who died of a fentanyl overdose. He wasn't the profile that right wing social media would lead you to expect. He was a white school teacher in his late 30s or early 40s.

When you make your entire personality “I’m not afraid to tell it how it is” but consistently get “how it is” wrong, or manipulate statistics like what you did adding in mental health incidents with drug overdoses, I feel like concluding that you’re dumb is honestly the more charitable position. Roccoco said you were “dishonest”. Which one is worse and why did you react so negatively to what I said?

You’re the one that started the negativity against me imo. I have always said I don’t think you’re a trump supporter, unlike others, but you painted me as some rabid trans affirming lefty. Couldn’t be further from the truth. If there was a pill people could take to not be trans, I’d be the first one advocating that they take it instead of transitioning (unless transitioning was super easy and complete). That’s not trans affirming.

i used fent overdoses as shorthand for the broader junkie and homeless crisis, which is over 30% of calls. if you narrow it to strictly fentanyl ODs in seattle it's around 5%, though the reporting issues you mentioned make that murky.

if lozen literally meant 80% of people ODing on fent, yeah that's nuts. i assumed he was talking about the wider picture.

and that 30% number is actually pretty misleading on its own. a cardiac arrest or car accident, paramedics load the guy up and drive to harborview, maybe two guys, maybe 15 minutes on scene. a homeless dude in psychosis or nodding out needs police on scene before EMS even walks up, then you've got fire, EMS, and at least one or two cops all standing around waiting to see what this guy does, could be an hour. so one call in the 30% bucket can eat what, 5x the bodies and 4x the time of a normal call.

seattle fire logs over 100 assaults on their people a year, sometimes twice that amount - and they are not getting assaulted when putting out fires or helping kittens stuck in trees, that's why the escort system exists in the first place.

so when people ask why cops aren't showing up to burglaries and car break-ins, that's why. it's not that nobody cares, it's that you need bodies on standby for whenever the next homeless mental health call comes in because you can't send a medic into that alone. when you account for resources consumed, it's a far greater number than the 30% of calls makes it sound like.

there you go again with more personal insults

i didn't manipulate anything. i was describing the broader resource strain, which is why i included behavioral health alongside overdoses, those calls require the same multi-unit response and the same police escort, the resource problem doesn't care what you label the call.

the 2025 sfd annual report has the numbers. 108,763 total responses. 5,001 overdose calls, 4.6%. basic life support calls came to 64,693, and 38% of those are identified as having a mental health or substance use component on arrival, that's another 24,500 calls, another 22%. combined that's 27% before anything slips through without a formal label. 30% is conservative.

roc called the argument dishonest, not me, and even that was because he was still narrowly focused on fentanyl ODs specifically while i was talking about the broader homeless and behavioral health burden. two different conversations. you're mischaracterizing what he said to make it land harder, which is exactly the kind of thing you're accusing me of which makes this entire accusation of yours hilarious

go check the posts. i never threw a single insult your way unprompted. you were the one who opened by insinuating i'd slept with a trans woman as a way to discredit what i was saying, then later skipped engaging entirely and just called me dumb. the divorce lawyer line came after both of those. you don't get to throw the first punch twice and then rewrite it as me starting it.

and frankly, since i'm so dumb, what odds or handicap would you give me in an iq test competition?

Lozen and Rickroll make a good team. I am now convinced that 5% and 3% are much closer to 80% than expected. These guys have completed and shared in depth local investigations and data that support their belief systems.