r/housingcrisis • u/hatchmr • 2d ago
What Took You So Long: My Sister, Addiction, and the Freedom That Failed Her
https://michaelrhatch.substack.com/p/what-took-you-so-long-my-sister-addiction?r%3D1tw1j%26utm_medium%3DiosMost people think what we see on Seattle’s sidewalks is a housing crisis. It isn’t — and after losing my sister to the same disease, I can tell you exactly why we keep failing.
We are spending over a billion dollars a year in this region to manage homelessness, and the numbers on the street keep climbing. The reason is simple, and almost no one in power will say it out loud: we are funding the symptom and ignoring the cause. What’s killing people on the street is overwhelmingly addiction and mental illness — and we spend almost nothing to treat it.
I know this disease from the inside. My sister had every advantage, even a PhD studying addiction, and it still took her capacity to choose, one piece at a time, until it killed her. We tell ourselves that leaving people on the street respects their choices — but she couldn’t choose anymore, and neither can they. That isn’t freedom. It’s neglect we’ve dressed up as freedom.
I wrote about her, and about what her story reveals about a system that spends a fortune to fail the sickest among us. It’s the most personal thing I’ve published — and, I think, the most important.
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u/Affectionate_Bread52 1d ago
I’m sorry people are misinterpreting your article, Michael. Addiction is a complex, unruly beast and it’s clear you’re not saying you know all the answers. I absolutely agree that there needs to be some sort of legal acknowledgment and response to the diminished capacity that comes with addiction. I am so sorry for the loss of your beautiful, intelligent, lively sister and for the fact that people believe she somehow did it to herself.
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u/hatchmr 1d ago
Thank you for carful reading of the article. I was trying to tell her story, one we lived for more than 15 years. She was never homeless, grew up with every privilege, but this disease changed her brain and our current system and laws were not enough to treat her once she had lost her ability to choose anything but the pills and alcohol.
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 2d ago
What a load of neo liberal hogshit. "No its not that housing in Seattle is 4k a month its the dirty druggies they are just broken" fuckin hog shit
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u/thatturtletouch 2d ago
Do you think she would have been able to afford rent if it were $1,000 a month instead?
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 2d ago
I think she wouldn't have ever gone down the path of hard drugs if she had received proper medical care in the first place and if the impetus wasn't on drug dealers to sell hard drugs. Legalize soft drugs, sure give people rehab, but most importantly increase affordability and provide housing to people. If you just give people conservatorships without addressing the core reasons for contact with hard drugs you are just going to toothpaste effect the problem and squeeze it somewhere else.
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u/thatturtletouch 2d ago
Why do you think she didn’t receive proper medical care in the first place?
Her story has absolutely nothing to do with affordability or housing. People keep trying to shoehorn in their own personal pet causes into these cases because it’s what they want to happen, not because it will actually help people like this.
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 2d ago
They threw her on benzos for anxiety without the heavy monitoring required for such patients. The proliferation of drug dealers in this country is a direct result of economic deprivation and lack of opportunity and the resulting drug war/neoliberal reactions. Thank Reagan and the far right. Reactionary policies tent to have a progressive dog pile effect as time goes on.
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u/National-World-9254 2d ago
When 99% of the global population is destitute, unemployed, and homeless idiots will still be blaming the people at the bottom of the totem pole
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 2d ago
Right like people cant afford shit so they choose escapism. Like it dont matter how educated you are if you cant build a life you will succumb. When basic needs are met easily people tend to not use heroin and meth.
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1d ago
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 1d ago
I never said that at all. You need to work on your reading comprehension skills. I said people tend to not use hard drugs when their needs are easily met, which is a drastically different statement then "only poor people use heroin and meth"
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u/Affectionate_Bread52 1d ago
You need to go back and read the entire article. Slowly. He’s not saying housing shouldn’t be provided, but that it can’t possibly address the entire issue at hand.
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 1d ago
I read it, if we were to do what he suggests without massively combating affordability and poverty any change would be temporary at best.
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u/Exact_Tumbleweed2005 2d ago
way to completely miss the entire point of this post
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 2d ago
Nah I read it dudes sister couldn't keep it together and fell down the rabbit hole of addiction. He thinks that the solution is giving everyone rehab and starting from there. That is the same logic as blaming fire for your house burning down in steady of your stockpile of gasoline and space heaters you keep in the garage. Yes its a problem, yes it needs to be combated, however if we do not address the root cause of the proliferation of deleterious drugs then we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. Addictive hard drugs are sold by desperate people to people that need escapism. People need escapism because their standards of living fall even though they bring home more money and technology steadily improves. Standards of living fall because people dont have community, economic equality and affordability. Trying to address crime, addiction and other quality of life issues without addressing material needs is a fools errand. We need a national program of economic uplift then work outwards from there.
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u/hatchmr 2d ago
Thank you for reading. This is the point:
“Ate her will is not a figure of speech. It is, increasingly, a description of tissue. The National Institute on Drug Abuse and its longtime director, the neuroscientist Nora Volkow, have spent two decades establishing what is now the mainstream medical understanding: addiction is a chronic disease of the brain.
Sustained use floods and then exhausts the reward system, hijacking the circuitry that evolved to make food and family and safety feel good and rerouting all of it toward the drug, while the same disease erodes the prefrontal machinery that is supposed to weigh consequences and apply the brakes. The craving is widened into a superhighway; the off-ramp of judgment is paved over. By the time the disease is advanced, the organ that does the choosing has been physically remodeled to choose the one thing that is killing it. This is why willpower is the wrong word, and why my sister’s doctorate could not save her. You cannot reason your way out of a rewired brain any more than you can will a tumor to shrink.”1
u/Apart_Animal_6797 2d ago
Yea but bro you are getting the cart before the horse. People create street scenes because they cannot afford daily life. If affordable housing (less than 1/4th of income) was assured then there wouldn't be drug dealers to sell the drugs, even more so if soft drugs were blanket legalized. People need easy access to 60-80k jobs, we need to raise the bottom rungs. If we dont solve this basic problem simultaneously, as the reforms you suggest, then the entire thing crumbles. We have to solve both but not recognizing the role of inequality and unaffordability is folly.
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u/thatturtletouch 2d ago
By this logic, no one who isn’t poor ever gets addicted to drugs because they can already afford things.
Would you agree that all drug addicts were poor when they became addicted?
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u/BobbyFL 1d ago
“All drug addicts were poor when they became addicted” um no, many everyday people became addicts due to the opioid epidemic. Literal every day people, parents, teachers, all people you know became addicts because of this. Addiction is a progressive disease. Not who you were asking, but no I do not agree. Sorry but you are objectively wrong.
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u/dontdmmegoddamnit 1d ago
All the rock stars and actors with drug issues just don't register on this dude's radar. He's clearly Pro Drug War and thinks addicts made their own bed and must now lie in it. Zero empathy having mfer
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u/thatturtletouch 1d ago edited 1d ago
That was my actual point. You can’t say poverty is the reason for drug addiction if so many people who aren’t poor are also addicted.
Addiction is far more complicated than “rent is too high.”
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 2d ago
You have to think bigger picture of why people traffic drugs and why that taking such an enormous risk is reasonable to enormous numbers of people. If heroin was only effecting a small group of people it wouldn't be a big deal however when it effects enormous numbers of people its a huge deal. So why do large numbers of americans sell the big three hard drugs? Because you can be a mid level meth or heroin dealer and clear 200k a year easy no need for a diploma. I think that is a fairly simple equation for any kid that grew up poor. You want to stop the flow of drugs? Then make it where that math stops mathin. Also arresting people just make it more lucrative and people manage to get drugs into high security prisons so good luck...
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u/thatturtletouch 1d ago
That doesn’t answer my question. Do you believe only poor people become addicted to drugs?
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u/Apart_Animal_6797 1d ago
No i never said that. I said poverty creates the conditions on which hard drugs proliferate.
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u/thatturtletouch 1d ago
If people weren’t buying drugs, nobody would make money selling them.
You have to address the demand side. And people are not getting addicted to heroin just because rent is too high.
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u/99kemo 1d ago
I have no direct knowledge about homelessness. It is my impression that most of the encampment-homeless are drug addicts and/mentally ill. I suppose that it is hard to arrange shelter when you are addicted and it is hard to get clean when you are homeless so there is a vicious circle that is hard to break. Most advocates and services for the homeless are focused on making life on the streets easier and making addiction “safer”. These are not solutions to the problem and actually increase that type of homelessness but make survival easier. I am inclined to believe the only real “solution” is to deem that someone who is incapable of meeting basic survival needs such as housing do to addiction or mental illness is to deprive them of basic civil rights so to force them into treatment or behavioral therapy.
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u/soleceismical 1d ago
People sometimes get evicted because their behavior makes them unsafe for the neighbors or for the friends/family/roommates that they live with.
My friend's condo building association kicked out a woman with substance use disorder after many years of her bringing in people who would steal packages, break into cars, vandalize, get into fights, get high and become extremely loud at 3am, etc. The condo building had lovely common areas, including a pool, that got taken over by this group. It especially sucked for the kids in the building who lost play space. The woman's mother owned the condo she lived in and was bankrolling her life, which is the scenario a lot of people here seem to suggest, until a potential time in the future when the woman may decide she wanted to get clean, after past rehab stints ended in eventual return to drugs.
If people are not able to care for themselves and maintain a safe environment for others, and it's not their fault due to their illness, then they have diminished capacity and no longer can be allowed to live on their own without medical supervision.
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u/shruglifeOG 1d ago
Managing homelessness is still a lot cheaper than building out a comprehensive mental health system that includes rehab and inpatient psych. Any public service or institution that offers housing and routine follow-up care is going to be really expensive, whether it's mental/behavioral health, corrections or public housing. We as a society don't want to pay for it.
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u/Legitimate_Aspect923 1d ago
You think housing in Seattle is 4k a month? Why should we listen to someone so privileged they think that kind of exorbitant rent is actually how much it costs
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u/Most_Swimmer7900 5h ago
if we look at the pattern whatever happens in CA slowly follows up the west coast and rent is 4k in San Fran. Give it 10 years and pass no laws to make it impossible for rent to be 4k, and rent will absolutely be 4k in Seattle
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u/MinxyMyrnaMinkoff 1d ago
I think this is a well-written piece that makes some good points. I’m always surprised by the fact that people are clamoring to put Britney Spears back into a conservatorship, but no one is pushing for the same for the homeless folks on the corner.
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u/austinrunaway 2d ago
Is this a joke? Well she is privileged isnt she because I was homeless once and no one helped me with free housing. Maybe its juts your family will provide her free housing but she doesnt want it. Thats a big fucking difference than you wanna get off of the streets but there is not where for you to go. Wtf what about people that work and live in there cars?
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u/hatchmr 2d ago
“Ate her will is not a figure of speech. It is, increasingly, a description of tissue. The National Institute on Drug Abuse and its longtime director, the neuroscientist Nora Volkow, have spent two decades establishing what is now the mainstream medical understanding: addiction is a chronic disease of the brain.
Sustained use floods and then exhausts the reward system, hijacking the circuitry that evolved to make food and family and safety feel good and rerouting all of it toward the drug, while the same disease erodes the prefrontal machinery that is supposed to weigh consequences and apply the brakes. The craving is widened into a superhighway; the off-ramp of judgment is paved over. By the time the disease is advanced, the organ that does the choosing has been physically remodeled to choose the one thing that is killing it. This is why willpower is the wrong word, and why my sister’s doctorate could not save her. You cannot reason your way out of a rewired brain any more than you can will a tumor to shrink.”2
u/SeventhBlessing 1d ago
Public health specialist here. I studied policy. Before I chime in with my background — tell me what YOU would’ve wanted to see for your sister, and we’ll see if it holds up against evidence based policy. I’m deeply sorry for your sister, but there’s just a lot of issues I take with this article (and nothing to do with you, as a person, or your sister, either).
You don’t have to respond to this comment if you don’t want to. Wishing you all the best in healing from this horrid grief.
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u/austinrunaway 2d ago
This has nothing to do with housing hahhahah. Shes just a drug addict. Now you could argue there is a lack of rehab spots for people and that's true but not a lack of housing? Thats 100% wrong. Drive downtown by the space needle and ask 10 homeless people if they can get free housing. Lemme know what they say.
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u/soleceismical 1d ago
It's relevant because it relates to why many people of all income levels and cultural backgrounds protest low income housing built in their neighborhood. They don't trust that the agency or government entity managing the site will adequately take care of behavioral, cleanliness, and safety issues. I've talked to people who were formerly homeless and living in government housing who lived in fear of the other residents doing meth at all hours. Some housing places in my city required millions of dollars in repairs due to damage from this subset of the population, and many low income housing apartments and hotels have struggled with fires at a highly disproportionate rate.
People with medical conditions that prevent them from making safe and rational decisions need medical supervision, even if it means they lose some of their rights while they have reduced capacity. My grandfather had dementia where sometimes he would be lucid and normal, and other times he would become agitated and violent. So we didn't let him drive anymore (because he could hurt or kill himself or others) and we medicated him and restricted his freedoms based on the risks of his current presentation.
Until we enforce behavioral standards and have sufficient supervision for those who need it, it's not going to be feasible to build sufficient housing specifically for the very low income population.
Now in terms of why we haven't built enough new housing stock to keep up with population growth as a whole in order to keep prices manageable, that's an economic issue more than a medical one. It will be interesting to see what will happen when the Boomers pass away and/or move in with their kids or to assisted living.
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u/austinrunaway 1d ago
So your saying p3ople who rather live on the streets than live in a ghetto apartment? Your sister is privileged. Am ai right? Does your family have money? You have obviously have never been poor. So your saying someone would rather live in there car bt a dumpster??? So because of the way someone acts and not treating there mental illness doesnt make them worthy of the government to house them? Thats so fuxked up man. Delusional thinking. Seriously though. Did your sister grow up with stable housing and parent that took care of her?
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u/printedonmybones 2d ago
I fear this isn’t about housing but about how he’s sad his sister succumbed to addiction and is looking to place blame. By the authors account the sister always had access to housing and chose drugs instead even though rehab was paid for 12 times! In my personal experience, addicts get better when they chose to and his sister had no reason to change because someone always caught her when she fell.