The oh-so-noble idea behind welfare was the idea that down-on-their-luck people just need a helping hand to get themselves through a rough patch in their lives, to give them a chance to get back on their feet. The problem is that, behind that thinking, is the idea that everyone is actually willing to do the things to straighten out their lives. To the elites who have been putting together our welfare systems, the concept that some people would rather just do their own thing, not caring about getting their lives back in order as long as someone else was paying them to stay indolent was simply outside of their conceptual framework.
Couple that with cultural attitudes of thinking that drug abuse is a victimless crime, and everything falls apart! From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Addiction takes a toll on life and limb
Amputations are spiking amid Philly’s tranq crisis. It’s a mark of the slow public health response to the latest threat in the drug epidemic
by Aubrey Whelan, Max Marin, and Dylan Purcell | Earth Day, April 22, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
The woman came to Samir Mehta’s clinic with a wound in her leg. The infection ran so deep and had destroyed so much soft tissue that Mehta thought he was dealing with an aggressive form of cancer.
As the Penn Medicine orthopedic surgeon was removing infected flesh around the patient’s tibia — a process called debridement – he said the bone began to crumble at his touch, like “rotting wood that falls apart in your hands.”
He decided the only option was to amputate.
It was 2022, and doctors around the Philadelphia region were facing the same decision as hundreds of drug users arrived at hospitals with similarly grave wounds. The harm was unlike anything they’d seen before: blackened hands and fingers, lesions that hollowed out arms and legs to the bone, maggots swimming in rotten flesh.
This new chapter opened in the opioid crisis about five years ago, with Philadelphia becoming ground zero for “tranq,” the street name for xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that quickly overtook the city’s illicit street drugs. Understudied and never approved for human use, tranq doesn’t kill instantly like the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl.
There’s much more at the original.
I’ve said it before: the huge drug market in Philadelphia exists because the city has so many junkies. The police could arrest dozens, maybe hundreds of dealers, and they’d be replaced by new drug dealers the following day. To clean up Kensington, the internationally famous hellhole of drug abuse, the Mayor, the District Attorney, and the Police Commissioner have to concentrate on arresting the addicts, and putting them in jail at least long enough to get them through withdrawal and detoxification. This is something Larry Krasner, the DA, would never do, because, Heaven forfend! it would leave the poor dears with a criminal record. But not doing so, simply leaving junkies to fend for themselves out on the streets means that they keep shooting up, living on the streets, fouling and terrorizing the SEPTA elevated train station in the neighborhood, committing petty, and some not-so-petty, crimes to feed their drug habits, and now, thanks to tranq, clogging emergency rooms, wasting hospitals’ resources since the junkies can rarely pay their hospital bills and don’t have insurance, and becoming a further drain on society by becoming disabled.
But the toll is clearly devastating: The severity of the skin wounds associated with tranq are costing people their limbs. Amputations among people addicted to opioids have doubled in five years in Philadelphia, The Inquirer found, in an extensive analysis of medical billing data and over six months of interviews with medical professionals, patients, and tranq users.
At least 450 people with documented opioid use disorders had amputations between 2020 and 2023, the analysis found. And that is likely an undercount.
If addicts are arrested and jailed at least long enough to go through detoxification, there is at least a chance that they can be treated and helped to get past their addiction. If they can be detoxed, at least for a while, they will be using whatever [insert vulgar term for feces here] is out on the streets that day.
Naturally, the good, kind, compassionate leftists at the Inquirer put the blame not on the junkies, but the government:
Beyond indicating tranq’s harm, the rise in amputations is also a mark of the slow public health response to the latest threat in the drug epidemic, and shows the limits of available medical treatment.
“(S)low public health response”? How about law enforcement’s response, how about the city’s response to getting these wastrels off the streets? Free Press writer Olivia Reingold wrote “Addiction Activists Say They’re ‘Reducing Harm’ in Philly. Locals Say They’re Causing It” 12½ months ago, noting that, whatever the good and noble intentions of the activists, the residents see it differently:
Those who advocate for harm reduction — a Biden-endorsed policy that prioritizes users’ safety over their sobriety or abstinence — say they’re helping fix the problem. But when I visited Kensington last month, (Sonja Bingham, a 55-year-old mother of three and Kensington resident) and almost a dozen other residents told me that the activists are actually the ones causing it.
The neighborhood is, despite Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins efforts, still a hellhole, because nobody wants to do the right thing! Arresting and forcibly detoxing the junkies won’t save them all, and there’s a certain point at which I stop caring about those who won’t try to save themselves — I am something of an admitted [insert slang term for the anus here] myself — but the social costs, the welfare costs, the medical costs are all falling not on the junkies but on normal taxpayers.
