Opinion Editorial THE MASSACHUSETTS DAILY COLLEGIAN
“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.” - Alfred Hitchcock
Thursday, March 31, 2016
‘Wet’ shelters: Helping or harming the homeless? Craig’s Place, a major homeless shelter in Amherst, has opened its doors to more than 500 homeless resi-
Bridget Higgins dents within the past four years. This number is rising even more due to the facility’s policy of being a “wet” shelter - residents can bring in alcohol, use funds from the shelter to buy alcohol and drink while housed overnight there. “Wet” shelters are becoming more popular around major cities in the U.S. like Seattle. This is not necessarily a good thing. With the implementation of a safe drinking zone, the severely afflicted alcoholics in the area may continue drinking 24/7 with neither incentive nor assurance of receiving rehabilitation. With the recent violence between homeless residents at Craig’s Place and on the streets of Amherst shelter, is remaining constantly intoxicated really helping the situation? Alcoholism is indeed one of the deadliest addictions in the nation. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), excessive alcohol use led to around 90,000 deaths each year in the U.S. This included homicide while intoxicated, drinking and driving deaths, alcohol poisoning and other accidents. The idea behind wet shelters was to bring chronic and severe alcoholics into the system, hoping to maneuver them from housing to treatment. The goal is to take alcoholics off of the street and bring them to a safe place to stay and drink under supervision. In theory, this is a great idea. In some aspects, it works well, too. For example, one Seattle study showed that residents of wet shelters decreased their intake of alcoholic beverages over two years from 20 drinks per day to 12.
Another study showed that the average individual in a Seattle wet housing program cost the city only a quarter of what they used to before entering the system. However, there are many very real and relevant drawbacks to wet shelters. For one, a study by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust showed that a number of those in wet housing ultimately drink themselves to death. In addition, Rehabs.com reported that wet shelters do not require residents to undergo any form of counseling or treatment. This is almost counterintuitive to the idea of getting chronic, severe alcoholics into the system. Drinking an unlimited amount throughout the night may allow them
Why tragedy is good for the media Tragedy is good news for school, or a guy executes peoCNN, as it is for FOX, MSNBC, ple at a mall, the whole world Buzzfeed and any other jour- gets an alert to tune in, and CNN stays on TV for another Becky Wandel year. I’m really sick of that. I’m sick of the only news on TV nalistic medium which relies being designed to make people on ad money. It’s simple. School afraid so they keep watching. kids being bombed in Peshawar, I’m sick of hearing people say bombs going off in Brussels, they’re not going to travel until Americans being beheaded on things have “settled down” video—it all equals one thing because their fear has been to these networks: money. Such events naturally draw exploited to the point where more viewers to their networks they think the whole world is and temporarily increase their out to get them. I’m sick of the audience. They give them this bombs going off in Pakistan great power to shape conver- and Turkey and Iraq not being sations and either milk each loud enough for CNN to hear tragedy for all it’s worth or because they won’t draw the
alcohol induced violence in Amherst. For those who must stay at Craig’s Place who are not under any influence, merely seeking a safe place to stay, these instances of violence affect the safety of the shelter every day. In addition to the perpetuation of violent conflict, wet shelters, at least in the case of Amherst, do not require rehab meetings or contain rehabilitation facilities on-site. I am no expert in chronic alcoholism, so I will take experts’ advice that allowing moderate amounts of drinking instead of quitting cold turkey is a more effective solution to alcoholism. However, there is no “moderation” within wet shelters. You may drink however much you want throughout the night, store your alcohol safely and take it out into public the next day with you. No one is trying to enforce counseling or solutions to substance abuse issues within the shelter. I do not necessarily disagree with the institution of wet shelters. However, these shelters as they currently stand are not helping with the problem so much as perpetuating substance abuse on a constant and daily basis. If wet shelters remain in place in Amherst, a rehabilitation or at least a counseling requirement should be in place, along with supervision and moderation of drinking—enough to ward off deadly withdrawal symptoms but not enough to cause excessive disorientation and violence. This is the only way to ensure safety of the homeless population while at least trying to keep people from hurting themselves, others or drinking themselves to death.
“You may drink however much you want throughout the night, store your alcohol safely and take it out into public the next day with you. No one is trying to enforce counseling or solutions to substance abuse issues within the shelter.” to drink comfortably, but there is no guarantee of rehabilitation. Another vulnerability of wet shelters is that they can perpetuate an unsafe environment, both within the shelter and on the streets. The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence found that 40 percent of all violent crimes today involved alcohol. In addition, the World Health Organization reported that, “Alcohol use directly affects cognitive and physical function, reducing self-control and leaving individuals less capable of negotiating a non-violent resolution.” This has manifested itself within the shelter at Craig’s Place just last week, where a woman was violently choked during a conflict. Another incident occurred in Amherst Center earlier in the week, when two shelter residents engaged in a violent fight during the daytime in front of Antonio’s. These are just some of the many calls involving
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“I’m sick of the only news on TV being designed to make people afraid so they keep watching. I’m sick of hearing people say they’re not going to travel until things have “settled down” because their fear has been exploited to the point where they think the whole world is out to get them.” give it its due time and move on. From the standpoint of a corporation (and that’s what these news agencies are), the choice is easy – talk about each awful thing for as long as possible, get more views, get more money. They are businesses after all, and businesses can’t be faulted for wanting to make money. But herein lies the key difference: news agencies aren’t just businesses, they’re public servants. We trust them to be human and moral and discretionary like the rest of us. In fact, we trust them so much that we give them an incredible power over us. They have power to manipulate our feelings and our opinions – power to manipulate our votes. So we must have faith that the corporations with which we trust this power are going to be responsible– that they’re not going to exploit our feelings and manipulate our attention for a profit. More and more though, they are forced to ignore us, mainly because we’re not giving them any money. As much as these news agencies deserve to be admonished as the antagonists they’ve become for ignoring such moral obligations, we can’t entirely blame them. We ask them to respect us but we don’t put our money where our mouth is. So when a bomb goes off somewhere around the world, or a man brings a gun into a
Bridget Higgins is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at behiggins@umass.edu.
same amount of views as bombs in Boston and Paris and Brussels. The choice to change that is in our hands. If we keep supporting cable news and clicking on the first thing that pops up when we google the #prayfor___ hashtag that just started trending on Twitter, we have to know that we’re feeding a monster. And it’s a monster that doesn’t care about us. Alternatively, we could look past the white-hot headlines, and scroll down by the first few links about a certain story to find publically funded journalism – stories that you know don’t have to rely heavily on lies or sensationalism to get views. PBS, first-hand tweets or YouTube journalists who are supported by crowdfunding are good places to start. I hope there will be more places like these in the future. I’ll say that as humans, our attention is one of the most precious things we have to give. It’s our time and it’s our life and every day we hand it over to someone else for some number of minutes or hours to hear about our world. With whom will you trust that gift? My advice? Make sure it’s someone who respects it. Make sure it’s someone who doesn’t just want to eat it alive. Becky Wandel is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at rwandel@umass.edu.
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