Whenever the subject of giving money to panhandlers comes up, inevitably someone says that they don’t want to feed drug and alcohol addictions.
In a thread a while ago on this very message board, someone (maybe more than one) said they don’t see any reason not to give money to feed addictions, and in at least one case, even give alcohol to panhandlers directly if it’s convenient. Their logic? The lives of those panhandlers are really bad, and they aren’t going to get better in a lot/most of cases. Why not give them relief from a miserable life that won’t improve for a few hours? (An additional related point: giving them their “fix” will keep them, at least that day, from committing crimes to get it.)
It’s an interesting POV that I never thought of. Do you agree? Why or why not?
I don’t care how they use money when I give it. If what they need/want most is a hit of something to make the world suck less for a little while, so be it.
If someone needs money to keep them from starving, or to have a roof above their head during a cold night, or to invest in something which may help them turn their life around (e.g. buy some nice clothes to go and apply for a job) then I may agree that helping them do so is a better use of my money than spending it on myself.
On the other hand, if they want to use the money to get drunk or stoned, then I’d much rather spend my hard-earned money on myself, or on some other form of charity. Food and shelter are necessities for survival; alcohol and drugs are not, so if you’re panhandling in order to get the latter instead of the former, then apparently you don’t need it so badly that I should feel compelled to hand over my money to help you get it.
Heck, I’d sooner donate money to a person who is richer than me and wants to buy a sailboat – makes as much sense as bankrolling someone else’s drug habit, in my view.
Sure. But if someone asks me to give them money without offering anything in return, then my expectation of what the money will be used for, affects my willingness to give. Otherwise I may as well give it to the guy in the Armani suit who needs just $3,000 more in order to afford his sailboat.
If I have a buck or two, and feel like giving it, I don’t query the recipient as to how they will use it. But that’s just me, and if you want to, feel free. Certainly we’re allowed to have different attitudes towards it.
So it’s worse to be a guy with an Armani suit who needs to wait until his bank opens for the down payment on his boat than it is to be a guy with no home, no job, no family suffering from numerous untreated health problems as well as craving and withdrawal from alcohol?
Giving the homeless guy a 40 ounce will make him feel much better than the millionaire would feel with another $3,000.
Because my goal is to make things better for the panhandler, and him getting drunk or high is going to make things worse in all but the very immediate short term.
This. How they use the money I gave them is none of my business. Presumably, they’ll use it for something that they feel will make their life better in some way. Even if thye use it to buy drugs, it might make them closer to be able to buy a sandwich once they’ll have had their fix.
I’m not in control of their lives because I handed them some pocket money, and I don’t want to. I’d happy enough to be in control of my own.
I don’t value human life so little as to bankroll the long and miserable process of DIY hospice for something as curable as poverty and addiction. If accelerating their decline to shorten their suffering is the goal, beating them to death with a golf club would be a more humane way to achieve it.
While it may keep them from committing crimes to acquire their drug(s) of choice, it won’t necessarily keep them from committing crimes.
Depending on the drug of choice, your “day” could very well be only a few hours.
Substance use disorders, unchecked, particularly in those with comorbid uncontrolled psychiatric disorders, tend to progress very rapidly from “getting high” to compulsive drug use for the sole purpose of fighting off the increasingly difficult to counter withdrawal and/or dysphoric effects of their drug(s) of choice, without the benefit of the increasingly elusive “euphoria” they once felt. They’ll keep trying to achieve it, unsuccessfully, until they die. I’m not sure that’s a “kindness” I’d want visited on any living being.
Please let this be tongue-in-cheek.
This. A hundred times this. A thousand times this.
Eventually, if not helped, even that “very immediate short term” can disappear, and you’re left with another dead body which just underwent cardiac/respiratory arrest. At that point, the only hope you have for them is that their conscious mind was gone before the worst of the potential pain associated with that would have occurred.
The idea that not giving someone drug money will help them kick the habit is about as ridiculous as thinking abstinence only education works. If they can’t get their drug money from you, they’ll get it some other way. If having to be out on the street without a home hasn’t gotten them to stop, lack of money won’t work either.