Can the US fix their addiction and homelessness problem?

I was horrified by what I saw in NYC and SF. What can be done?

A few years ago, my boyfriend picked me up from the gleaming, immaculate SFO Airport in his shiny pick up truck and took me out for lunch. “We’ll go to my favourite place,” he told me, grinning with his perfect, bleached American teeth. “I hope you like Chinese food.” We drove through the more affluent parts of San Francisco, and I marvelled at the beautiful homes, quirky cafes and leafy canopies under that broad Californian sky. We kept driving. Everything grew duller, grey concrete slabs replacing floral store fronts, and it wasn’t long until rubbish bags flooded into the street and the acrid stench of urine filled the air.

What I had thought were piles of trash turned out to be tents: not one or two, mind, but entire streets and then blocks and blocks of tents across the sidewalks. People staggered in and out of them, as if in a daze, human waste leaking out into the road. I retched, covering my mouth with my sleeve in horror. We stopped in a car park downtown, and he went to open my door. “Mind your feet,” he said cheerfully. “Homeless people use this place as a bathroom.”

A terrifying lack of compassion and social aid: or a deeper problem?

I’m not saying we don’t have homelessness or drug issues in the UK, far from it, but we don’t have tent cities. We don’t…