The Cheif Cause Of Homelessness
- The Chief Cause of Homelessness.
Liberals like to contend that “inadequate housing” is the major reason you see so many homeless. But that isn’t so, according to an increasing number of experts in the field. Irving Shandler, who runs the Diagnostic and Rehabilitation Center in Philadelphia, a private group that has worked for 26 years to help the homeless, estimates that 75 to 80 per cent of homeless men and women suffer from drug and alcohol addiction.
Drug and alcohol abuse “is the nasty little secret of the homeless,” admits Ernest Drucker, an associate professor of social medicine and epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Robert Hayes, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, a group with headquarters in New York, says homeless advocates have shied away from discussing the addictive problem in the past, in part because they feared the public would lose sympathy for these people. But the “bottom line,” he told the New York TIMES last week, “is that we have to tell the truth.” -From HUMAN EVENTS