Seattle’s Community Assisted Suicide Policies Are Killing the Homeless

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the rights of cities to enforce common sense laws which prohibit the homeless from sleeping in public spaces, such as parks or sidewalks where children play or families walk. It's almost absurd that the Court was forced to expend its limited resources adjudicating a controversy over whether such laws should be constitutional.

A similarly surreal debate took place last September in my hometown of Seattle. After months of debate, our city council adopted, by a contentious 6 to 3 vote, a policy to enforce laws banning the public use of illicit drugs. Such hesitancy — such inability — of a dark blue city to overcome its moral paralysis and protect residents from deadly drugs might be funny if it weren't so tragic.

I work in downtown Seattle and lived in the heart of the city for years. One day I drove to work and got lucky — I found a parking space near the office. During that short walk I saw things that are completely normal:

• A man laying on his back on the sidewalk, totally high.
• A tent — soiled and half-burned — in a graffiti-covered doorway, undoubtedly reflecting a botched attempt to smoke up.
• Another man, mentally absent with an upside-down-cross tattooed on his forehead and his pants around his knees, waddling down the road as cars carefully avoided him.
• A group of five young men and women, huddled near an alley passing around a drug pipe.

These people are living in hell, and progressives' "mutual aid" is only keeping them in street-addiction as they slowly kill themselves with drugs. Having spent time ministering to people in homeless camps, and witnessing their soul-crushing suffering, I've developed a term for the policies which imprison so many in lives of self-destruction: "Community Assisted Suicide."