Forum: The answer to these issues lies somewhere in the middle
Published 1:30 am Saturday, May 16, 2026
Hi Nate (Nehring),
You are on the right track! I just read your opinion piece in [the May 6 edition of] the Herald. (Good writing! Yay, Herald for printing!)
Addressing homelessness, drug addiction, and related behavior issues in their individual silos hasn’t worked. Addressing them together with compassion and accountability is exactly right. As parents, we sometimes know about “tough love”. It’s difficult, but effective.
Compassion means we don’t want to see people suffer. But the key word is “see”. Shelters without expectations gets the problem out of sight, but actually enables those problems. Why would government, and particularly progressives, endorse this? (I speak as a progressive.). It is a response to the “War On Drugs” from the Nixon era which was a war on the defenseless. The only thing we didn’t do was round them up and put them in concentration camps. The denigration of homeless, behavior challenged, and drug addicted has resonated for decades, and the punitive only approach flies in the face of anyone with ethics and morals about how people should be viewed and treated. The pendulum has now swung to the other extreme. Neither extreme works, the balance of compassion and accountability will. In addition, here are two suggestions.
First, please talk to Rick Steves and ask him how Portugal deals with this. They have found the balance. But it requires a vigorous, active, functioning Health Department, including behavior health monitoring, which we presently lack. But Health Department interventions, instead of Law Enforcement interventions, is what makes their system work. It’s a behavior version of Medic One, which revolutionized emergency response nation wide. It is efficient, effective, and compassionate. Conservatives may fret about “government intrusion into personal freedom” as well as the cost of effective government (not cheap government). But the other considerations are the intrusion into our communities of people with these untreated issues, and the “cost” we all pay in safety and security by ignoring.
Second, an extra accountability piece is needed to push drugs out of our community. The concept is simple: Every drug customer is a snitch. “Customers” will be detained until they identify who and where they got the drugs. No exceptions. This enables drug enforcement to effectively cut off supply.
The sources of these drugs are people preying on the vulnerable. Those who use and then sell to support their own addiction are very aware of this. So accountability needs to first identify users only, users who sell, then sellers.
Users deserve most compassion and resources to help turn their lives around. They need top priority, including behavior and housing help.
Users who sell are caught in a vicious trap. It is more likely that incarceration first and rehab resources second will be best. But this requires careful, individual evaluation. In both cases, the “catch and release” system is worthless. The only advantage is it’s cheap, but a total waste and demoralizing to law enforcement.
There are laws in the books to deal with dealers and sellers, and I doubt we need more laws, just better enforcement. My personal preference is to lock them up and throw away the key. They are community predators. My only compassion for them is how their upbringing may have contributed to their predatory nature.
It is time to balance the books and bring the wild pendulum swings of the last fifty years back to center. Accountability has gone too far in the past. Compassion combined with willful ignorance has gone the other way now. Let’s use laser like focus to insure people are always treated with compassion first. Only then can we apply the “tough love” with accountability. This approach tells people, “You matter.” It tells our community, “We are looking out for you.” It tells the Health Department, “You are a valued partner in finding proven solutions.”
So yes, let’s find the right balance of compassion and accountability. The balance of both is required, and both progressives and conservatives can meet in the middle. I urge a solution where both are equally important. It will not be cheap, but it will be effective. I want effective government that works.
Ron Friesen lives in Marysville.
