 Who knows. Maybe a “wet house” is preferable to the Romanian “Please don’t run over the drunks” approach. |
There was a time in my life when – if you told me there was a place I could go live for free and drink my brains out as I saw fit – I would have camped out overnight so I could be the first first in line on registration day. I spent much of my adult life proving how well I could maintain an orderly existence while ingesting mind-boggling amounts of intoxicants selected from the veritable smorgasbord of both socially acceptable and not-so-socially acceptable recreational drugs available to the modern party monster, and I guess I was pretty good at it for a while. My views have changed a bit though, after slowly calling it quits over the years, finally ending my personal war on drugs a few years ago when I surrendered to the most resilient of my challengers, alcohol. Which is why I have to say I have some mixed feelings about the idea of something I’d never heard of before today: a concept called a “wet house”. The idea is that trying to rehabilitate “chronic inebriates” (i.e.: hopeless drunks) is such a financial burden on society that giving them a place to live for free and just letting them drink their brains out is a better solution. They’re trying it in St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Francisco was considering the idea last fall, after seeing the results of a wet house program in Seattle that started in 2006. As you can imagine, the responses to the idea tend to be rather polarized, ranging from those who deride the program as “bunks for drunks” to those who argue in favor of the idea based on the concept of harm reduction. I’m still trying to process the realities of this scenario; although my gut reaction is that it’s an awful, awful idea, reason urges me to consider the possibility that if managed well, it may actually present an “end of the line” alcoholic with one last chance to get sober, when it’s obvious that the existing system has failed to help them.