Doug Lambert: Shocked at information learned at recent homeless forum

To The Daily Sun,

I learned several things at the recent homeless forum that shocked me.

Kits that include needles, tourniquets and spoons are handed out in the city. In times past, this used to be considered “drug paraphernalia” and possession led to an arrest. Now, tax dollars are used to provide it to enable the use of illegal deadly drugs. When residents find needles scattered throughout parks, the woods, and on the WOW Trail, all places where children play, we can assume that taxpaying citizens bought and provided them.

Another thing I learned is that the many well-paid recipients of tax-dollar funded grants who run a myriad of “programs” designed to somehow address the growing homeless problem in our area, a portion of which is fueled by drug abuse and addiction, have no answers as to how they measure “success.” Instead, attendees were treated to stories of how these “programs” are so good that the leaders get invited to speak at “conferences” to discuss them in hopes, apparently, to spread them to other areas so that even more tax dollars can fund more programs.

The question must be asked: “How is this helping the problem here in Laconia?” The answer of course, is that it isn’t. It simply feeds and perpetuates an ever-growing network of feel-good operations that do nothing but provide more well-paid jobs for bureaucrats. Meanwhile, the problem only gets worse. In a recent post on X, Elon Musk wrote of this very matter in San Francisco, "The NGOs are paid almost a million dollars a year per homeless person, so their incentive is therefore super high to maximize the number of homeless people and never do anything that would reduce their number, like stopping the sale of fentanyl. Whatever you incentivize will happen.”

And it is.

Doug Lambert

Gilford