Years ago, a friend and I started a street paper in our city. A lot of our vendors had really serious addictions. The perception you would get about homeless/near homeless addicts from copaganda and the truth is remarkably far apart.
My biggest take from a lot of those interactions was how much they're like tech founders. I swear that if one particular vendor had discovered a IIc instead of LSD in the mid-80s, every one of us on this site would know his name.
Experiences like that really chip away at the "Thin Blue Line" narrative where these flawed people are our last line of defense against the degeneracy of drugs.
My biggest take from a lot of those interactions was how much they're like tech founders. I swear that if one particular vendor had discovered a IIc instead of LSD in the mid-80s, every one of us on this site would know his name.
Experiences like that really chip away at the "Thin Blue Line" narrative where these flawed people are our last line of defense against the degeneracy of drugs.