Sunday, May 22, 2016

[Worth Another Look, Part 2] From the 'Only in Lake Worth' file: "I got to know my sober home neighbors, and I'm glad I did"

On drug addicts and sober homes the downtown resident continues: ". . . some relapse. Others hang themselves. Still others have friends who cause noise and traffic. Some relapsers die with needles in their arms or need an ambulance in the middle of the night, or police intervention to calm disturbing behavior. All are troubled, or they wouldn’t have become addicts in the first place."

This scratch-your-head-in-disbelief headline and text appears in a "Point of View" in The Palm Beach Post print edition on Friday the 13th (5/13), a timely and appropriate day for this mythical piece to appear in the newspaper. Now you can see why this problem of sober homes is going to take so long to solve.

As long as people stay complacent about South Florida, and specifically, cities like Lake Worth, being a dumping ground for families and insurance companies in other parts of the country with drug-addicted kids who they can't deal with, then, well, we deserve sober homes up and down every street in town.

But the problem goes deeper than that. Probably every single person in Lake Worth who is paying attention knows what one of the biggest problems is with sober homes. . . except for a handful it would seem:
"I did not realize that there was no on-site 'house mother' or manager in these homes. . . There must be more oversight." Hello! Where have you been? Spending too much time worried about a County park?