I've noticed, since I got home, that there are a lot more homeless people on the streets of town than there used to be. I don't know where they've all come from all of a sudden.

Most of them -- the vast, vast majority of them -- are men. Men, probably in their thirties and early forties, although it's hard to tell, the state they're in. You see them lying on benches in front of the bus terminal or scrabbling through garbage bins looking for plastic bottles to sell or walking up and down the street begging passersby for fifty cents to buy "a little something to eat". They are dirty. Filthy, filthy dirty. Hair that hasn't been combed or washed in ages, matted and locked and grimy looking. Their skin is grey with dirt. Their feet are hard and rough and black. Their clothes are stained and smelly and hang on them all wrong. They walk with their shoulders stooped, dragging their feet like the weight of the world is on their shoulders, heads down, meeting no-one's eyes. And there's this look on their faces that I can not even describe. It's despair and shame and hopelessness and yearning and incomprehension and resignation and desperation and brokenness... It's tragic. Undescribable and tragic. And I look at them, and I think I see somewhere, somewhere behind their eyes, somewhere behind the faces that look years and years older than they have any right to, some small shadow of the men they used to be and the men they could have been.

I don't know how to end this. I think for a long time we didn't realize that this country might have a drug problem. I think we thought that crackheads and 'paros' were just a few poor marginal unfortunates that we could pity, maybe revile, and generally pretend not to see. But we can't pretend to see them anymore. So what are we going to do about it now? What are we going to do about our problem now?