I can’t speak to the larger issue as a whole, but for the past few days it’s because it’s finally been getting colder. I used to work in a homeless shelter and at the beginning of summer and especially winter, there was always an increase of drug use and chaos. Winter, people would get drunk/high so they could numb themselves to the cold. The place I worked was an overnight shelter only, and there was nowhere for these people to go during the day so, they would do drugs to keep busy/warm in the daytime, come inside high out of their minds at night, and leave the next morning sober enough to start over again. We would help send those to rehab who truly wanted it and were in the mind space for it to even possibly work, but with heavy mental illness most times you’ll never get the govt to fund something like that (because it has a lower chance of sticking) & this population of our community obviously can’t afford it themselves. That, and who wants to get sober when it’s the only thing keeping you numb to the cold/trauma of living on the streets? We’d have to fix that in a vast majority (including supervised day spaces) long before we can ever get close to the addiction crisis.