Warnings for death, drug use, and bodily fluids. And me having too many thoughts about toilets.
The best solution for people dying in bathrooms is supervised injection facilities. Relying on employees (who have no emergency medical training) peering in through crappy bathroom barriers is not a good system.
There are so many complicated issues around public restrooms, and who gets access to them. As a former drug user, I can’t help but pay attention to how different public restrooms are designed and what their policies are. 19 years later, I still expect a harried barista to bar me from a bathroom because I look too sketchy.
I lived for 10 years in San Francisco, the US city with the highest density of pubic defecation. In the 90s, San Francisco closed down a lot of its public restrooms because of pubic sex, drug use, and people sleeping in bathroom structures, and they were replaced with space toilets (self-contained, self-cleaning token toilets made by JCDecaux). The toilets cost money and were on a timer and so people broke the lock on the toilet in Boedekker Park (a notorious drug spot a block and a half from my apartment) and the alarm would go off for days at a time.
At around the same time, I worked at a coffee shop in the Haight Ashbury that had a buzzer for the (single occupant) bathroom. I spent a lot of mental energy trying to keep track of how long people had been in the bathroom, and hassling people who’d been in there too long particularly if they pinged my druggy radar. A month after I quit, the guy who took over my job found someone dead in the bathroom.
So, I guess, it’s an issue that I spend a lot of time thinking about. And it felt like that Slate article only barely touched on the things that seem to me like the biggest issues.
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The best solution for people dying in bathrooms is supervised injection facilities. Relying on employees (who have no emergency medical training) peering in through crappy bathroom barriers is not a good system.
For anyone’s who’s interested, there are two really good podcast episodes from the Harm Reduction Coalition that talk about specific techniques for reducing ODs in bathrooms: https://harmreduction.org/publication-type/podcast/eighty-three/ and https://harmreduction.org/publication-type/podcast/eighty-four/
There are so many complicated issues around public restrooms, and who gets access to them. As a former drug user, I can’t help but pay attention to how different public restrooms are designed and what their policies are. 19 years later, I still expect a harried barista to bar me from a bathroom because I look too sketchy.
I lived for 10 years in San Francisco, the US city with the highest density of pubic defecation. In the 90s, San Francisco closed down a lot of its public restrooms because of pubic sex, drug use, and people sleeping in bathroom structures, and they were replaced with space toilets (self-contained, self-cleaning token toilets made by JCDecaux). The toilets cost money and were on a timer and so people broke the lock on the toilet in Boedekker Park (a notorious drug spot a block and a half from my apartment) and the alarm would go off for days at a time.
At around the same time, I worked at a coffee shop in the Haight Ashbury that had a buzzer for the (single occupant) bathroom. I spent a lot of mental energy trying to keep track of how long people had been in the bathroom, and hassling people who’d been in there too long particularly if they pinged my druggy radar. A month after I quit, the guy who took over my job found someone dead in the bathroom.
So, I guess, it’s an issue that I spend a lot of time thinking about. And it felt like that Slate article only barely touched on the things that seem to me like the biggest issues.