Addiction in Greenwich Village, Late Summer 2024

Following up my post Addiction in Greenwich Village, Early Summer 2024, here are new pictures starting late summer.

These Pictures Are Of Our Culture, Including You and Me, Not the People in Them

As always on posts about addiction: These images are of United States and global culture, not just the people in them. Their addictions may look bad, but mainly hurt themselves, secondarily the community immediately around them with their

Litter
Urine
Feces
Influencing and scaring children
Lowering property values
Funding more supply
Promoting more addiction

The following addictions hurt people and culture more:

Doof
Flying
Fast fashion (or buying any clothes, jewelry, make up, etc you don’t need)
Large vehicles like SUVs
Buying unnecessary indulgent things
Takeout
Buying food shipped from far away
Social media, especially more than a few minutes a day
… you get the idea

In other words, the images below are of us and our culture. They only look more acute, but hurt people less than most mainstream addictions. I could just as well include pictures of McDonald’s, Delta Airlines, and Ford Explorers, which hurt more people by funding pollution and depletion.

Here are some from late August.

In the first, you have to look carefully to see the person behind is injecting into their toes. The person in front stepped there to make sure I wasn’t photographing identifying features like their face, which I wasn’t interested in. You can see the syringe.

Here are some from Labor Day weekend:

In the first one, you can’t quite get the feel from a photograph how they took over this block. Walking through their mess is like running the gauntlet (from the Free Dictionary:

run the gauntlet: To be exposed to or forced to endure a series of threats,dangers,criticism, or other problems. Refers to an old military punishment in which one was forced to run between two lines of soldiers while being thrashed with rods or whips.

Examples: “Medical students often feel that they have to run the gauntlet when they become residents in a hospital.” “The director has been running the gauntlet of fans’ outrage following the release of his latest film.”)

Speaking of medicine, these areas often smell like urine and sometimes feces too.

From mid-September: The first two show a guy injecting on a brownstone stoop. I took his picture. He looked at me and kept doing what he was doing. One of the women in the next picture was also shooting up, as I remember. If you look carefully in the last one, you can see in the reflection me taking the picture.