I have given money... but usually I prefer to buy food... If I give cash 1-3 dollars is fine.... but I usually ask people if I can give them some food, or buy them a meal... if they immediately reject that... I usually let them go on about their day.
Which is why those of us who know what we're doing never reject offers of food. Even if we have way too much food already. We know you're likely to react that way. So we say yes in the hope that it'll increase the odds of getting you to give money later down the line. Even if we already have more food than we can eat. Even if you're not panhandling purely for the money, you'll still say yes if you know what you're doing. Even if someone else just bought you food minutes ago and you're not hungry and can't keep the food anyway. Because saying no will likely result in you not offering next time when we really are hungry.
Which is quite wasteful. So I wouldn't call that a particularly helpful strategy for anyone.
People think panhandling is easy. It's not, not if you wanna do it successfully. Like any job there's a lot to know about how to do. It's harder than it looks.
When I was doing it, everything we might have said to you, everything about how we were doing it right down to the last detail was engineered to increase the odds of you giving and giving money. No matter if you do it for drugs or not, if you want to do it successfully, you have no choice but to manipulate people.
Id even tell people some of the tricks sometimes, and that in itself was another trick. A strategy used to get you to feel that I've taken you into my confidence and increase your trust to make you more likely to trust me when I start having to lie.
If you ask me if I do drugs, I might even partially admit to it depending on how I've gauged your personality. Knowing that you're likely to think that I'd either deny ever using drugs at all and be lying. Or admit to having used drugs in the past but don't much anymore and be telling the truth.
So when I do have to lie, you're more likely to believe it. And that I've determined that you're not likely to be concerned about what I've admitted to, but assumed that if I were lying I wouldn't have said it. Even the material the bowl that the money was put in was chosen specifically to make the right sound and be loud enough to prompt others. Everything engineered to work you.
I'm not proud of it. But you gotta understand, even if you're just poor and not using drugs at all. The ultimate goal is money. Money is something that can be used later and for anything. We can't spend ALL our time begging. In order to best get what we need, regardless of if it's drugs or food or other things you need when you're homeless and in poverty. Nothing is going to be more useful than money. So that's what we're trying to get.
It's unfortunate that it has to involve so much dishonesty and manipulation, but that's what you do when you feel you have no other choice.
I'm not trying to convince you not to give money to panhandlers. Im trying to get you to see that even if it looks like a scam it might not be, and vice versa. and that if your concern is aiding people feeding a drug habit, to see that it's still better you help them and people not using drugs than helping neither.
It's not mutually exclusive. When I was doing it, I was homeless, I had nothing. I wasn't exactly getting in a car and going home at the end of the day to watch Netflix or something. But yes, i was trying to feed my heroin habit. And if I hadn't been able to get money that way I'd have been doing something worse. Pretty much everyone I knew doing this sort of thing for drugs did it so they didn't have to steal (for boys) or prostitute (for girls) instead.
I honestly think that giving money is a better outcome for everyone involved no matter if it's to drug addicts, homeless, or homeless drug addicts.
