The Origins of San Francisco's Homeless Problem

When did San Francisco shift? Because I've been going to San Francisco to do stand-up since the 1990s. And I don't know when I noticed it. There was always homeless people, but they were not camping. Like it wasn't as chaotic as it, like you're never going to get away from a certain amount of mental illness, correct? Right. You're never going to get away with a certain amount of drug addicts and there's, you know, it's a thing with cities. When did it get where it is and how, what were the steps? Right. So you really have to go back. So culturally, San Francisco has been very tolerant of drug use since the 19th century. It had opium dens, that it was the last to shut down of anybody in the 19th century. But then you really go, then the of the sixties and a celebration of drug culture in the sixties. People think of it being psychedelics and marijuana, but it also included amphetamines and heroin. I mean, you go back to Janis Joplin in the sixties, she was doing heroin. Did you know that that's also where the CIA did Operation Midnight Climax? I'm not surprised. Yeah. That's where they did there where they would have brothels and they would dose the Johns up with LSD and observed them through two way mirrors. I'm not surprised. Yeah. It's, it's a culture, a very libertarian culture, right? So it makes sense that it's, it's that way. But then I think you have to go to the 1990s with the harm, which the movement that I was involved in, Harm Reduction, also had at the same time, it wasn't exactly the same movement, but it was also expanded treatment of pain through opioids. And that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic really begins with the liberalization of opioids. So that we just overprescribed opioids, right? It's now a famous story in the United States. We just gave them away to too many people, a lot of people that probably should have received an antidepressant or maybe some medicine for ADHD, or were just depressed, were getting opioids and their doctors were encouraged to do it. Obviously the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it. Obama then we, we, we started restricting that around 2010. And then a lot of those people then switched to heroin. And then, and then meanwhile in the background, really growing from the sixties, but just getting more and more intensified and concentrated as meth. So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill. Now we're into, we're into next generation opioids from heroin, which is fentanyl, which is something that you've covered here a lot. And so that's how you get these just rising. So you basically on the one hand, you get gradually increasing death toll from that 17,000 in the year 2000 to 93,000 last year, but fentanyl also is game changing. And so it's much easier, usually heroin, it's harder to overdose. Usually it's because of mixing with alcohol or benzodiazepines, but you get to fentanyl and it's much easier to just overdose directly on fentanyl. And now the Narcan's not working as well against the fentanyl. So that's basically it. Now the tents, I tried to answer this question and there's disagreement about it, but definitely Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless community in 2011. I mean, I remember around in Oakland where I was working at the time, there were all these Occupy tents at the down in front of the city center. And the same thing in San Francisco. And then after Occupy ended, the activists, the anarchist activists just gave the tents to the homeless. And it seems like a nice thing to do, right? Like here you have a tent to stay in. It seems like the compassionate thing to do, but then it basically just grew out of control. And so we call, we euphemize it by calling it an encampment. It makes it sound like it's a happy camp, but we know that women are raped in those camps, mentally ill people are taken advantage of, people overdose and die, people are killed when you can't make payment for your drugs, the drug dealers stab you with a machete. So these are really violent, dangerous, terrible places. You get hepatitis because of all the feces. So it just spiraled out of control. So it's hard to pinpoint any single thing, but I think, yeah, for sure, like Occupy 10 years ago. And then just, you know, I mean, we even see basically cities and police becoming more liberal around public drunkenness in like the 70s. And in the 1980s, when homelessness really emerged, you mentioned comic relief. I mean, comedians actually did a real disservice on this issue, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that homelessness was a problem of poverty. It was really a result of the crack epidemic, crack and alcohol. Certainly there were economic forces involved, but progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a problem of high rents. Is this just because it feels good to rally against the rich and to say that we need to just be compassionate? Is that what it is? Yeah, I think that if I had to summarize it, I quote this amazing addiction specialist from Stanford, Keith Humphries, who calls it left libertarianism. So it's basically this idea, and this is where the book ends up going, is that to victims give everything and demand nothing. You know, it's a combination of a radical left view, but also combined with a libertarianism. So that's what's kind of behind it. You interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand anything from addicts or from homeless people. How dare you? How dare you ask them to change their behavior, their victims of all these terrible things? In a lot of cases they are, but the whole thing is that nobody to suggest that somebody's essentially a victim actually ends up being, I think, racist. The idea that all black people are victims, I think, is a racist idea. The idea that all white people are benefiting from privilege also a racist idea. But that kind of racism, it's a different kind of racism than the type that we're all used to, which was racism. Type one was how do we justify enslaving Africans, basically? And how do we justify prejudicial policies against people of color mostly? Type two comes out of guilt. And so really it starts in the 60s at a point where we passed civil rights legislation in 1964. In 1970, and this very famous book gets published called Blaming the Victim. And the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization.