Note:
This is a edited version of an extremely long transcript of a Michael Shellenberger interview on EPOCH TV, which requires a paid subscription.
I tried to cut the length in half, but this is still a long article. The subject is important, but street people / drug addiction / mental illness are rarely discussed, much less solved !
Ye Editor
“We’re literally paying people in the form of cash welfare, housing, and other services to live in tents on the street, use hard drugs, defecate publicly, and commit crimes,”
says Michael Shellenberger, author of “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.”
... he breaks down the root causes behind the sprawling homeless encampments found in cities like San Francisco.
Even the word “homeless” itself is a propaganda word, Shellenberger says.
“It suggests that the underlying problem is lack of housing, expensive rents, or poverty.
And that’s not the case.”
The term “homeless” lumps together two groups that are radically different.
But it’s irresponsible to conflate mothers escaping abusive husbands, or people who are just going through some hard times,
with people who are mentally ill, or drug-addicted, or both, Shellenberger says.
Fundamentally, a victim ideology guides how progressives deal with homelessness.
And this ideology refuses to demand even a modicum of accountability from so-called victims, Shellenberger argues, even when they’re engaging in self-destructive behaviors that could be deadly.
Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from Oct 28, 2021. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.
... Mr. Jekielek:
... today, we’re going to talk about San Fransicko.
... What is really happening out there?
Mr. Shellenberger:
... Around 2017, when drug overdose deaths reached 73,000 a year, up from 17,000 in the year 2000, I remember thinking something has gone horribly wrong.
I started to look more at the issue.
Last year, we had 93,000 deaths from illicit drugs overdoses and poisonings.
I knew this was something I needed to come back to.
Apocalypse Never, my book on the environment, is a reflection on what I had been wrong about and why I changed my mind about some questions.
I wanted to do the same thing for San Fransicko.
Mr. Jekielek:
... It’s not a homelessness issue.
It is a drug abuse issue, but somehow these things are conflated, right?
Mr. Shellenberger:
That’s right. I mean, the word homeless is a propaganda word.
It’s been around for decades, but it was really used in the 1980s by progressive activists to demand more subsidized housing.
And they used people who were on the street suffering from drug addiction or untreated mental illness as reasons for more housing.
And part of the reason that you would use the word homeless is it suggests that the underlying problem is lack of housing, expensive rents, or poverty.
And that’s not the case.
It was interesting.
I try to look back on how I thought about these questions.
There was always a lot of political activity around homelessness in San Francisco when I was there in the 1990s,
but I was never fully on board with a lot of it because it seemed like it was basically a defense of people being addicted to hard drugs and living on the street and engaging in criminal activities.
It never seemed right either for the people that were engaged in those activities or for the other residents of the city.
At various moments, people have…
This is not, by the way, my interpretation of that word.
I mean, the word homeless, the advocates who used the word homelessness explicitly said that they were using that word.
The problem is, what they’re doing is they’re combining groups of people that should not be combined.
So the two groups that are in the biggest trouble, that are living on the street, are people suffering from untreated mental illness and people suffering from drug addiction.
Sometimes they’re the same people.
Sometimes they’re different people.
There’s people with schizophrenia that live on the street, but there’s also just people that got addicted to heroin or meth that have become disaffiliated, alienated from friends and family
in part because they’ve stolen money from them or borrowed money from them and not paid it back and basically been kicked out of their homes.
To mixed up those people with, say the mother escaping an abusive husband, is just irresponsible.
There’s people that do suffer hard times and they need some financial help.
We do a pretty good job of helping those people.
They don’t need the same thing that people that are addicted to heroin and meth need.
... And to some extent, San Francisco is famous for having treated people with HIV/AIDS at a time when other people were not treating them.
So it really comes out of a tradition of compassion.
I mean, the name of San Francisco is named after Saint Francis who was a Saint to the poor and the sick.
And so, leading with compassion is a big part of our identity.
The problem is, is most people have some awareness of people that are addicted to hard drugs or even to alcohol and marijuana, which are not perceived as being as hard drugs, but people that are suffering from addiction often do need an intervention.
This has been well understood for 150 years of opioid abuse.
... There’s a television show, reality show called Intervention.
Many of us, if not most of us, have a family or a friend who at some point has suffered from addiction and benefited from an intervention, or not gotten an intervention and needed one.
I myself have had two childhood friends that have died from complications relating to drug addiction.
I have another friend that’s still struggling with addiction.
So yeah, I mean, you have to ask the question.
Why do people that say they’re so compassionate, allow people suffering from drug addiction or severe mental illness to live on the streets?
And the basic idea is, for progressives, is that the system is bad.
The system being our democratic capitalist, the system is bad.
It creates victims.
And so, progressives only pay attention to people who are obviously victims of that system.
In San Fransicko, I also described the seemingly contradictory nature of the progressive response to crime, in particular to homicide.
And what you notice is that one of the first thing when you look at the data, 30 times more African-Americans are killed by other civilians than by the police.
And yet there’s all of this attention to police killings.
Why is that?
Well, it’s because progressives are really obsessed with people that are killed by representatives of the system.
In that case, by police.
So in the case of people that are addicted to the hard drugs or suffering from mental illness, they’re not perceived as victims of the system per se.
And so there’s not as much concern or retain care of them.
And in fact, the people that are offering perpetuating violence and the addiction are drug dealers in San Francisco.
The drug trade is controlled by Honduras.
They themselves are viewed as victims of human trafficking.
It’s not true.
But that victim ideology, the idea that people can be put in the category of victims and that everything should be given to them and nothing asked is really the dominant ideology of progressives right now. I
t’s really the dominant ideology of all of our political leaders in the San Francisco Bay area.
... Mr. Jekielek:
How does it work in, say skid row in LA or the Tenderloin in San Francisco? I mean, I remember when I was living in San Francisco, driving through the Tenderloin.
There were people wandering through the streets, obviously in very rough shape.
And this was 10 years ago. ...
Mr. Shellenberger:
... what we call homeless encampments is a euphemism.
It’s a propaganda word designed to make you think that it’s something different than it is.
The idea is that, “Oh, it’s these people helping each other.
They’re camping out.”
The European researchers…
And there was a major study done of this that was commissioned by the Norwegian government.
They describe these at as open drug scenes where people live inside of open-air drug markets.
So buyers and sellers are meeting there, but they’re also just living there because they’re so addicted.
I mean, when you’re addicted to opioids, whether pills or heroin or fentanyl and you’re in the depths of that addiction,
you often need to be using your opioids every four hours, except for at night when you might sleep a long time.
You sleep off that, but you wake up right away and you need to use. That’s what those encampments are.
They’re open drug scenes.
In Europe, they tried, at first, just like we’re doing in California.
Just helping people, giving people methadone, which is the substitute to heroin.
Giving people clean needles.
Encouraging them to go into drug treatment.
It didn’t work.
People were like, “No, I’ll just stay here in the squalor and use drugs” because they’re suffering from a kind of mental illness, which is what drug addiction is.
Finally, the people of those cities, and it’s Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich, they all took action with police and social workers to require people.
“You can’t camp in public.
You can’t use drugs in public.
You can’t defecate in public.
You can come to shelter.
We can get you drug treatment.
Or you can go to jail.
But those are your two choices.”
That was where I thought we left things in the early 2000s.
But basically, we’ve done a series of laws, court judgements, and just changes in public attitudes so much that now it’s just, “Hey, if you’re doing those things, we’ll leave you alone because we think you’re victims.”
Mr. Jekielek:
And what about police and how do police interact with these areas? ...
Mr. Shellenberger:
I mean, naturally, police are completely have been demonized particularly the last several years, but really it’s older than that.
It goes back 50, 60 years when police were viewed as part of the system.
They’re part of this oppressive prison state.
Prisons became viewed as a metaphor for the capitalist system by a lot of radical left, socialist, progressive anarchists.
I describe there’s really a long history of sort of valorizing and celebrating convicts, criminals.
This is very old.
The idea is that capitalism itself is a crime, that property is theft, that nobody is wealthy, they didn’t steal their wealth, that it’s all a corrupt con game.
And that anybody that breaks the laws in some sense, a rebel, a resistance fighter, and that goes for people that commit very violent crimes even.
So the anti-police protests are very old to some extent.
They gained new life obviously last year.
... You need good policing for sure.
But just having more police on the streets reduces crime.
And there’s just so many studies that have found this.
But one way we know you can reduce homicides is by having police interact with potential killers.
It’s that classic Hollywood movie where the police officer knows the potential criminal and they have this relationship.
We know that one of the factors driving a rise in homicides, the willingness of people to kill, is just total cynicism in the system.
Total disbelief that the system is fair, that the system is impartial, that it’s not discriminatory.
So when you have months and months of activists, the news media, incredible individual saying that the police are basically racist, that the police are killers and violent, it reduces the legitimacy of the police.
The police are less likely to engage in the community, and would-be criminals are more likely to commit crimes including homicide.
... it’s an issue I’m sensitive too.
My aunt suffered from schizophrenia.
She was pretty well taken care of.
She lived in a residential care in Denver, Colorado.
She had her own bedroom, a shared living space, shared kitchen space.
She was too disabled to work.
So she was cared for by taxpayers but in a really I think as positive a way as possible.
A lot of people remember how terrible our psychiatric hospitals became around mid 20th century.
And that’s true.
But it’s important to remember that the treatment of the mentally ill has always been extremely difficult and often really terrible.
So in the 19th century, the 18th century, people with mental illness were locked up in basements and barns, literally in chains.
Many people were killed.
And so the initial impetus to get people into psychiatric hospitals was very humanistic.
We then had a great depression.
We had World War II.
They were short staffed in those hospitals.
The activists that were trying to reform the hospitals took the story to LIFE Magazine.
And look, these are the big magazines and newspapers.
We saw photos of how terrible the hospitals were.
At the same time, progressives were pushing for a very humanistic response, at least they thought, to treat them mentally ill in communities.
But what ended up happening, and this occurred really starts under President John F. Kennedy and then accelerates after that,
is we just started literally dumping people from the psychiatric hospitals onto the street.
So some people did get the care that they needed like my aunt.
Other people ended up homeless and often addicted to hard drugs.
And then many other people ended up in jail and prison.
I point out that the institution that has the most seriously mentally ill people in the country is Los Angeles County Jail, kept in absolutely terrible conditions, at least for this population.
And it’s much easier to deal with somebody with depression or mild depression who becomes addicted to heroin.
That’s someone who we have better experience dealing with.
But people with schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart, that’s a group of people that are extremely difficult to deal with.
And it requires some amount of sophistication, but it certainly requires engagement and some amount of coercion, otherwise people end up getting hurt.
People with dementia, our grandparents, suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia, we don’t allow them to wander the streets and live on the streets.
And so, one of the questions I wanted to ask was why then do we allow people that are suffering from psychosis, whether from schizophrenia or from chronic meth use, to be on the streets.
... Seriously, mentally ill people that are not properly taken care of can get into a lot of trouble, including committing acts of violence.
They can be in psychotic states for a long time and end up on hurting other people or hurting themselves. ...
... one way to look at these two waves where we had a huge increase in homicide and other crimes starting in the late ’60s, 1970s, all the way through the early 1980s, then we then had a big backlash.
A lot of mass incarceration in response to that in the 1980s and 1990s. Then we started to come back from that.
A lot of us were like… We really went too far on the other direction.
I think we’re at a very interesting moment right now because on my book, certainly some people on the left will try to dismiss it as conservative,
but I do think when people read it, they’ll see that really I’m arguing for a system much more like what they do in Amsterdam or what they do in Europe,
which is universal psychiatric care, shelter first, treatment first, and then housing earned.
The lefts has promoted this idea that people on the streets should just be given housing.
No questions asked.
That housing is a right.
That everybody has a right to their own apartment no matter the circumstances.
We know that’s actually really dangerous.
It’s irresponsible to give people suffering from addiction or serious mental illness, cash, or their own apartment without any restrictions on how they spend it.
And so, it often is cruel to people to not give money to the homeless, but we know that when you’re supporting people in their addictions, it can actually result in very destructive behaviors.
But that is the basic idea, is this really bad idea that the people on the street suffering from addiction and mental illness are victims and nothing should be required of them.
And that requiring anything of them as a kind of oppression.
It’s not something that mainstream psychiatrists believe.
It’s not something that addiction specialists believe or agree with. In San Fransicko, one of the main characters is a leading addiction specialists at Stanford University.
He’s somebody who supports harm reduction measures including giving addicts clean needles so they don’t get HIV/AIDS, but he says very clearly, “Look.
You need interventions.
I mean, this is obvious.”
So in some ways, I think that where it all ends up going is I think America needs to mature in its own relationship to freedom.
And that these things are justified out of a kind of freedom for victims.
But also I think for non lefties, they kind of go, “Well, you can’t tell people what to do.”
And my view is, yeah, that’s fine.
You can’t tell people what to do.
I don’t think we should put any resources into say, making addicts who are killing themselves in the privacy of their own homes some sort of a law enforcement priority,
but we have a situation here where we’re literally paying people in the form of cash welfare, housing, and other services to live intents on the street, use hard drugs, defecate publicly, and commit crimes.
So clearly, something’s not working.
We need to have some accountability.
And that includes from the people that we label victims.
... And when you ask progressives what the solution is to all the drug overdoses in San Francisco, we have one of the highest rates of drug overdose in the country.
712 drug overdose deaths or poisonings last year.
They say we just need a safe place for people to use drugs.
hey claim that that’s what Europe did.
They claim that Europe simply decriminalized.
That’s just false.
... I also interviewed the head of Portugal drug programs.
I mean, one of the main talking points is that Portugal just decriminalized all drugs, and it’s fine.
I asked the head of Portugal’s drug program.
“If I were shooting heroin in Lisbon, in public, what would happen to me?” And he said, “You would be arrested and brought to the police station.”
They have decriminalized a certain amount of drugs for personal use.
But if you’re caught breaking other laws as a result of your addiction, including using drugs publicly, shooting heroin on a park bench, you are brought before something called a Commissions for the Dissuasion of Addiction, which is just as scary as it sounds.
Usually, it’s like a defense attorney, a prosecuting attorney, a social worker, a psychiatrist, and your family members.
So basically, it’s an intervention with the power of the state behind it so that if you’re a repeat offender, you’re arrested again.
Something else happens, they will come after you and increase the punishment and the consequences of your behavior.
... interventions are liberating for the person that’s being intervened upon.
The addicts are in the grip of a mental illness.
That’s the first thing you have to understand. In the book I describe three recovering addicts, two of whom were homeless at one point.
And they just say straight, “I had to be arrested to quit drugs.
And I’m glad I was arrested.”
I interviewed many people, including people that were actively addicted and actively homeless, who would say, “I wish somebody would do something. I wish I would…”
They wouldn’t necessarily say “I wish I were being arrested,” but they would ask to be on probation.
They need some sort of structure to keep themselves healthy and clean.
It used to be that even addicts would be arrested every once in a while and would find themselves in jail or a prison where they would have to detox and kick their addiction at least for a period of time.
We’re not doing that now.
And so, the result is, often there’s a lot of what we call poly drug use.
There’s a lot of people using multiple hard drugs in a single day, day after day.
Meth at night, often.
And then heroin or fentanyl during the day.
It is very hard on the body to live like that.
We see people in San Francisco with open wounds, open sores, people are becoming deeply sick, obviously they’re dying of drug overdoses.
So the popular idea that we should just simply help people to remain heavily addicted but in a slightly safer way, I find it just offensive and quite cynical.
Many people need the intervention.
... And the Portuguese know that.
Yes, you don’t necessarily need to arrest addicts and put them in prison, but they do need the intervention so that they can get clean and move on with their lives.
... the most surprising thing by far is that the reason we don’t have enough shelter beds in San Francisco or in other cities in California or on the progressive west coast is because the homeless advocates themselves had fought to fully fund them.
And so, when you interview progressives, it’s shocking.
They say, “Well, we didn’t want the money to go to shelters because we wanted all the money to go into something they call permanent supportive housing.”
They really believe, out of a radical left view, that housing is a right.
That if you just show up and say, “I’m homeless,” that you have a right to an apartment in San Francisco, or in Venice Beach which is one of the most exclusive residential community communities in Los Angeles.
That is really what people believe.
And that is what they say.
And that’s why they have denied sufficient funding to build shelters.
There’s other factors involved, like it’s hard to build anything in San Francisco because of the nimbyism.
But that’s also solvable.
The shelters can be built elsewhere.
But basically, that was what was so striking about it.
... And I point too, we offer more generous cash welfare, more generous housing, more generous services in San Francisco.
There’s sort of a magnet effect.
But at the end of the day, you have people living on the street because you’re allowing people to live on the street.
If you were to a say to the people on the street, “You can’t sleep here in the park.
You have to go sleep in the shelter.
And if you’re not going to go to the shelter and you’re going to insist on being here, then we’re going to arrest you.”
You will suddenly discover that you don’t have tents all over your city anymore.
That’s all that that is.
So that was I think the most surprising things.
At the end of the day, it was like, “Okay. If you just don’t let people camp out and you require them to sleep in shelters, that solves the problem.
You then have to make sure you have enough shelter space.”
... It’s not just the radical left.
Our current governor, Gavin Newsom, he himself advocated in defunding shelters as a way to divert all of that funding into housing.
So you sort of start to see a pattern here, which is like, these really are threats to basic civilizational institutions.
I mean, first they defunded the psychiatric hospitals and let everybody out.
Then they defunded the shelters and said people can sleep anywhere.
And now they’re defunding the police and trying to close all the jails in prisons.
Look, a lot of those folks probably should have gotten rehabilitation, but that’s not what’s happening.
People are just being let out without any conditions.
... I do advocate for universal psychiatric care.
Our current system of psychiatric care is a mess.
There’s both gaps in the system.
So if you get out of drug treatment, we don’t have an obvious place for you to go.
A lot of those folks get out of treatment and go right back to the street, and some of them overdose and die because their tolerances have dropped.
Other people get out of prison and they have the same problem.
So we don’t have a really functioning psychiatric care system.
And at the same time, we have a lot of duplication.
People paid to do the same thing for different groups of people.
A lot of overlap.
That system has to get fixed.
I’m proposing a new agency to handle it at the state level with a hierarchy that reports directly to the governor.
... people have a right to their city.
People have a right to walk down the sidewalk and not have to move into the street because there’s a tent there.
They have a right not to see somebody injecting heroin in front of them.
They have a right to not having people defecate publicly.
These are all rights that we have as residents of the city.
And so, the real attack comes from I think this kind of extreme victimology, which suggests that it would be wrong to enforce the laws against certain groups of people.
... I also see behind the opioid epidemic, this idea that any amount of pain should be responded to with very heavy drugs.
One of the things I learned in the Netherlands is that they just didn’t have an opioid epidemic in most of these European countries.
Why?
Well, because if you had some pain, their first response was not to just give you an opioid prescription.
They were much more conservative in prescribing opioid pills.
Of course, we overprescribed opioids from the 1990s to around 2010.
We then cracked down on overprescribing opioids.
A lot of those folks then turned to heroin.
A lot of those folks are now using fentanyl and dying.
The bottom line is, we also needed psychiatric care. ... "
