It is time for it to come to an end. "Chaos" is the word I think many people in San Francisco would use to describe the situation. It's homelessness problem has been out of control for years. But COVID made it even worse. Is shoplifting happening every single day? Every single day, any time they want.
Residents here are mortified. We're beyond wit's end. It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city. On December 17th, 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city's Tenderloin district, which will lead to an increased police presence in the epicenter of the city's growing homelessness and addiction crisis. It was a major turnaround for Breed, who, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, called for ending the use of police in responding to non-criminal activity. And she was roundly criticized by progressive politicians and groups like the Coalition on Homelessness, who called the move an expansion of strategies that have been tried and failed that would contribute to the instability and poor public health outcomes of people living on the streets. Michael Shellenberger, author of the new book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruined Cities, calls Breed's new tough love approach a big step in the right direction. The homelessness crisis, he says, is actually an addiction and mental health crisis enabled by progressive policies that permit open air drug scenes on public property, prevent police from enforcing crimes and undermine the creation of a functional mental health system. Reason spoke with Shellenberger, a Bay Area activist best known for his advocacy of nuclear power, about his foray into social policy. His critiques of both progressive and libertarian politics, mayor Breed's new approach and how he thinks America's big cities can clean up their streets without grossly violating civil liberties. So your new book is San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruined Cities. First off, can we talk about the title for a second? It's a little aggressive, no. Are you worried about scaring off potentially persuadable people? I do worry about that. I don't want to scare off anybody, but I also believe in truth in advertising, and the title is accurate. You know, the basic argument of the book is that San Francisco and other liberal cities are sick. They have untreated they have people with untreated mental illness and untreated addiction. Camping in parks, on sidewalks, using drugs, publicly defecating publicly. It's a huge health public health problem, and I don't just mean homelessness. I mean the broader, you know, urban decay and including rising crime. I also think I also argue that there's a kind of sick way of thinking about these problems, which is to pathologize and to view the world as and to view the, you know, our system, as you know, fundamentally evil and wrong and that that leads to terrible outcomes. You know, the book is not it is about San Francisco, but it's also really about what the subtitle says, which is why progressives ruin cities. It was a question I had and and and still am asking, but try to get to the bottom of which is why is it that cities that ostensibly care the most about poor people, minorities, people suffering mental illness and addiction. Why do they treat them so terribly? What's going on is the issue of money. Is that a lack of housing? Is it a lack of rehab? What's going on? That's the that's the reason for the book. I'm curious about your journey to this topic because you're kind of known as the nuclear guy. That's how I knew you. But there is sort of a through line here. I mean, you came from progressive politics in the environmental movement and started to question some of that in terms of whether it was actually achieving its goal. Now you've expanded your focus to urban dysfunction more generally. Is there some sort of connection there or did were there other reasons that you decided to expand your focus? Yeah, for sure. And I'm still a nuclear guy, and I'm still working on energy, the environment, I still write about it and I still campaigned to support nuclear. In fact, our nuclear work is really more salient than ever because we're in a global energy crisis because of in part because of lack of nuclear and also the lack of natural gas, which is also fuel that I support. So, yeah, there is, and it took I had to actually write the book to see some of the connections, but for me and the third book also coming from the same publisher Harper Collins, probably next year and there will be three, there'll be three books Apocalypse Never, San Francisco, and then the third book. And they're all dealing with this issue of really the threats to civilization from within the civilization. Like, why is it that we're having serious problems of governance? Why is it that our institutions are failing? And you know, the most dramatic, I think example of really the progressive attack on institutions is when I was reading about the effort to shut down psychiatric hospitals, which had a bunch of problems and needed it to be reformed. But nonetheless, they were shut down and this kind of panic without having adequate places for people to go or requiring people to be there. It reminded me a lot of the panic of shutting down nuclear plants and and I keep seeing it over and over again. And in fact, Greta Thunberg the climate activist. Her most famous line is "I don't want you to have hope, I want you to panic." Which I was very critical of in Apocalypse Never, panic literally means unthinking behavior and action, which is not something we should wish on our worst enemies. And I see myself making the case for civilization. And that sounds a little grandiose, but but certainly making the case for institutions that you have to have that civilization is cities sort of literally what it meant. But those cities depend on institutions, and it means that you need to have police and you need to have criminal justice and you need to have functioning electricity grids and you need to have homeless shelters. And so you need all these things. And and there's something that happens when kind of the radical left really muscles liberals and Democrats into taking some pretty radical actions, and it certainly happened on the right too. I'm not suggesting it doesn't. But but I see I see that as the through line in the work, The perspective that you bring to this as a former activist involved in progressive causes. I have to say it's oddly relatable to me because progressive politics and libertarian politics overlap in many of these very areas: drug legalization, criminal justice reform, the rights of those with mental illness. Yet as a recently former Californian who has seen and documented and experienced a lot of the tragedy unfolding on the streets, I've had to personally think very deeply about how some of these policies have been implemented and their real world effects. You know, I still want to see major changes in laws and sentencing across the country that maximize personal liberty. But my general sense and it was bolstered by a lot of what you dug into in the book here, is that the way it's been implemented in practice has emphasized the personal liberty side of the equation while ignoring the personal responsibilities part and for a libertarian. Those things are bound together. What is your big picture diagnosis of what's gone wrong in California cities? Yeah, thank you for that and I totally agree with you. I mean, I love my freedom and I'm in San Francisco. I'm in the I'm in Berkeley, which is across the bay from San Francisco. I'm in California because I love the cultural libertarianism here. I love the fact that we really reject a lot of the traditional statist hierarchy of the East Coast around where you went to school and working in big, you know, companies and stuff like that. I love the entrepreneurialism. I just think that's the most special part of the of the of the left coast. So I totally agree. I also care a lot about people. I mean, I think the libertarians lay down people is that they care about freedom more. And the trip that progressives lay on people is that they care more. They're more compassionate and there's probably some truth to it. But I think the truth is that I think a lot of us love our freedom and a lot of us care a lot about other people. And we're looking for, particularly now, I think, some practical ways to solve these problems. So I mean, I view the problem out here. I view there's a lot of things going on. But if you kind of take the so-called homeless problem, I believe that is fundamentally a problem of untreated mental illness and drug addiction. Drug addiction, I believe, is a form of mental illness. I also think I agree that it's often self-inflicted and sometimes it comes from trauma, sometimes it comes from undiagnosed depression or anxiety, or even more severely schizophrenia. But sometimes it just comes from partying too much. I mean, addiction is just something that afflicts a bunch of people, and it's untreated. I agree, though, that we don't have a functioning psychiatric system that really helps people to get themselves like a lot of people that are addicted to hard drugs might have just done fine with an antidepressant and some cognitive behavioral therapy and exercise, which works for almost everybody. So. We don't we don't have that, and that's the the traditional progressive criticisms, we don't have that, but we do need that. And then the other issue is just, of course, that why are there so many people on the streets in San Francisco and California? It's because we let them. It's there's a myth that it's because of the weather. Certainly in freezing places like Chicago, it's hard to be on the streets year-round. But there's other places like Miami, Miami, which are warm, which don't have the same problems that we have. Or least they did, and then they fixed them. And I think there's been some backsliding, but nonetheless has had much better outcomes than we have. So it's sometimes it's easier to describe what the solution is and then work through why we're not doing it. And the solution is basically a universal shelter. I think that the Supreme Court has established it, but even regardless, the Supreme Court, ethically, we should one that everybody should have a safe and clean place to sleep. It should not be so nice that it attracts people who want to stay there, but that should be universal. That's not the policy we have. We have a Housing First policy rather than a shelter first policy under this utopian idea that we can just provide everybody who wants their own apartment in San Francisco or Venice Beach with their own apartment. It's obviously wrong. Just geographically, you can't do it, but financially you can't do it, and it creates a terrible incentive for people to become homeless. We need to enforce laws, including misdemeanors, including against a public campaign, including against public defecation and public drug use. Those are cries for help from people, and when they break those laws, they should be arrested, brought before a judge and given the opportunity to have rehab or psychiatric care rather than jail or prison. There's nothing super extraordinary about where I come to philosophically, but I do sort of point out that the core American value has been freedom ever since our founding, and that's a beautiful value and wish to continue to have that value. But it does require responsibility at the individual level, but also at the societal level and really that we need to balance those two values responsibility and freedom. I know from reading your book that you don't want to go back to the bad old days of insane asylums and mass incarceration, total drug war, but also the current trajectory in these cities is clearly not right, either. What is the middle path forward from here? The synthesis? And how do you think that those of us who are legitimately concerned about these issues, like personal liberty and autonomy and not bringing in heavy handed law enforcement to bother people for, you know, sitting on a park bench with their stuff or something can be part of a productive coalition to get America's cities back on track for the 21st century. Yeah, well, it's a great question. I sort of boiled it down to the three key Ps, so we don't want overincarceration. That means that we need to rely more heavily on good policing, on psychiatry and probation. And I would just include in psychiatry, rehab and addiction care. And I would just add to that you also need some kind of caseworker. You need some empowered caseworkers or assertive case management is what's called to bridge those things. So, you know, one of the big arguments for defunding the cops as we say "Well, the cops shouldn't be responding to mental health calls. We should have social workers do that. Well, it sounds good. But actually less than 10 percent of those mental health calls are safe enough for a social worker alone. I mean, a lot of those mental health calls are really scary and involve people engaged in violent activities. And so really, what you want is to you want more soft cops and more hard social workers and you want them working together. And it sounds very kumbaya, and in some extent it is, but it's not easy, and it does take the police department's changing. And then that's why I think you do need something like cal psych. So homelessness is the kind of umbrella issue under which many other sub categories fall. And you mentioned mental illness, drug use, and we'll get into those a little bit more in a second. But there's also the issue of housing, which I would say in the book you very much downplay and say, you know, housing prices really are not a major driver of homelessness. I mean, there is some empirical research out there that at least shows correlations between local rents, local housing prices and, you know, incomes and rates of homelessness. So first, just taking the housing plank here, isn't it at least plausible to you that that some subset of the population here are people who maybe were right on the margins, they got displaced. Being out of your home can exacerbate various underlying mental health conditions, and so is making the problem worse. Is that a plausible story to you? Those camps that you see, the so-called homeless encampments, it's just a 100 percent addiction and mental illness. I'm not saying there's not somebody there who has been off drugs for a little bit or suffering mental illness, but there's some underlying sickness there that is leading them to be there. There are then now now could housing, could higher housing prices worsen that situation? Absolutely. I mean, so for example, the classic picture is somebody becomes addicted to, let's say, you know, somebody a 20 year old is addicted to hard drugs. He's still living with his parents. He stops working. He starts stealing from his parents and lying to them. They try to get him into rehab. Then maybe he goes, It doesn't work, doesn't stick. Finally, they just cut him off and they kick him out. He then goes and lives in a homeless encampment on the street. I think that that moment of kicking somebody out probably occurs much more quickly and maybe occurs when you're living in a much more crowded conditions and much more expensive rent areas. So I can totally see that. The difference, though, is that do you allow the open public campaign? So for example, if it were just a function of high rents, then we would see homeless encampments in Beverly Hills and in really nice neighborhoods. But they're not. They're always in the same places near train stations, near public transport downtowns, in poor neighborhoods, often minority communities. And so, you know, ultimately, I also allude to this issue of the magnet effect. There's always, you know, policymakers are always saying that because you offer social services or free housing or food and shelter that it attracts homeless people from around the country. I definitely found a lot of evidence for it. But at the end of the day, I was like, people are attracted to the open drug scene in San Francisco and in Los Angeles and there in there in the open drug scene is allowed to exist because progressive activists, really radical left activists, but certainly after the rebranding of the 1990s occurred. Progressive activists have said that it's immoral to disallow public camping, that it's criminalizing poverty and homelessness, and that it must be allowed and that only things can be given and nothing, nothing taken. So I don't want to suggest there's no role for high rents, but in some of the most interesting studies where they were a site where scholars looked at this. You're right, they did find a correlation. But they also noted that in the places where you have high amounts of unsheltered homelessness tend to be very progressive cities. They didn't quite use the language, but cities where they had different social values. So, you know, people's attitudes towards the homeless or towards the street addicts are different in Houston and Dallas than they are in San Francisco and Seattle. There's this ideology called Housing First, which you mentioned earlier, and it's really the operating assumption of most homelessness policy in all these cities, even at the national level, at all the large nonprofits, which is that just get people under a roof in their own private space, and that will begin to fix the problem and turn things around. And it sounds very clean and intuitive, and there's a certain simplicity to it that's very appealing. From covering it in L.A., I know that it's not workable, at least in a city like Los Angeles, where the economic reality of building these units has caused them to go up, you know, above half a million dollars per unit in some cases. Why doesn't housing first solve homelessness? What's not working here? The basic reason is that if you go get people with untreated mental illness and addiction in their own apartments and you don't deal with the untreated mental illness or addiction, they actually do end up back on the street, often very quickly. We now know from a big Harvard study that was done over 12 years that there was no better. There was no better outcomes for people that had a housing first, the non housing first, even on their own metric of keeping people in housing. That is the only metric that they've been able to boast of success, but we have seen no evidence. The National Academies of Science, which is our premier research body, did a review of the science. I think a couple of years ago, maybe twenty eighteen, and they found that Housing First did not have any improved outcomes and that there was some evidence that it had worse outcomes because they didn't deal with the underlying problem of addiction and mental illness there. The response, just to be fair to my opponents on this, their response is they said, "Well, we never said that you wouldn't also have services." So I tell a story in the book about my Dutch character is a social worker and how he dealt with a man with schizophrenia. Very serious schizophrenia. The original housing first idea, by the way, came from you using that strategy with people with mental illness, not addiction. And there was a lot of similarities, but there's also a lot of
differences, particularly with things like schizophrenia and drug addiction. But my character, his name is Renee. He he tells a story of basically kind of muscling. A friend of the family who had schizophrenia into first some shelters, then into psychiatric hospitals a couple of times, and then he finally got them on good meds. And the guy now has his own job, his own apartment, his own car. And for schizophrenia, that's just an extraordinarily positive outcome. I mean, he tells a story about a guy still has hallucinations and delusions. He thought people were staring at him through his window, and Renee's like, just close the curtains. You know, that's a beautiful outcome. And I think that is what they're the best of the housing first people wanted. And they stressed, they said you'd have services in that case would be Renee or somebody to be playing that role. But that's just not what's been occurring. And some of that isn't the fault of progressives. It's because we don't have a functioning psychiatric and addiction care services. But a lot of it is also victim ideology, which is a weirdly libertarian part of it. You know, which is sort of like just it's liberal, left libertarian, a kind of anarchist libertarian, which is sort of like you, they're victims of trauma and racism and poverty and whatever and addiction and almost give them the means. You should give them things like their own apartment and offer them help, but don't require it. Don't mandate it, because that would be an extension of the victimization. And that's where everything goes wrong. I mean, addiction, particularly focus on addiction for a second, but even schizophrenia, there is some amount of coercion that's usually required for people to quit their addiction. People do need to be arrested or in Portugal. They do these interventions with a kind of mix of family members, social workers, you know, government officials and cops. But still, it's pressure on people and we know this about addiction. We have a whole reality TV show called Intervention. That shouldn't be so surprising, but I think there's that's where the dogma has interrupted the proper treatment of people with addiction and mental illnesses and actually requiring some amount of pressure or coercion. There's this kind of zero sum game and competing for funds between shelters and permanent supportive housing. You know, for every one person permanent supportive housing unit, you could build, you know, tons of beds in a shelter, you know, in addition to the economics of scale there, that with the shelter model, you can still implement this sort of reward system where you can work your way up from the shelter to, you know, a private room to your own place. Is that the appeal of shelters? There is still a role for, I think, publicly subsidized housing, again that's something we can talk about in terms of the libertarian concerns about it. I think it should be limited. I think the goal should be independence, which I think everybody should share for people to the extent that that's possible. I mean, truly disabled people, obviously, that's not possible. And so one of the things that I would see the social workers do in the Netherlands is they would offer people their own private room as an incentive or eventually maybe their own apartment if you can afford it or if you have that. But even their own room is a really good incentive for people because people don't like sharing rooms and people don't like congregation
spaces everybody is the same in that way. And so that housing earned approach we had there was big studies done on this in Birmingham, Alabama, actually clean on crack and they would find that crack addicts who were given their own apartment as a reward for passing a drug test and being off cocaine did very well. It actually, I mean, it's still, you know, it's not perfect. But but it did much better than the Housing First, folks, when they had some sort of an incentive to change their behavior. I want to talk to you about the drug war, which I still see as a giant failure and think that decriminalization and eventually legalization is the right path forward to alleviate a lot of the suffering we see on the streets and sidewalks, though maybe done in a perhaps more careful way than it's been done in some of these cities. You say in the book that you were once a critic of the drug war. Do you still think it's a good idea? You know, given what we know about the effects of the black market, people having their lives ruined with jail or prison time is keeping drugs criminalized a viable path forward. So I mean, I think if you kind of go to the drug war, succeed or fail, well, on the one hand, it's obviously spectacularly failed on every level because we have 100,000 people that died from drugs last year. That's an increase from 17,000 in the year 2,000. I mean, it's just the numbers are mind blowing. You know, that's three times more people dying of drugs than car accidents, five times more dying than from a homicides. So number one cause of death right now for people between the ages of 18 and 45. So, you know, these are terrible numbers. I want to be careful, though, because I think that I think that I mean, what I'll say is, I think we are we are I think we are evolving and I hope that San Fransicko is a part of it. I believe it is a part of the evolution of our thinking, which had traditionally been just decriminalized drugs or your or a prosecuter and you want to lock them up. I think there is a third way, and that's I. hesitate to use that word
because it's been so kind of contaminated, but basically, I do think that there's a better way, which is much more similar to the Dutch and the Portuguese model, although the Portuguese have much tighter family and community networks, so it's a little bit harder to replicate. But nonetheless the Dutch model, they are putting pressure on addicts to quit. At the same time, if you're using heroin, cocaine in the privacy of your own home and you're not camping on the streets. There's no they're not going to go after you and they're really not going in after you hear either. And in terms of drug dealing, drug dealing continues in the Netherlands and it continues all over the world. And I don't think you can get rid of it. Or I would say, I don't think you could get rid of drug dealing or drug use without a severe curtailment of our civil liberties, which nobody, not even the most fascist really in our society would support. But you can disallow open drug scenes, which is the homeless encampments. You can disallow open air drug dealing. It's hard, but it is. We do know how to do it, which is that you basically suppress any, you know, if you see one dealer and one addict making a sale on the street, it's not a priority for police. But once it becomes known, and part of the problem is that like addicts, if you live in Cleveland, like you know that San Francisco is a place that you can go to and use heroin openly and freely on a low cost. And so when you shut that open-air drug scene down an open drug dealing down, it massively improves the security of the neighborhoods. I mean, I think I can get behind the idea of cities prohibiting these open air drug scenes on public property. I think you could make that case on libertarian grounds even. Where it gets dicey is with this issue of personal consumption, even, you know, selling to people within the privacy of your own home or some private venue. Is that somewhere? And Portugal, for the record, actually, they they will arrest you just for doing drugs and bring you in front of a drug court and then kind of force you into rehab. But are you willing to, you know, kind of draw a bright line there and say, you know, let's just focus on the open air drug scenes and not going after casual drug users? Yeah, absolutely, I'm very comfortable with that. And I think actually being explicit about it and creating some societal consensus is an important step in solving this problem. In fact, it's the first step, in fact, that study I mentioned about saying the open drug scenes they actually created like a like a list of things that all the studies did in the first one is established in the social, societal and political consensus. And they all said he did that because if you don't do that, forget about it. So, yeah, absolutely. I still I am very uncomfortable with the government getting involved in selling these drugs or selling them from pharmacies. I do still think they should be. I think I think it's okay to decriminalize decriminalization is different than legalization. Yes. And so I think it should be hard to get those substances. Not easy. But I'm sure you are aware of the research. You know, we've had this opioid crisis with with pain pills and in areas where they crack down on the pain pills, people turn to the illicit street drugs and the overdoses go up. So isn't there ultimately even a case for saying, you know, just allow the legal sale of all of it and we need to build up a safety net around it? We need to build build up appropriate treatment centers. And to your point, you know, put recovery up there, as you know, one of the top priorities and kind of learn to grapple with the reality of these drugs in a kind of more sophisticated manner society wide. Again I look to the Europeans because they're ahead of us on this. They had the open drug schemes in the late 80s. They made the same mistake that we are making now. They changed their approach. They involved law enforcement in the early 90s, and they fixed it. There are supervised drug use sites in the Netherlands. There's about 20. I just got the research I haven't published yet, but my my character gave me that information. There's about 20 supervised drug use sites in the Netherlands. They get between 10 and 20 people per day, and it's a tiny number of people, if you think about it. There are some people that they do give heroin to in the in the Netherlands, it's about 100. It's less than 150. Those are people for whom methadone, which is the substitute for heroin, did not work. Suboxone or buprenorphine is a superior or somewhat superior. People think to methadone is widely available. So I am. I'm on board with the Dutch model. I'm fine if you need to have some folks to allow them to use those harder drugs. But but they do not sell heroin or fentanyl in coffee shops in the same way that they do marijuana. Yeah, I will say I continue to think that the evidence points towards when you criminalize these substances, they tend to get more dangerous. However, you did raise this Dutch model with some activists this idea of offering an alternative to jail treatment as an alternative to jail. And I was kind of surprised that so many activists just said no, that that is not where we're going with this. We're not even talking about someone who's been arrested just for possession and somebody who's been doing breaking the law in some other way. And instead of sending you to jail, we can see you have an addiction. So we're going to divert you to treatment. Were you surprised at the pushback to that idea? I was. I was. Annoyed. I find myself still annoyed by it because that was not my understanding. Now, maybe I back in the 90s. I mean, and now maybe I misremembered it. Or maybe I. But I feel a little hoodwinked that there was this idea that we were going to. We were going to have rehab as the alternative to prison. But then when it came time to implement these things, I think it was also just a thing on the left. I mean, maybe the right to, but I know the left better, which is that like, you kind of get a little bit and you keep pushing. I think they had just so much political power that progressives were just like, Well, we don't want to require anything like that. And I think that that plays into victim ideologies. So, yeah, I was bothered by it. I mean, just even at like a kind of political level, you'd kind of go, Well, wouldn't that be progress? Like, wouldn't that like if you're trying to legalize all drugs and you're like in a conservative part of the United States and you're like, Well, we're just saying let the addicts go to rehab rather than prison, why would you oppose that? But they do, because they view it as it's not just a compromise, they view it as fundamentally immoral to require something of people. A place where it gets even a little more puzzling, I would say, is where we you start to get into mental illness. And this idea of again offering some treatment path rather than prison for somebody who has a mental illness who is acting out in some way on the street, again committing some other crime. It's not just that they are mentally ill and hurting nobody, it's that something happened. They're they're violating public safety in some way. And again, you encountered activists
who said offering treatment as an alternativeis not the right path forward. You know, in that, so there's the argument I had with the ACLU and the ACLU in California, and she says, I says, Well, what if somebody is defecating you know on the sidewalk? Shouldn't they be arrested? And she said, Well, it depends on what they're doing. And she said, you know, if it's if it's a frat guy urinating on my driveway, then he should be arrested. But if it's a poor homeless person, you know, then no. And I was kind of like, Well, but then like, how are you going to get them the help that they need or like, what about enforcing the laws? I mean, it just got really twisted, but it can't. That's the that's the story of victim ideology. I mean, she just thinks there's some people that are victims and some people are not. And if you're a frat guy, then you're definitely not a victim. But if you're the homeless guy, you definitely are victims. That was the way she described it. I mean, look, I think there's a concern that and I share it, which is that if you get sentenced for example, to a psychiatric hospital, you're in a psychotic state and you're out of control and you're sensitive psychiatric hospital and maybe you're only sentenced for 90 days or six months in jail. Go into that institution and never escape and never get into kind of, you know, residential care. You know, you have some harsh words in there for thinkers like Foucau, Thomas Szasz as both of whom questioned the very underpinnings of psychiatry. And I agree that in some regards, they probably went too far. But there does seem to be the core of something that we need to be vigilant of, which is you talk about wanting to expand the scope of conservatorship, which is where basically some other entity takes control of somebodies decision making, legal decision making. We know this can be abused. Britney Spears was the big recent example of that. Is it even possible to balance this adequately? Or is it too dangerous to hand the state more and more ability to have conservatorship over people because they have a mental illness as the state defines it? Yeah. Well, let me let me address the Britney Spears thing. I actually had Britney in the book and she and I and she came out of the book towards the end because she's not, you know, the book's not about me. She's she's a rich celebrity. Right? But but we don't know that she that her conservatorship was inappropriate. We have no evidence for that whatsoever. And even if she were to then say it was inappropriate, that's not proof of that. So I think that, you know, in terms of those proceedings are confidential. We have not seen the court proceedings. We do know that there were some very strange behaviors around her and her kids that may have been related to both mental illness and drug addiction, but we just don't know. I agree. conservatorship is very radical. There is, in some cases it's appropriate, but obviously it should be used in limited cases. I mean, I would say that the courts in California rarely do it, so it's not like it's being widely used right now. And so that means that the people that are getting conservatorship, it's a pretty extreme circumstances. I mean, you gotta remember we have cases out here where it's like people will have been in like a car accident or motorcycle accident and have brain injuries and end up drug addicts on the street and their families can't get them the care they need, even though obviously they had like, you know, obviously a physical injury that resulted in them being, you know, unsheltered and homeless. There is another alternative, which is assisted outpatient treatment that's just a court ordered psychiatric care for folks. It's less restrictive or it's less total than conservatorship. It has been focused on mental illness, but it could also be used for addiction. You know, what I would say is, I mean, look, there's never of course, there's no. Of course, it's always going to be wrong in some way. There's always going to be some people that are getting are getting mistreated by too much state involvement. And there's going to be some people that aren't going to be getting enough. If you kind of go the Dutch, get as close as anybody has gotten. I'm sure you'll find people that were unjustly hospitalized and Netherlands and some people that are that needed more care and didn't get it. I will say that I think if you have the functioning care system that we don't have, then you're going to reduce that a lot. You know, we just find that in places where the care is better, there's a lot less resistance to the care. And your big picture idea for fixing the dysfunction on the streets is this agency that you call Cal Psych, which would override all the local mental health departments and funnel both those with mental illnesses and drug addictions into a centralized system. And you're a critic of what you call the results of the neoliberal model of contracting to non-profits. But my question about that is aren't more localized public private partnerships just more accountable to communities? I mean, like, why should anyone trust a system run by California state government, which, after all, did oversee the system of abuse of insane asylums of the late 19th and early 20th century? I mean, why would I expect, you know, something run out of Sacramento to be cost effective, humane or accountable? You have to work with the social worker, you know, or you have to work with a cop in this particular way. But that that needs to occur. And that's the improvement of policing in terms of psychiatry. I'm with you. I mean, there has been some people that have called for a return to big asylums. I think the evidence and basically what everybody says that has to live in one of those is that the residential care is much preferred to big old asylums. You know, you have to remember then those residential care facilities are going to have to be in people's communities, and there's usually very strong NIMBY resistance. I do think some of that solved by being able to have those residential care facilities in other parts and spread out more uniformly around the state, not all concentrated in downtown San Francisco. But I do think that's an important reform that needs to be made and probably does need a lot of federal help. The current system is a kluge in the sense that you have a bunch of charities, churches, private health care providers, rehab health care providers that are paid by taxpayers at the county at the county level, mostly to provide care. Right now, they're not accountable like they. They have been struggling for decades. One of the most depressing parts of this research is reading, you know, Blue Ribbon Commission reports from the 80s and 90s or early aughts talking about how there needs to be more coordination so they can't coordinate even at the local level. So part of the problem is that part of the problem is the population itself. It's especially the addict population is highly transient. I mean, transient was one of the words that was used before we settled in on homelessness on homeless, but it's a highly transient population. If it's a criminal population, so often they're often escaping local police jurisdictions that are after them. But if they're mentally ill, there's also a high level of transients. So, you know, it's just a huge problem in that sense. But the other big problem is is the is the cost and so in in San Francisco, San Francisco, Los Angeles is attracting huge numbers of addicts from around the region, the state and the country. You know, as people on the streets from Cleveland and West Virginia, it's very expensive. I mean, San Francisco just can't do any services because they can't provide psychiatric and addiction care for every addict in America. It has to be able to move people places it has to build. And so you have a physical problem of we don't have enough homeless shelters, psychiatric beds, residential care in San Francisco, and you never will. And by the way, I'm arguing for a super hierarchical, transparent agency that does contracts with these different providers. So there'll still be a lot of private sector providers. I don't think you need to nationalize the entire sector. For example, the Dutch, for example, do a big subcontract with Salvation Army. Two thousand Salvation Army employees work in a contract for the Dutch government. It would be a government agency with a CEO who reports directly to the governor with like regional managers who then oversee caseworkers and contracts. And I think the power of having a new agency with new leadership is you can create a new culture, you can create an institution and it can be really high functioning if it's allowed to kind of rebuild from scratch as a kind of skunkworks, rather than having to somehow try out of reform these institutions or, God forbid, coordinate. I mean, like these are institutions that just are resistant to any amount of coordination. Is there any hope in your mind that the healing is going to begin any time soon? Are you optimistic about that? Or do you think that it still needs to get worse before it gets better? I don't think it does have to get worse before it gets better. I'm not. I've always been a proponent of immiseration theory in general, including in my in my Marxist days. I think that the whole point of political advocacy is that you can raise the bottom. Of our word from addiction intervention, we are seeing a significant response in San Francisco, and I'm happy to contribute to it to the extent that we have for the last few months, we started protesting open drug dealing in May. We've organized the California Peace Coalition with parents of street addicts, parents of kids killed by fentanyl with recovering addicts and community leaders. It is having an impact. Just, you know, the book has had a big impact in San Francisco. The mayor announced a crackdown on open drug dealing in mid-December. She immediately experienced pushback from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She's now getting bureaucratic pushback, but she's pushing back against the pushback. You know, I get a lot of calls from people all the time with different kind of views of what's going on. But I do have hope. And it did. It did help that Fox News and the conservative national news media were pounding away on San Francisco. I mean, the San Francisco brand is in deep trouble and it will be for many years to come until they fixed it. I mean, we hear reports of people from Reykjavik and from Thailand who are like, Yeah, we were just talking about because, you know, the bad the horrible situation in San Francisco has made international news. So I do think we have to keep the pressure on, and I think we need to praise the politicians from whatever party they're coming from when they move in our direction, even if it's not very far. Are you bothered by being characterized as kind of a tool of the right wing now? I've read lots of criticisms along those lines. We started with the title of your book that kind of plays into that somewhat. I mean, nobody likes being criticized. That said, I think it bothers me less now than it ever has. Yeah, I mean, I just retweeted a friend of mine who talked about how, you know, it's like, you see, I don't get invited to go on CNN or MSNBC. My last book was ignored by the Times. This book was was was reviewed, and an attack from the reviewers lied about the book, which is to be expected. But it also got an Editors Choice mentioned in the year end review for the Times I, after the mayor of San Francisco, announced a crackdown. I was invited to finally give a speech at the Commonwealth Club, which is sort of our liberal, you know, high society club. So there is a thawing occurring. I mean, generally, I get attacked at the exact same moment that my work is having some impact, so I kind of remind myself of that. You know, and I'm I'm not a right winger, and I'm not just demanding, you know, a return to the drug war, and I'm not just wrapping things in language, I'm actually proposing a pretty substantive new social program. Apocalypse Never was last year and that's my book on the environment and it was just so taboo. And so I was just such persona non grata really until now. Where it is starting to be taken a little bit more seriously by liberals, still not as much, I think, as San Fransicko, but I think San Fransicko, the ideas in it are maybe paradoxically given the title, but they're actually there are more palatable to people, to liberal people when they really consider it. And then so you know, you've got to the other day. My philosophy is sort of like if you try too hard to make your ideas palatable, then you're at risk of corrupting the ideas themselves. And so you have to have some faith in that that the times will change to catch up with the ideas.
