What San Francisco is doing about homelessness that LA is not |
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What San Francisco is doing about homelessness that LA is not
San Francisco is making real progress in the fight against homelessness; Los Angeles is not. And the difference is how each city treats addiction among the homeless population.
Addicts are a crucial subset of that population. It is a brain disease, and brain diseases, as they progress, result in the loss of the ability to manage the necessities of daily life.
We are not referring to those who may experience transient homelessness, who can make use of various resources that are available for housing.
We are concerned with those for whom their brain conditions have progressed to the point that they lie down on the sidewalk, and stay there.
This is a population who throughout modern medical history was considered “gravely disabled,” and in need of medical and perhaps custodial care.
Because of the various laws that have eroded our ability to bring patients to care for psychiatric illness, “gravely disabled” essentially no longer exists as a criterion for care.
In the meantime, these individuals often remain on the street, where they are maintained in an open-air hospital, attended to by social workers or street outreach teams.
These may be wonderful people, but they have not gone to nursing or medical school and have certainly not completed a psychiatric residency.
Those providing addiction services in LA stick to a strict harm-avoidance strategy, which in many cases provides the homeless with their rigs and pipes for drug delivery, and may even provide the drugs themselves.
Worse, gangs control the drug trade on LA’s Skid Row. They also traffic the addicted women, and charge the homeless for the space on the sidewalk.
As LA taxpayers continue to pour billions into housing........