Zombieland

LA Doesn't Have a Homeless Problem...We Have a Drug Problem. Here's How We Fix It.

On the 20th anniversary of Gavin Newsom’s 10-year plan to end homelessness in California, the homeless industrial complex is bigger than ever, especially in Los Angeles. Nearly everywhere you look: Skid Row, downtown alleys, valley underpasses, the tents and tarps of 46,000+ homeless drug addicts form a sprawling open-air asylum of fentanyl, meth, and human waste. People camp in the sewers like Demolition Man. Rats feast on discarded scraps. Overdoses spike. Fires rage from encampment trash ignited by heroin torches. Unscrupulous leaders like Karen Basura and Nithya Raman have spent billions on “housing first” experiments that fail to address the core issue, but it does enrich their NGO executive friends at obscene taxpayer expense; Basura and Raman are charging us $1M PER ROOM. One thing has become increasingly clear to LA voters: our politicians suck at fixing this. If anything, they seem to only want to make things worse. None of the other candidates for Mayor have a real solution, just the same tired, meaningless platitudes and pledges to chase more good money after bad, insisting that if we enrich more NGO’s, we can solve homelessness.

MacArthur Park is a disgraceful shell of its former self

The thing is…we actually don’t have a homeless problem. We have a drug problem. And you can’t fix a drug problem with more housing; most of the “homeless” people proactively refuse to go to a Karen Basura shelter. They choose to live on the streets, because they want to do drugs, and they’re not allowed to shoot up or drink in the shelters. As it turns out, when you make a behavior illegal somewhere, criminals take their illegal behavior somewhere else; we call that a clue (more on that later). And while not everyone on Skid Row is an addict, the overwhelming majority are, and this stubborn refusal to just call it what it is…well, it’s the end of our city as we know it.

Los Angeles looks like Zombieland

The drug zombie problem that plagues LA isn’t just a nuisance; it’s literally killing our city, like a cancer. People are eager to tell me their horror stories (it seems like everyone has one), and they are quite disturbing. Parents have to distract their kids with iPads when they drive through the city, for fear their toddler might be traumatized by the sight of adult men defecating on the street, doing skin pops, exposing themselves. Business owners are going belly-up because crackheads occupied the neighboring building, scaring away their customers, tanking their business, and leaving them holding the bag on some commercial real estate they couldn’t sell if they wanted to…and that’s if the addicts don’t burn down the building altogether, which they frequently do. 33% of all fires that LAFD responds to are caused by vagrants. 12% of all LAFD calls for service are medical responses for vagrants overdosing.

The downstream effects of this drug zombie problem are legion. 100 restaurants have closed in the last year, alone. Legendary Cole’s French dip, a historic monument and the oldest restaurant in the city of LA is now shutting down after over a century in business. They survived the Great Depression and 2 World Wars, but they couldn’t survive Karen Basura. Foot traffic has cratered because nobody wants to be around Zombieland, and many business owners simply give up. It’s a war of attrition, and we are all losing. To many, the homeless problem seems intractable, and most Angelenos have simply accepted street feces as part and parcel of living in LA. But I’m here to tell you it is fixable. We just need a leader who doesn’t have a pecuniary interest in keeping the homeless grift alive, and has the stones to just…follow the law.

The way that Karen Basura and current city leaders have chosen to address the drug problem is to facilitate more of it. Not only do they refuse to enforce any drug laws, they hand out drug paraphernalia to the addicts, at taxpayer expense. When the addicts inevitably overdose, they don’t get them treatment, they simply shove Narcan up their nose to revive them so they can overdose again and again and again.

Narcan (naloxone hydrochloride) traces its roots to the 1960s. Chemists synthesized it in 1961 as a pure opioid antagonist to counter morphine overdoses in hospitals. The FDA approved the injectable form in 1971. For decades, it was a tool for doctors and paramedics. Then the opioid flood hit. In 2015 the FDA greenlit the first needle-free nasal spray version, and by 2023 the FDA made it first over-the-counter opioid reversal drug, letting anyone grab it off pharmacy shelves. Deployment is so simple, even a caveman could do it: two sprays, one per nostril. Firefighters and cops carry it in every rig. For most opioid ODs, the patient is breathing again within minutes, with success rates up to 75-100 percent. It works even if the patient took fentanyl, heroin, or prescription pills. There are thousands of videos online, showing a miraculous Lazarus-style resurrection.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Narcan basically rips the opioids off the brain’s receptors like tearing off a Band-Aid. The junkie wakes up in full withdrawal; sweating, puking, shaking with intense pain and rage. Many come up swinging, screaming, fighting anyone in uniform. Firefighters describe it as routine chaos: one minute you’re doing CPR on a corpse; the next the “patient” is cursing you out, refusing transport, and sometimes bolting back to his plug for another hit. LAFD logs thousands of these calls a year. Paramedics get spit on, punched, and cursed while trying to save the same guy they’ll see again in 48 hours. The city’s voluminous use of Narcan has formed a grim loop; it keeps bodies alive, but it does nothing to fix the problem. It blocks the opioids for a brief time, but it takes weeks to detox and start to cure an addiction.

Enter Vivitrol…basically extended release Narcan, and it blocks the opioid receptors for an entire month. They could do as much heroin as they want, they can’t get high. The shot got FDA approval in 2006 for alcohol dependence and 2010 for preventing opioid relapse after detox. It’s a simple glute injection given once every four weeks by a doctor or nurse. Imagine if you could keep an addict clean for 30 days…how much better of a chance do they have at getting past the addiction? The only caveat is that you can’t use it until the the addict stays clean long enough to start it (7–10 days opioid-free) and shows up for the shots. So therein lies the rub…you have to figure out how to keep them in a managed detox for 2 weeks. My solution for Zombieland is simple; treat it or beat it.

The law is on our side, here. California’s Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act, which has long been used for the mentally ill, now offers us a tactful legal tool that a responsible Mayor could wield to sweep the addicts off our streets for good.

The key is the LPS Act’s “gravely disabled” standard, turbocharged by SB 43, which just took full effect in LA County on January 1. Under Welfare and Institutions Code Section 5150, a peace officer or county-designated professional can detain anyone for a 72-hour psychiatric evaluation if they are a danger to themselves, a danger to others, or gravely disabled (anyone who’s seen the fenty fold knows that these people are certainly gravely disabled). The new law explicitly folds severe substance use disorder (SUD) into the definition. If a person, because of severe addiction, cannot provide for their own food, clothing, shelter, personal safety, or necessary medical care, they qualify. This effectively describes the entire population of Skid Row. No more dancing around “mental health” loopholes. A folded over fentanyl user passed out in his own waste, unable to feed himself or avoid getting robbed (or worse), is legally “gravely disabled” and they can be put on a 72 hour hold.

So how do we make this work? Officers slap on the 5150 hold and transport him to a designated facility. For the first 72 hours he gets medical stabilization and evaluation. If doctors confirm severe SUD and grave disability, the hold extends under Section 5250 for up to 14 days of intensive treatment. If they refuse detox, a judge can sign off on a 5270 extension—another 30 days—because the law now allows repeated holds for grave disability. That’s up to 45 straight days of supervised medical detox, counseling, and stabilization behind locked doors, all without the addict’s consent. If we leave it up to their discretion, they will continue to make poor choices, do drugs, and terrorize our city. We must detain them long enough to get them clean.

Beyond that 45 day hold, if the addict remains unable to care for himself after the holds expire, the county can petition for temporary conservatorship—court-ordered guardianship that can last up to a year, renewable. Conservatorship hands authorities control over housing, treatment, and medication. Vivitrol shots? Mandated. Residential rehab? Required. The addict is removed from the street, placed in a locked facility or structured sober-living program, and kept there until he can prove he can function without becoming a ticking public health timebomb.

This isn’t fantasy. The statutes already exist. LAPD and LAFD already respond to thousands of these calls every month. As Mayor I would simply direct the Police Chief, Fire Chief, and County Health Director to treat every encampment as a grave-disability zone. Prioritize the worst offenders first—the daily overdose cases, the ones starting fires, the ones leaving needles where kids play. No new laws needed. No endless task forces. No platitudes and euphemisms. Just aggressive, statute-driven enforcement that turns the streets back into a thriving public space instead of Zombieland.

Predictably, critics will scream that this is a violation of their rights. What about the rights of the rest of LA? The taxpayers, businesses, families, the moms, and Instagram models who just want to walk their dog and get an overpriced latte in peace…they have a right to sidewalks that don’t double as open-air asylums. All Angelenos are stuck in a prison against their will, held captive by a bunch of bums. And if that language offends you, you are part of the problem. Our inability to call a spade a spade is a primary reason this problem persists. George Carlin had a famous bit about the softening of language. The concise and descriptive “shell shock” slowly morphed into “post-traumatic stress disorder”, softening the term to protect delicate sensibilities, and–in so doing–blunting our emotional connection to the problem, ultimately leading to impotence in addressing it. It mirrors our devolution from “bum” to “person experiencing homelessness”.

Everyone on the streets deserves our help and compassion; we are biblically commanded to do as the Samaritan did on the road to Jericho. But coddling does not equal compassion. If your brother-in-law were unemployed, doing drugs, and living in mom’s basement, you’d call him a BUM, and you’d tell him to get his act together, but if he’s doing drugs and crapping on the streets in front of your children, he’s suddenly the victim, and we certainly wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings! As our language softens, so, too, does our response to it. It should piss you off that a bunch of unscrupulous politicians have let drug addicts ruin your city.

Treat it or beat it! If you can’t quit the drugs, get out of LA. Without eradicating the drug problem, all that housing will do is provide a $50M multi-story shade structure for the crackheads in the alley. A mayor willing to use the LPS Act as written could shrink the tent cities faster than any housing bond ever could. Forty-five days of forced detox followed by conservatorship isn’t cruel. It’s the only realistic off-ramp for people who have proven they cannot (or will not) save themselves. They 5150’d Britney Spears for getting a damn hair cut! I think we can use it for people doing skin pops and torturing dogs on 6th Street.

One of the more obnoxious retorts from our unscrupulous politicians is to say that we are “criminalizing being homeless”. It’s not a homeless problem! The Raman types always have to mislead and misdirect in order to bully you into silence. Yes, homelessness isn’t illegal. But defecating on the street is illegal. Doing drugs in public is illegal. Exposing yourself in public is illegal. Outside my young son’s school, there was a lady who was openly scrubbing her San Fernando Valley in full view of little children. This is criminal behavior! I will direct the LAPD to enforce these laws, and put an end to these disgusting crimes that are destroying our city.

It starts with a citation. If they ignore it, we then have cause to arrest, and we wouldn’t even have to arrest a lot of them. Once you start making arrests, making it more difficult to commit crimes, they will move along elsewhere. Remember…they’re only out on the streets because they’re not allowed to do crime in the shelters. If we make crime illegal on our streets, too…they’ll shuffle on to Portland or Seattle, or back to their home states. Or, God willing, they’ll get clean. That is the outcome I want, and I will do all the hard things that are needed in order to set them up for success. The current Basura/Raman model is condemning these poor souls to failure and death.

Somebody recently messaged me to say “I was a fentanyl addict…going to jail was the best thing that ever happened to me”. In our upside-down modern world, we’ve convinced ourselves that indulging our vices is somehow virtuous. As a father of 2 boys, I know full well that indulging their every craving for pizza and cookies isn’t kind…it’s cruelty, even if the junk food gives them joy. It’s not kind to leave drug addicts in sin, and shelter them from judgment with euphemisms and taxpayer-funded rewards while they slowly rot do death. We are at a point in this city where we need daddy energy. We need a dad to come in and give some people a swift kick in the ass and say “get your shit together and get a job.” That’s actually what true compassion looks like, even if you think it’s a buzzkill. That’s what you do when you care about someone’s wellbeing. You don’t feed their addiction, give them a needle, build a high-rise, then pat yourself on the back.

Some of these folks will kick the addiction and lead productive lives. Some won’t. Some of them need a helping hand. Some of them need to go to jail. That’s how the cookie crumbles, sometimes, and it’s OK to accept that reality. It’s time for honesty, and it’s well past time for some tough love. It’s time for daddy to take the reins in LA.