San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger

Many people in recovery from addiction say they would have died had they not been forced to accept treatment.

“I don’t recommend it as a way to get your life together,” said Vicki, “but getting indicted by the feds worked for me. I wouldn’t have done this without them. I didn’t go to treatment to get clean. I went to treatment to get out of Santa Rita [jail].”

Research finds that many addicts need mandatory treatment, and that it works nearly as well as voluntary treatment.

Researchers estimated that every dollar allocated to drug courts saves approximately $4 in spending on incarceration and health care.40

“If they [had] legalized drugs or they decriminalized everything,” said Tom, “and made it a lot easier to get fentanyl on the street when I was on the street in 2018, I would be dead, because there would have been no real compulsion for me to stop.”43

I don’t want Purdue Pharma to sell cocaine because I am for harm reduction.”

They’re kicking people to the street when their triggers and cravings will be at their highest.

“The left’s idea is that everyone who’s addicted really wants to change if we just give them the right services,”

“Even strongly dependent users seem to be able to quit without formal treatment services under the right kind of pressure,”

Many parents of addicted homeless children want mandatory treatment.

For some people there needs to be a level of ‘you need to be forced to do this.’”32 Some former addicts, and advocates for the homeless, agree.

“If you completely reject criminalization, you just end up with lots of people with addictions dying on the street.”34

On a single day in late June 1972, Agnews State Hospital released over 3,800 patients into the San Jose area, creating a “mental health ghetto.”

The “new,” post-1980 homeless had 50 percent more chronic mental illness than the old homeless.

The emptying of state mental hospitals continued at the same rate between 1959 and 1967 under a Democratic governor as it did under Reagan. By the time Reagan took office in 1967, nearly half of the patients in California’s state mental hospitals had already been released.

“The reason that it’s hard to see those costs is because they’re buried in the hospital budget, they’re buried in the police budget, they’re buried in the courts, they’re buried in ambulance budgets, so the cost of homelessness tends to be hidden,”

60 percent of all fatal shootings by police in the city since 2010 had involved people who had a mental illness or were acting erratically.

“That was all about us engaging him so that we can eventually persuade him to come in for treatment,”

“Why do we let mentally ill people live like that?” I asked. She rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask me. It’s your job to figure that out.”

San Francisco General saw its acute inpatient psychiatric beds decline from 88 in 2011 to 19 in 2013. They have not risen since.

California has a 30 percent higher rate of mentally ill people in jails, and a 91 percent higher rate of mentally ill people on the streets or in homeless shelters,

“California spends more than most places,” said Snook, “and yet it came in near the bottom while Arizona, which spends significantly less, came in near the top.

Idealism and ideology had triumphed over pragmatism and reason.

The result is that the most difficult mentally ill and addicted homeless people end up becoming the responsibility of the police and criminal justice system.

there is evidence that external reinforcements build internal strength over time.

“Civil rights lawyers,” he said, “were more interested in people’s civil rights than their lives.”

started from a civil libertarian perspective,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t want to see people die with their rights on.

if poverty, trauma, and structural racism cause addiction, why did addiction worsen over the same period that poverty, trauma, and racism declined?

Looking back now, Jabari doesn’t play the victim. He says he had no one to blame but himself. “That was my punk-ass way of justifying all I did to everybody,” he said. “Because deep down inside I was a really selfish motherfucker, man. You know what I mean? I had no rhyme or reason or remorse for nobody. It was me, me, me, you know what I mean? And if I messed anything up, I can beg that, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s going to be okay. I’ll never do it again.’ Just like a spoiled child.”45

The criminal justice system failed Jabari not because it was too hard on him but because it wasn’t hard enough.

University of Minnesota anthropologist Teresa Gowan discovered that many homeless men reject the victim identity.

Words are powerful. The word “homeless” not only makes us think of housing, it also makes us not think of mental illness, drugs, and disaffiliation. The word directs our attention to things perceived as outside of a person’s control, such as the high cost of housing, and away from things perceived as in their control, such as working, parenting, and staying sober.

The number of government agencies increased tenfold, from 1,500 in the early eighties to over 15,000 a decade later.66

“It’s common for the defendant to return to the same corner anyway, get arrested again and be sentenced by a judge to probation,”

Frankl demanded that his depressed patients find a reason for living. He would even ask them, somewhat shockingly, “Why do you not commit suicide?”

Frankl asked challenging questions to provoke individuals to take responsibility for, and gain power over, their lives.

Where Freud emphasized how we are shaped by our environments, Frankl emphasized how we can control our experience.

“Man is condemned to be free,”

The problem with this line of thinking is that people appear to behave far better when they take responsibility for their actions than when they don’t.

you do call free will an illusion, it’s a useful illusion, right?”

we should be communicating to people that they have far more freedom, not less freedom, than they realize. The more you play the victim, the more of a victim you’ll become.

Scholars call such excessive compassion “pathological altruism,” defined as “behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.”

“a transformation of victimhood from a problem to be solved into an identity in itself, and as an identity to be nurtured.”

Frankl, a victim of biology-based identity politics, attacked the notion of collective guilt after the war. “In 1946,” he said, “I lectured in the French occupation zone of Austria. I spoke against collective guilt in the presence of the commanding general of the French forces.”

Playing the victim, or what researchers call victim signaling, appears to be working better than ever.

there are more people who identify as victims today, even as actual trauma and victimization are declining.

with the so-called Dark Triad personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

“Every time I hear somebody say, ‘Well, I just want to help people,’ I want to punch them in the face,” said Vicki Westbrook. “Those are the people that are usually harming the people the most.”

some of the harshest critiques of radical harm reduction and drug decriminalization are coming from people like Tom Wolf, Vicki Westbrook, and Jabari Jackson, who suffered from and overcame trauma, addiction, and homelessness.

The politics of victimology undermines our freedom and threatens us all. “Losing faith in your own willfulness and capacity to act, you eventually lose freedom,”