Name: The Origins of San Francisco's Homeless Problem
Uploaded: 2021-10-14T17:32:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Origins of San Francisco's Homeless Problem' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Origins of San Francisco's Homeless Problem' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-14. Transcript available.

When did San Francisco shift? Because I've been going to San Francisco to do
stand-up since the 1990s and I don't know when I noticed it. There was always
homeless people, but they were not camping. It wasn't as chaotic. You're never
going to get away from a certain amount of mental illness, correct?
You're never going to get away from a certain amount of drug addicts. It's a
thing with cities. When did it get where it is and what were the steps?
You really have to go back. Culturally, San Francisco has been very tolerant of
drug use since the 19th century. It had opium dens. It was the last to shut
down of anybody in the 19th century.
Then you really go ... Then you have the '60s and a celebration of drug culture
in the '60s. People think of it being psychedelics and marijuana, but it also
included amphetamines and heroin. I mean, you go back to Janis Joplin in the '60s.
She was doing heroin.
Do you know that that's also where the CIA did Operation Midnight Climax?
I'm not surprised.
Yeah, that's where they did their ... Where they would have brothels and they
would dose the Johns up with LSD and observe them through two-way mirrors.
I'm not surprised. Yeah. It has a very libertarian culture, right? Yeah.
So it makes sense that it's that way. But then I think you have to go to the
1990s with the movement that I was involved in, harm reduction, also had ... At
the same time, it wasn't exactly the same movement, but it was also expanded
treatment of pain through opioids.
And that's the beginning of the opioid epidemic, really begins with the liberalization
of opioids, so that we just over-prescribed opioids, right?
It's now a famous story. In the United States, we just gave them away to too
many people.
A lot of people that probably should have received an antidepressant or maybe
some medicine for ADHD or were just depressed were getting opioids, and their
doctors were encouraged to do it.
Obviously, the pharmaceutical industry encouraged it. Obama then ... We started
restricting that around 2010, and then a lot of those people then switched to
heroin.
And then, meanwhile, in the background, really growing from the '60s, but just
getting more and more intensified and concentrated as meth.
So you have two separate epidemics, meth and opioids, and they both kill.
Now we're into next-generation opioids from heroin, which is fentanyl, which is
something that you've covered here a lot.
And so that's how you get these just rising ... So you basically, on the one
hand, you get gradually increasing death toll from that 17,000 in the year 2000
to 93,000 last year.
But fentanyl also is game-changing, and so it's much easier ... Usually heroin,
it's harder to overdose.
Usually it's because of mixing with alcohol or benzodiazepines, but you get to
fentanyl, and it's much easier to just overdose directly on fentanyl.
And now the Narcan's not working as well against the fentanyl.
So that's basically it.
Now the tents ... I tried to answer this question, and there's disagreement
about it, but definitely Occupy brought a lot of tents into the homeless
community.
Ah, interesting.
In 2011.
I mean, I remember around in Oakland, where I was working at the time, there
were all these Occupy tents in front of the city center.
And the same thing in San Francisco, and then after Occupy ended, the activists,
the anarchist activists, just gave the tents to the homeless.
And, you know, it seems like a nice thing to do, right?
Like, here you have a tent to stay in.
It seems like the compassionate thing to do, but then it basically just grew
out of control.
And so we call ... You know, we euphemize it by calling it an encampment.
You know, it makes it sound like it's a happy camp.
Yeah.
But we know that, you know, women are raped in those camps.
Mentally ill people are taken advantage of.
People overdose and die.
People are killed.
When you can't make payment for your drugs, the drug dealers stab you with a
machete.
So these are really violent, dangerous, terrible places.
You get hepatitis because of all the feces.
So it just spiraled out of control.
So it's hard to pinpoint any single thing.
But I think, yeah, for sure, like, Occupy 10 years ago.
And then just a ... You know, I mean, we even see basically cities and police
becoming more liberal around public drunkenness in, like, the 70s.
And the 1980s, when homelessness really emerged, you mentioned comic relief.
I mean, comedians actually did a real disservice on this issue.
You know, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, by suggesting that
homelessness was a problem of poverty.
It was really a result of the crack epidemic, crack and alcohol.
Certainly there were economic forces involved.
But progressives have just badly misled people into thinking that this is a
problem of high rents.
Is this just because it feels good to, like, rally against the rich and to say
that we need to just be compassionate?
Is that what it is?
Yeah, I think if I had to summarize it, I quote this amazing addiction
specialist from Stanford, Keith Humphries, who calls it left libertarianism.
So it's basically this idea, and this is where the book ends up going, is that
to victims give everything and demand nothing.
You know, it's a combination of a radical left view, but also combined with a
libertarianism.
So that's what's kind of behind it.
I mean, you interview people and they just think it's immoral to demand
anything from addicts or from homeless people.
How dare you?
You know, how dare you ask them to change their behavior?
They're victims of all these terrible things.
And in a lot of cases they are.
But the whole thing is that nobody to suggest that somebody is essentially a
victim actually ends up being, I think, racist.
The idea that all black people are victims, I think, is a racist idea.
The idea that all white people are benefiting from privilege, also a racist
idea.
But that kind of racism, it's a different kind of racism than the type that we're
all used to, which was, you know, racism.
Type one was how do we justify enslaving Africans, basically?
And how do we justify prejudicial policies against, you know, people of color
mostly?
Type two comes out of guilt, you know.
And so really it starts in the 60s, you know, at a point where we passed civil
rights legislation in 1964.
You get to 1970 and this very famous book gets published called Blaming the
Victim.
And the idea is that basically any policies that demand some accountability and
taking of personal responsibility is effectively a kind of victimization.
Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.