“When asked how many of the people he met in [LA’s homeless] encampments had lost housing due to high rents, [social worker] Eric could not remember one. Meth was the reason they were there… Some were addicted to crack or heroin… But what Eric most encountered was crystal meth” 
“Remarkably, Eric noticed, meth rarely came up in [L.A.] city discussions on homelessness… Policymakers & advocates instead preferred to focus on L.A.’s cost of housing, which was very high, but hardly relevant to people rendered schizophrenic & unhousable by methamphetamine.”
“For many progressives it is taboo to suggest people are on the street for any reason other than poverty. ‘Journalists need to not frame this problem as people with meth addiction,’ Housing First advocate Margot Kushel said to me, sternly, at the end of our call.”
“In 2014, as the flows of new meth were beginning, Californians passed Proposition 47. Rather than expanding the ways felony drug-possession arrests could be used as leverage by judges to push people into treatment, Prop 47 made those charges misdemeanors...
“Cops stopped making those arrests. Those arrested refused treatment & judges had no leverage to force them into it. So they remained on the street and fewer addicts went to treatment, just as street drugs they used became more prevalent, addictive, and brain damaging than ever”
The author of “The Least Of Us,” @samquinones7 , came to the exact same conclusions about homelessness as I did. His book came out two weeks after mine. He and I have never spoken or met.
/End
/End
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