Robert Urbanek
Platinum Member
A newer, easier to produce form of meth is turning users into homeless zombies, according to the article “The New Meth” in the November 2021 issue of The Atlantic magazine.
Remarkably, meth rarely comes up in city discussions on homelessness, or in newspaper articles about it. [Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig] Mitchell called it “the elephant in the room”—nobody wants to talk about it, he said. “There’s a desire not to stigmatize the homeless as drug users.” Policy makers and advocates instead prefer to focus on L.A.’s cost of housing, which is very high but hardly relevant to people rendered psychotic and unemployable by methamphetamine.
One counselor said it took him 12 years of using ephedrine-based meth to become homeless. But those using P2P meth are homeless within a year.
The article offers no solutions other than to look more closely and sympathetically at the users, the typical response of liberals who are incapable of seeing any drug addict as responsible for their own condition.
As the new meth users are self-isolated and usually non-communicative, hollow offers of therapy and treatment will not get them off the street. Only incarceration of some form, either in jail or psychiatric institutions, will do that. A more conservative U.S. Supreme Court may be willing to undo previous decisions that let the mentally ill run free. But don’t expect any stringent measures in woke California.
Remarkably, meth rarely comes up in city discussions on homelessness, or in newspaper articles about it. [Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig] Mitchell called it “the elephant in the room”—nobody wants to talk about it, he said. “There’s a desire not to stigmatize the homeless as drug users.” Policy makers and advocates instead prefer to focus on L.A.’s cost of housing, which is very high but hardly relevant to people rendered psychotic and unemployable by methamphetamine.
One counselor said it took him 12 years of using ephedrine-based meth to become homeless. But those using P2P meth are homeless within a year.
The article offers no solutions other than to look more closely and sympathetically at the users, the typical response of liberals who are incapable of seeing any drug addict as responsible for their own condition.
As the new meth users are self-isolated and usually non-communicative, hollow offers of therapy and treatment will not get them off the street. Only incarceration of some form, either in jail or psychiatric institutions, will do that. A more conservative U.S. Supreme Court may be willing to undo previous decisions that let the mentally ill run free. But don’t expect any stringent measures in woke California.
