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the jurogan experience when did san francisco shift because i've i've been going to san francisco to do stand-ups since the 1990s and i don't know when i noticed there was always homeless people but they they were not camping like it wasn't as chaotic as like you're never gonna get away from a certain amount of mental illness correct right you're never gonna get away with certain amount of drug addicts and there's you know it's a thing with cities when did it get where it is and how what were the steps right so it you really have to go back so culturally san francisco has been very tolerant of drug use since the 19th century it had opium dems dens that it was the last to shut down of anybody in the 19th century but then you really go then the of 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 janice 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 there 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's it's so it's a cult a very libertarian culture right so it makes sense that it's it's that way but then i think you have to go to the 1990s uh with the heart which 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 we just gave them away to too many people a lot of um 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 we started restricting that around 2010
and then a lot of those people then switched to heroin and then and then meanwhile in the background really growing from the 60s but just getting more and more intensified and concentrated is meth so you have two separate epidemics meth and opioids and they both kill now we're into we're into next generation opioids from heroin which is fentanyl which is something that you've covered here a lot um 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 narcans 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 tense into the homeless community interested in 2011 i mean i remember around in oakland where i was working at the time there were all these occupy tents at the down 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's 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 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 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 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 new 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 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 and then is that what it is yeah i think that if i had to summarize it i 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 that's it's a combination of a radical left view but also combined with the libertarianism so that's what's kind of behind it i mean you i interview university 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 in a lot of cases they are but the whole thing is that nobody to to to suggest that somebody's 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 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 um you know at a point where we passed civil rights legislation 1964
you get to 1970 and this very famous book gets published called uh 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