Fighting the scourge of fentanyl and finding a place to put unhoused humans are among San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s top priorities. The topics dominate hizzoner's agenda for the legislature and much of his public relations efforts.
I don’t know if he grasps that these are both unwinnable ‘wars.’
A little history is in order, with the most important lesson being that punitive measures don’t work. The underlying issues associated with demand (for drugs) and supply (for housing) are never fully addressed because they involve basic questions about the nature of our social safety net/economic structure.
Just Say No to Hippies and Black Power
The nation has lived through several rebrands in labeling drug usage as dangerous to individuals and a menace to society. Our modern manifestations started with President Richard Nixon’s effort to undermine the popular movements fueling opposition to his policies.
"If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "I am not prepared to accept this alternative."
Former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman was quoted in a Harper’s Magazine story on the origins of this campaign:
“You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying.
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Over the four decades following Nixon’s declaration, the US spent more than $1 trillion on the war on drugs, and failed to produce results. There were negative consequences, including a big strain on America's criminal justice system and the proliferation of drug-related violence around the world.
The Reagan administration used drug smuggling as a cover for the escalation of global military actions and militarizing domestic policing.
With all the crackdowns on specific drugs, attacking distribution meant drug production and trafficking shifted elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up — particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.
Fentanyl started out as a consequence of a hyperactive big pharma campaign, moved on to smuggling pills via Mexico, and graduated to precursor chemicals exported from China. The simplicity of manufacturing fentanyl has enabled cartels (along with a few independent dealers) to flood the market even to the point of using the drug as a cutting agent.
In some drug markets fentanyl is already being replaced (or supplemented) with Xylazine, a non-opioid sedative, analgesic, and muscle relaxant used in veterinary medicine. Its selling point is that it produces a longer lasting high.
Most of the effort to reduce demand (even if its unintended) has involved “otherizing” drug users. When a user discovers the untruth in the (unchallenged in the media) image of addicted humans as at the bottom of the heap and not capable of functioning in society, all the other things they’ve been told about substances begin to evaporate.
There are politicians and public figures and school teachers and priests who are functioning addicts, paying bills and living up to their expected roles in society. An astounding 75% of substance abusing and dependent people simply “grow out of it.”
There are as many reasons for addiction as there are addicts. But the one cause I say is more universal than others is dissatisfaction with opportunities for fulfillment. And while many people in the scheme of things aren’t poor in a material sense, the emptiness of the soul is a form of poverty.
This is where opportunities to actually do something about drug addiction and homelessness intersect. Not having enough money should not exclusively define poverty; the reality is that it’s a condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.
Matthew Desmond, a Pulitzer Prize winning sociologist, took a deep look at poverty in the New York Times Magazine and came away with conclusions guaranteed to be unsettling.
The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets…
Desmond says a big part of eliminating poverty involves empowering workers. The Reagan era promises holding that the elimination of bloated unions was a win-win idea is just as silly as believing tax cuts for the wealthy would trickle down.
…Consider how many employers now get one over on American workers. The United States offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world. A larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to the group, nearly 23 percent of American workers labor in low-paying jobs, compared with roughly 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5 percent in Italy. Poverty wages have swollen the ranks of the American working poor, most of whom are 35 or older…
…In Tommy Orange’s novel, “There There,” a man trying to describe the problem of suicides on Native American reservations says: “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.” The poverty debate has suffered from a similar kind of myopia. For the past half-century, we’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves — posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits — when we should have been focusing on the fire. The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?
San Diego’s housing crisis is directly related to the cost of having a roof over your head. Rents are more expensive because wages for working class and poor people haven’t matched housing costs.
Even the once vaunted goal of $15 an hour isn’t enough to live here. And there is a 100% chance that homelessness will increase even with expanded housing opportunities.
This is a problem with capitalism itself. It won’t be easy to solve, given the recent example of Silicon Valley Bros brazenly begging for a bailout not long after saying student loan forgiveness was too expensive for the country.
Mayor Gloria knows how to read a room, and I don’t see him telling representatives of the XYZ corporation that they’ll have to pay at least a living wage (currently $22.61) if they want to do business in San Diego.
In order to make simply living AND having a fulfilling life possible in San Diego we’re going to have to change the room that any politician has to read when making decisions.
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This piece is a great and informative read. You connected the dots with analysis that makes me want to learn more.