Progressive/nonprofit model of treating homelessness and addiction is “mistreatment of the foulest sort” say critics

A mere 40 miles to the north, in the Tenderloin district of SF, city leaders, in their vast wisdom, have to decided to enable an unfettered and unregulated drug market. The market's main customers are, sadly enough, deeply afflicted homeless individuals with severe mental health and pre-existing addiction concerns. Independent gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberg is appalled, in the Spectator. 

No sane psychiatrist believes that enabling and subsidizing people with schizophrenia and depression and anxiety disorders to use fentanyl and meth is good medicine. Yet that is what San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles are, in effect doing. What California does with its 100,000 unsheltered residents, most suffering mental illness or drug addiction while l living in violent, dangerous, and degrading encampments, is mistreatment of the foulest sort. 

How did we go from the nightmare of mental institutions to the nightmare of homeless encampments?

These cities, almost always run by progressive elites, played the primary role in creating the dominant neoliberal model of government contracting to fragmented and often unaccountable nonprofit service providers that have proven financially, structurally, and legally incapable of addressing the crisis. 

This article originally appeared in the Spectator. Read the whole thing here.

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