Given that I am and intend to remain a denizen of a small rural community in Alaska, I'm still an odd one indeed to be writing about the state of America's urban areas and Democrat/leftist jurisdictions. If you've been reading my work, you know I grew up in a rural setting in Iowa and am now a happy rural dweller myself. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they smell bad. I like the clean country air of the Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up with the occasional bear in our raspberry patch, that's fine.
So, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas host much of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's less the case now. Case in point: Los Angeles, California, where the policies of Governor Gavin Newsom and California Democrats have reduced the Skid Row district to a nest of open-air drug sales and use, vagrancy, and crime.
And now, in an interesting on-site investigation by City Journal's Christopher F. Rufo and Austen Hufford, it's all due to some remarkably stupid policies described as "harm reduction."
As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly supported “harm reduction” policies, which enable drug use in the name of making it “safer.” He created the state’s Harm Reduction Initiative, which funded “syringe services programs” for “people who inject and smoke fentanyl and/or methamphetamines.” His Department of Public Health has endorsed distributing syringes, glass pipes, and “[c]ontainers for mixing injectable drugs” to drug users. Newsom argued earlier this year that harm-reduction tactics “increase the likelihood of people entering substance use treatment.”
But do California’s harm-reduction programs encourage addicts to enter treatment? We visited the Skid Row Care Campus, a homeless-services site in Los Angeles County, to witness “harm reduction” in action. We discovered that, instead of directing addicts to get clean, the taxpayer-funded program doles out free paraphernalia, enabling addicts to get high—no questions asked.
Of course they do! These things, yes, have to be examined objectively; that's how you affect policy and perhaps persuade voters, with a scrupulous examination of facts. But anyone with an ounce of intuition would already know that these policies, most notably handing out free drug paraphernalia, would only make things worse, not to mention drawing more bums and criminals to the area.
And that's just what's happening. Rufo and Hufford write:
We entered campus and found a walk-up counter, where an attendant sat before shelves of drug paraphernalia. Users come to this counter to get free needles and crack pipes, with which they can inject or smoke hard drugs.
“What can I get you?” he asked. “We have oil burners, we have spray shooters, we have socks, we have petroleum jelly.”
Across several visits, we obtained drug-testing strips, syringes, and crack pipes. One worker told us that while drug use isn’t allowed on-site, we “wouldn’t be bothered” if we got high just outside—unless we overdosed.
In other words, the plague of drug use and crime happens because the city and the state of California allow it to happen.
Read More: The Downfall of America's Cities: How LA's Transit System Became a Haven for Crime
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Skid Row may never have been one of Los Angeles' safer and more prosperous districts. It is, after all, an area whose name has become a synonym for "the bad part of town." But now, things are well and truly out of control, and the Skid Row Care Campus is at the heart of it.
"People are overdosing, people are fighting, people have lit fires. It's just mayhem, 24/7. The size and the scope of this dwarfs what I brought to your attention two years ago. This is a meth mansion," said Estela Lopez, Executive Director of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District.
"Any time you have four homicides in the same area, everybody should be alarmed. It shouldn't matter the socioeconomic status of that community. We're talking two small blocks. Four deaths in four months," added LAPD Captain Kelli Muñiz, Commanding Officer of Central Division.
A meth mansion. In a city that was once one of America's greatest. And the city and state are paying for it. Crime is being subsidized with taxpayer dollars in California, right now.
It's an unbreakable rule of governing that if you subsidize a thing, you get more of it. California is subsidizing open-air drug sales and use, and all of the associated crime and pathologies that go with that. Ordinary Californians are paying the price, in more ways than one. What Gavin Newsom, California Democrats, and the city of Los Angeles are doing here is failing, catastrophically. In their feather-headed notion of "compassion," they have turned an entire neighborhood into a crime-ridden hellscape, and it's not just crime, but litter and basic sanitation, a situation which wouldn't have been accepted in ancient Rome.
Government, any level of government, has one primary purpose: To protect the liberty and property of the citizens. In this, California has failed; the city of Los Angeles has failed; Gavin Newsom has failed; and California Democrats have, again, failed.
This fall's elections will be key for any recovery of California. If the voters of the once-Golden State put the same lunatics back in charge of the asylum, it's only a matter of time before things go well and truly out of control.
