Michael Powell Pt. 2: "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs"

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, I'm looking out right now. It's there's the smoke has cleared a little bit, but we've been dealing with these terrible wildfires. And I'm rereading about the guy who apparently lit them out in Spokane was convicted of killing his father back in 2012, released from prison in 2012.

[00:00:42] And I don't really know enough about it, but it just makes me think, oh, man, it's just one more person here in Washington State not getting the help they need. Yeah, well, it sounds like I mean, I've only been I haven't been tracking it super closely. We've obviously had these huge wildfires outside of Spokane, Washington, you know, to our east and and and yeah, this guy apparently is claiming he lit 25 different fires, like including this huge, you know, fires that have burned like six or seven hundred.

[00:01:10] Structures in Spokane and environment. So yeah, yeah. And apparently the S kind of cycled through the system without much consequence. Really? Maybe. Yeah. Hard to know. Well, next up, wildfires. But on today's show, we're talking to Michael Powell again, journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic. Check out our last interview with Michael.

[00:01:35] But for this one, we're talking about his recent piece for The Atlantic called The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs, in which Seattle and some other blue cities feature prominently, including Vancouver, B.C., that we don't really talk about. But hopefully we will on this episode, even though it's not a U.S. city. Michael Powell, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's a pleasure being back. Yeah, Michael, it's great to have you back for part two here. Yes, right.

[00:02:04] So I want to start by asking you start and end with Seattle and you start in the Little Saigon neighborhood, which is something that we've talked about on this podcast. And I wanted to bring up an anecdote from my own reporting. When I was working for the local NPR station here, I interviewed a family who lived a couple blocks from that location and their daughter's school was just the other side of it.

[00:02:29] And so this kid basically had to walk by there every single day. And they were a very progressive, compassionate family. The guy I interviewed happened to be black and they've been living there for a few years.

[00:02:43] And she's walking to school and it's not just like the degradation and seeing people stooped over and seeing people using drugs that was so upsetting to them was the fact that she was actually getting harassed and followed and threatened kind of on a daily basis to the point where she was sort of living in fear of walking to her school.

[00:03:05] So eventually she decides or the family decides it makes more sense for her to commute by bus like 45 minutes across Lake Washington to another school rather than just walk the two blocks to school there in Seattle. And these are folks who just want people to get help. You know, they're kind of going, what's going on? They're calling the city and nothing happens. Nothing changes. In fact, people are just kind of blowing them off. They're not really getting much of a response. But I'm wondering, why did you start there and what did you see when you were here in Seattle?

[00:03:35] Yeah, I mean, those similar stories I heard all the time when I was in Seattle and really goes to why I wanted to write this piece because it felt like that whole. There's a lot for good reason talked about with drug addicts and and those addicted and kind of what needs to be done and how do we move this?

[00:04:00] But I think what's also lost is like that the civic contract is just torn apart, severed. And I felt like I kept seeing that in Seattle where people. Just ordinary people, well-meaning people, very often, you know, kind of working class, lower middle class.

[00:04:23] We're putting up with we're being asked to put up with things day to day and week to week that most people would never accept, including like forcing people to go to school and other places because of the dreariness of what they had to confront.

[00:04:43] And, you know, when I was out there, I had the good fortune to go out with several different kind of nonprofit groups that were doing work around this. And then I went back after once they kind of gave me the tour of the horizon. I then went back out on my own to all of the same places and spent more time. One of those certainly was Little Saigon.

[00:05:07] One was Dr. Jose Real Park, which is just a little bit south of Little Saigon. And then I went to some other areas, which I didn't mention in the piece, but further south in in Seattle. And it was just I mean, you know, look, I grew up in New York City. I'm not a I'm not a naif when it comes to this. I know that there's, you know, there's drug addiction. You see all sorts of things.

[00:05:33] But this was at a level that was truly impressive in a not great way. And I remember, in fact, there was an area park, which I'm now going to space on the name of further south from Little Saigon, but still in Seattle, where, you know, there was like 15 tents. And in the middle of the tent of the tent colony was the drug dealer. And he made no no bones about it.

[00:06:00] I mean, he he was doing business in front of us, you know, as we came by. And, you know, I saw people walking their dogs and going back and forth. And it just it's a very it was it was a sad and depressing thing to see in a city that has the resources and the ability to do something other than what it's doing.

[00:06:24] Well, let me weigh in here, first of all, by saying, Michael, kudos on your article, which went online about a week ago. And and correct me if I'm wrong, it's going to be in the September print edition of the of the of the Atlantic. Yes, thank you. Yeah. And and it's in some ways a very difficult read. Right. It's a it's a searing article about sort of a lot of it about what you're observing on the streets of some of these cities you visit, including Seattle.

[00:06:52] And and so, first of all, let me let me ask you how how did you come to decide on the cities you look at? You really talk about Seattle, Vancouver, British Columbia and Burlington, Vermont are the kind of three cities that you that you put the spotlight on and what's what you're reserving there. So why those cities? Why not Philly, Baltimore? Yeah. How did you end up kind of kind of coming to how you were going to tackle this subject?

[00:07:21] Sure. It's a good question. I mean, one of the reasons, you know, I had I knew Seattle had a serious problem. I had been out there the year before just visiting that beautiful city and area and had seen was struck by the scene at Pioneer Square and other places. But but beyond that, I guess, as I think about it, you know, Baltimore gets easily stereotyped.

[00:07:48] Right. I mean, it's a place that's had a high homicide rate forever. Thank God it's finally come down. Those are kind of cities to lesser extent Philadelphia where, you know, you kind of expect to see that. That's no doubt unfair to those cities. But I was interested in so I was interested in not going to the worst of the worst. And at the same time, I was interested in visiting different cities.

[00:08:17] So Burlington, a small city and a college town up in northern Vermont and Seattle, obviously a city that is to some extent synonymous with a certain amount of privilege. Right. I mean, in addition to left liberal politics, I mean, it's a place that is a lot of, you know, high tech and a lot just I mean, historically over the years. Many, many advantages. Not to say it doesn't have its problems.

[00:08:43] It clearly does, even aside from the drugs. I mean, as in all cities, Vancouver was in essence. I mean, I didn't actually initially approach it that way. But Vancouver is kind of the, you know, the lodestone. I mean, for all of this, I mean, it's where the very first injection centers took place.

[00:09:05] It's probably fairly portrayed as the place that what I called kind of radical harm reduction to differentiate from what had been at the start really took root. I mean, it was the first place to do an injection center where you could bring drugs, your own drugs in and shoot up. And if anything happened, there were people there who would, you know, either revive you or call the hospital.

[00:09:35] And it's really expanded from there. So if you if you're looking for a ground zero, that's a good place to start. And it struck me that there's also a kind of political lineage, political cultural lineage, say from, you know, Vancouver, a certain shared sort of ethos. Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, even down to L.A.

[00:10:01] So in a lot of respects, it just struck me as kind of a natural place to look. And and then I'll shut up everywhere. Like Burlington is looking to start an injection center. They cite Vancouver, the experience of Vancouver. If you look at any number of things that are that the public health community says in Seattle and Portland and even in San Francisco, there's been a change there we could get at.

[00:10:27] They also cite Vancouver as kind of the, you know, we should we should be doing what they're doing. So that's how I kind of arrived at those three. It's interesting because one of my colleagues, I moved here in 2004, shortly after that opens in Vancouver. And one of my colleagues, a reporter there, did a story about that, which I think ran nationally on NPR, because at the time, you know, that stuff was really innovative and people were kind of wondering how to address the war on drugs differently.

[00:10:57] But you say that the idea took root even earlier in the Netherlands. So paint a little bit of a picture about kind of where where this idea of harm reduction kind of comes from and germinates and and gets going. Sure. I mean, the 1980s, maybe even if you go back to the far enough, the very late part of the 1970s, you saw in excuse me, in the Netherlands, in Holland and in Germany, among other places.

[00:11:27] These attempts to. Well, to two things. One is to do needle exchanges. And I should say. Like, I think very history is, I think, largely, you know, demonstrated that that was a good move. That was the AIDS epidemic was happening, certainly in the 1980s. Lots of people were dying.

[00:11:50] And clearly, you did not want to have people junkies, as they called themselves, sharing needles. That was the best way, the most assured way of destruction, because they would, you know, they would get they would get AIDS. They'd give it on to someone else. And it was a real disaster.

[00:12:11] So you have the formation of what were called junkie, junkie, junkie, junkie unions in predominantly in Holland, but I say also in some of the other northern European countries. And it was born out of this desperation that were, you know, were were simply losing people. That then spread to New York.

[00:12:33] I remember 19, very early 1990s, I spent a month in a heroin shooting gallery as a reporter. And, you know, the there there were all kinds of activists at the time doing these needle exchanges and for the same born of the same desperation that we just want to stop the spread of AIDS. And to some extent it did.

[00:13:01] I mean, as I say, I think it was a an admirable and humane impulse. But at the same time, even when I was there in 91, 92, that is in New York and in Bushwick, which was then a very tough neighborhood. You would hear talk of, you know, really what we should do is go take the next step.

[00:13:22] We should, you know, decriminalize hard narcotics that is, you know, heroin, meth, coke, and let people use it under safe circumstances. And that this is, you know, this is the kind of the next step. It didn't happen in New York. It didn't happen really anywhere in the United States, but it did happen in Vancouver.

[00:13:47] Vancouver, and that's where you had the, you know, sort of the late 90s. You started to have, well, let's go to this next step. Where, you know, let's, the war on drugs is not working. You're seeing an increase in addiction and therefore also in overdoses.

[00:14:07] And so what we should do is set up safe places to use that eventually expanded from that into what they call safe supply, which is that you provide those addicted with, you know, hydromorphone, which is a dilaudid, a very powerful morphine pill. Anyway, and it kind of kept growing from there.

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[00:15:27] That's bluecitypodcast at gmail.com. And send along show ideas, guest ideas. Sandeep and I would really appreciate that as well. Okay, back to the show. Michael, obviously, the origins of harm reduction concepts in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and needle exchange, as you say, has this incredibly strong and evidence-based public health nexus.

[00:15:57] Right? It just – we were seeing this massive spread of then-fatal disease among the population of IV drug users. And by creating needle exchange, we're able to make massive improvements in public health and the spread of this terrible, terrible scourge and disease. But I want to talk a little bit about the other thing that these ideas are rooted in, which was the war on drugs itself. Right?

[00:16:24] And I think there's a widespread belief, and it would be one I share, that the really kind of punitive approaches of the war on drugs were a pretty abject failure and that we took a medical and social problem and treated it as if it was a moral and a criminal problem. And the results were disastrous and costly and fed all sorts of systemic racism and other kinds of issues.

[00:16:51] And I will say – I think I should say I was a – I show up briefly in your Atlantic piece and I talked to you about this. It doesn't show up in the story, but listeners of the podcast will know that I have an addiction history myself and I lived on the front lines of the drug war in the late 90s in Washington, D.C. And I can say from personal experience that there was no constitution on the mean streets of Southeast D.C. in that era at the height of the drug war.

[00:17:19] That if you were in that neighborhood and weren't black, the cops would assume probably correctly that you were there to buy or use drugs and they would roust you and try to arrest you. And I said before the one time I did get arrested and the cops just invented probable cause. They made up a whole thing to justify their grabbing me off the street. And so, you know, that was bad, right?

[00:17:46] I mean, those were the impulses, I think, that animated the desire to turn towards some kind of new and less punitive approach. And I think that those were rooted in some sound assumptions. But, Michael, let me ask you kind of how do you feel about how the kind of war on drugs and how it played out sort of played into the kind of origins of this new approach that we're talking about now in Seattle, Vancouver, Burlington, other places? Oh, I think – I mean, I 100 percent agree with you.

[00:18:16] I mean, I think that is part of this, you know, sense that you had with – as harm reduction expanded that, you know, we're in this kind of brilliant new day where we're moving away where there were a lot of abuses.

[00:18:32] I mean, and, you know, I think where it's also unfortunate, however, is I think that there's a lot of folk – a lot of people out there thinking about how do you reach – you know, what are ways of dealing with things like Seattle and Portland and Vancouver and so on who now see that kind of greatly expanded harm reduction

[00:19:00] as a problem, but most certainly do not want to have a return to the, you know, lock them up, throw away the key. If we can just lock up enough junkies, we'll eventually, you know, have clean streets. So it's – both are true. I think that there's no doubt – I can't imagine wanting to see a return to that old kind of, you know, war on drugs.

[00:19:27] And I certainly don't hear that from most people who are pretty trenchant critics of the greatly expanded harm reduction. They want – their argument is, look, we've made a lot of progress. There are places where perhaps a stick as well as a, you know, kind of a humane approach can work in tandem with each other.

[00:19:52] And that you can – you know, that if you send out police, say, to Little Saigon and they're working hand in glove with, you know, social workers and caseworkers who really understand how you can start to, you know, use the two, that there might be a chance for a different approach.

[00:20:12] I will say also – and this is 100% not to defend anything about the old war on drugs approach. But, I mean, there were two things that struck me when I was out in Bushwick in that shooting gallery. Number one, it was on the fourth floor of a tenement walk-up. There were all Latino families on the other.

[00:20:37] And I recall walking up one day, going up the steps, and seeing like four kids from the family down below. And they were watching us because I looked – you know, no doubt the assumption was that I was a – you know, that's where I was scoring. And I thought that's no – that's no way for a family to live, right?

[00:21:02] That's like – I mean, it's fine and I'm not arguing that what the police should have done is come in and clean everybody else. Frankly, all the heroin addicts I dealt with there were actually perfectly nice people. They were addicted. But they were – you know. But it is to say there was a real human cost for, you know, the families that lived out there, the dealers that kept the order. I mean, they were – that was like some serious stuff.

[00:21:30] You did not want to get in their way. And they lived on those blocks and they had big guns. So, you know, in fact, one of the big parks in Bushwick is named after a woman who was an activist trying to, you know, clean up the street. And the dealers put out a hit on her. So, it's – I think it's a complicated thing.

[00:21:53] And then I guess the last thing I was thinking is I was – even the lingo spoke to the ambivalence, I think, on the part of users. I mean, there were several who got arrested while I was there and then got back out because they, you know, they were slingers. They were just dealing small stuff. And they called getting arrested getting saved. You know, oh, yeah, I was saved. And I said, what? You know, well, I was arrested. Well, so what did it mean?

[00:22:23] It meant they went to Rikers. They got, you know, sort of early AIDS drugs at that time. They got three square. They got like, you know, their veins had a chance to recover. Again, none of them – just not to argue, right, for that they're all – that's the answer.

[00:22:41] It is to say, though, that that ambivalence – whenever I hear like meet an addict where he or she is, I think like actually, A, it's a pretty grim place where they're at. And we should by no means assume that all things being equal, that's where they want to remain for the rest of their life.

[00:23:02] I mentioned this before, but we have a carpenter who's done some work for us who's a super bright guy, grew up in Seattle, became a meth addict, and spent a good portion of his life in prison and basically tells the same story. He's like without prison, you know, he'd be dead by now probably and feels like there are worse things in his case. But it's not to advocate for prison obviously, but, you know, I see – I take your point.

[00:23:31] I wanted to also follow up just – you mentioned this, but not to be too narcissistic about the interview, to misuse the word narcissism actually. Seattle, you write, one of the wealthiest and best educated cities in the world. It can afford to try various strategies to address its drug epidemic and high rate of fatal overdoses.

[00:23:51] Yet many of the city's leaders, apparently supported by voters, view enforcing bans on the open sale and use of narcotics and forcing addicts off the street into treatment as akin to an act of state repression. And that's true. I mean we just had an election, right, Sandeep, last year where in some ways that was one of the dividing issues between the candidates, certainly not the only one, but one of them.

[00:24:15] And all of the progressives who take the view that you're describing more or less are the ones who won. So presumably it's either not an issue that bothers voters very much or that's the side that they're on. A little hard to say. But in any case, I – you know, I'm not somebody who grew up on the West Coast. I'm originally from Canada, moved here, mostly grew up on the East Coast. And as liberal as New York and Boston and other kinds of cities are, they aren't libertarian in the way that Seattle is on this stuff. Like they sort of never have been.

[00:24:45] So that's part of what I was kind of wondering about is how much of this is unique to cities do you think? I mean yes, these ideas were shared from city to city but it does seem like there are some outliers in terms of the approaches that they take into harm reduction. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that.

[00:25:01] Yeah, I guess I'll be humble here because I think both of you guys probably have kind of more – well, certainly have much more grounding and thoughts in what the particulars of the Northwest and its politics and culture. But certainly – look, I mean it – Seattle, I mean the entire – that necklace of cities that run south from Vancouver certainly have all of that right there.

[00:25:29] I do think there's a receptivity to that. And on other issues, sometimes that's like the strength of that part of the world, right? There's a willingness to kind of rethink things, do things differently. I mean even that kind of libertarian ethos mixed with a kind of a liberal politics can lead to interesting thinking. So I don't want to portray it as kind of the source of all evil.

[00:25:57] I do think this has greatly complicated the ability of Seattle to deal with this. And I've seen in New York – I mean we actually have New York City, which is where I was born and raised. We have two injection centers. So it's kind of an odd thing. And yet I would not – I would say that the culture is very different here around that sort of thing.

[00:26:26] I mean one of the – those two injection centers are in very poor neighborhoods. And frankly, it's kind of hellish right around those – both of those places. But there is in a sense – also New York is just so vast that it kind of swallows it up. Like when I've told a lot of friends, well, you know, we have injection centers in New York there. That is news to them. You know, there's just – it's a different ethos.

[00:26:56] But also, you know, it isn't just – I mean Seattle actually doesn't have injection centers. But it has a number of – I mean like Pioneer Square, you know, I was there one day from like 5 o'clock till 10 o'clock. And just to see it at 10 o'clock at night was just striking. I mean just hundreds and hundreds of people, you know, and using back alleys as bathrooms.

[00:27:23] I mean it was a – if you wanted a kind of vision of degradation in this in a neighborhood that is, you know, gentrifying, it was quite striking. I don't know if I answered your question, but I – you know, it – I do think there's something different about some of the West Coast cities. And we actually – you know, one of the people that you quote in your piece is Keith Humphries, right, a Stanford professor.

[00:27:52] He was one of the main, you know, nationally most prominent drug policy experts in the country who advised Obama on drug policy. Has been on our pod twice and is really a friend of the pod.

[00:28:07] And, you know, Keith has been one of the people, probably the most prominent voice in the country, kind of raising the alarm here that this sort of post-war on drugs conception of how we're going to think about harm reduction and some of these less punitive approaches do need to take into account the social consequences of addiction, right?

[00:28:33] When you say the family and the kids in the tenement building or the people in Little Saigon here in Seattle, a working-class community of immigrants and marginalized folks, a lot of Asian elders who have to live in the middle of this massive open-air drug and stolen goods market, right? You know, that they have to negotiate every time they walk out of their apartment building.

[00:29:01] That we need to like – we've lost sight of that impact, right? That the fraying of social bonds that is created when addiction is allowed to kind of reach a kind of critical mass and flourish without any kind of impediment.

[00:29:23] Yeah, I mean, that park, there's that little pocket park that was built in, you know, Little Saigon, right around the corner from the worst of the drug scene there. It's a very nice little park and a nice playground. I mean, I was there at four in the afternoon. There were 25 addicts. No parent in their right mind, and by the way, there were no parents there, would bring their kid there.

[00:29:49] I mean, it's just – it is wholly taken over by – and there were by addicts and dealers. And the only city people I saw there was one day a team came by, you know, with these little red packets that they hand out to users with, you know, tinfoil and plastic pipes.

[00:30:12] And it has – you know, it's emblazoned with the image of Martin Luther King, I guess for King County. But it felt in context a bit obscene because the people that Martin Luther King cared about – I mean, it wouldn't say not care about addicts.

[00:30:31] But certainly, I mean, you know, it's those poor and working class families for whom that playground had been built and were now just 100% shut out of. Yeah, just to really quickly just follow up, I just want to quote what Keith – you quote Keith in your article, and I thought this was a really incisive quote from him. And he said that, you know, he argues that drug policy must take into account the impact on communities.

[00:30:58] And he told me he gets dismissed as a reactionary when he brings this up. And he says their arguments, he said, quote, sound a lot more like gun rights and vaccine refusal. It's no longer about the whole population. It's just about the subset who use drugs, right? And that seems right to me. Well, it's considered kind of heretical to bring it up almost or, you know, has been.

[00:31:21] I will say at my own station for a while, you know, you would see these just very one-sided stories where they never quoted small business owners or surrounding neighborhood community members and kind of the impact that some of the stuff was having on them. And I didn't so much mind the fact that you were getting that progressive viewpoint as well, but it was just kind of only part of the story. I mean, come on.

[00:31:47] Recently at my place, a woman dressed in a zebra suit and another dude spread latex paint all over as well as other sort of human bodily fluids on people's homes and all over our cars. And I've got a really generous deductible of it's like 100 bucks. My cars are getting dealt with. It's not, you know, it's inconvenience for me. It's not like the end of the world or whatever.

[00:32:15] You know, but my neighbors have ring cameras. So they were sort of pieced together kind of what happened and who they think this person is. She lives in an RV up the street. So she has a kind of sheltered, but she would definitely be – she would definitely be kind of sheltered, excuse me, but she would be considered homeless for sure. But she clearly has – one would guess, I don't know, you know, some kind of untreated addiction possibly, mental illness possibly.

[00:32:44] I think if I polled my neighbors, they would just like her to like go to jail and not do that again to them. That's just the political reality of it. But I personally think, gosh, what if we pass the hat? I could get her some help. But that's impossible. She's not going to get help. And as far as I know, she's just still living in the RV. Like nothing has really happened at all.

[00:33:02] And so it's kind of like – it's a pretty frustrating situation for us bougie, you know, homed people, housed people and business owners kind of dealing with some of this stuff because it's not so much that like – I kind of identify with that guy I was mentioning earlier in Little Saigon. I want her to get help, whatever that means. But I just don't have any confidence that our government is doing anything in a situation like that. Like nothing is going to happen at all.

[00:33:30] And that's just – that's kind of crazy. So I don't know what my question is. Just to echo the frustration that I feel like some folks are feeling and this just happened to us. My car is still covered in latex paint. Well, to continue with the class thing, and I think that was very interesting. I often thought about that when – with this, you know, the mantra is meet people where they are, right?

[00:33:56] So these are very largely poor people, those on the street, right? Or, you know, maybe from working class families. You look at the demographic studies. I mean there's the occasional person like me who like, you know, comes in and, you know, is addicted at 24. But mainly it's – that's not the thing.

[00:34:16] And I was thinking about why is meeting – you know, why is it like so we should not talk about – first place, never use the word addict, right? They're drug users. We should never – we should not pressure people. We should not condescend to them. And to me, it actually – that feels condescending. You know, like people of my – our demographic, right?

[00:34:44] I mean, you know, middle, upper middle class people. Like there's – if you have a drug problem or an alcohol problem, I don't know. And I should say, number one, I've been down that route, but I've also had several friends over time like that. No one would say to them, well, you know what you need to do is just let me meet you where you are. You know, you need a drink. That's fine. Let me – you know, we'll help you. You need – you've got a drug, Jones.

[00:35:14] You know, okay. I get it. No. 100% no. What the effort is is to do an intervention to get that person, that loved one, into a drug treatment program. And very often with – you know, there's a hammer held up there with great pain by families saying, if you don't do that, you know, you're out of the house.

[00:35:37] So, in other words, for, if you will, the middle, upper middle class, lefty liberal, you know, it's one standard. Like you're not telling them, oh, you know what? Yeah, that's fine. You go down to Pioneer Square and, you know, do what you got to do. So, why if it's not good for us?

[00:36:02] Is it good for, you know, those dying – using and dying along 12th Street in Seattle? I guess that's something that troubles me. Yeah, right. I mean, if it's your kid and you have the means, you're going to absolutely fucking throw their ass in rehab. And, like, you know, do everything in your power to do that and to try, you know, and to try to get there up.

[00:36:28] And this goes to actually another guest we had on BCB a few months ago, Neil Gong, who's a University of California, San Diego professor, who wrote a really good book called Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics. And it's about mental illness and not about drugs and addiction per se, though there's a nexus there with addiction, but about mental illness on the streets of Los Angeles. And he says it is class-driven. There's two different systems.

[00:36:57] If you can afford to do private pay, yes, your family is going to put you into a really nice, you know, facility in Malibu, and they are going to do everything in their power to get you to a place where you can be functional in society and address your schizophrenia or whatever mental illness you have.

[00:37:18] If you're homeless and addicted on the streets of Skid Row and mentally ill in Los Angeles, he says the system is entirely different. There are interventions, but they're just about managing you so that you cause less, you know, social disruption. But there's a sort of sense that we're going to honor your autonomy and let you be mentally ill

[00:37:47] and not do these kind of more intensive, expensive interventions because that's just easier for us to do for you because you don't have the resources to pay for this stuff. And so it creates this entirely class-driven differential. But so, Michael, I think what you're getting at in this piece, we talked about the origins of the concept of harm reduction, but you're making this argument that this concept has evolved in recent decades.

[00:38:17] And it's in some sense, you call it a kind of radical version of harm reduction that has emerged that doesn't say, hey, we're going to try to connect with users where they're at so that we can get them the help that they need to actually address their addiction. It's actually become a thing that says, you know, we should be permissive and have a belief that addiction is okay.

[00:38:46] It's just one way of living your life, right? That we should not just stop stigmatizing addiction, but we should in some sense normalize it. And that's, it seems to me, where your piece says things have gone off the rails. And I have a follow-up to this, but comment on that, you know, this kind of, is that what you're talking about here? Is this kind of, yes. Yes. Yes, it is.

[00:39:13] And I think it has gone off the rails. And I think kind of to tie that back to what we were just talking about, I mean, I think it's, albeit for humane reasons, it's also, there's a condescending, an inevitable condescension there.

[00:39:30] That, like, if I can meet you where you are, however miserable being addicted is, that that's somehow, like, better for you than if I meet you and try to get you into something, something better. And that kind of, it surprises me that liberals and lefties have gotten themselves into a place of saying, well, you know, that's their business.

[00:40:00] And it's, again, I just go back to, if it was, if it's my son, if it's, you know, your brother and they're addicted, that would be, and you, you would never leave it there. Even if you didn't have a lot of money, you would just do what you could to try to get them out of there. And anyway, so I'd find that baffling. So when I talk, you know, and I, I talk to a lot of folks here in Seattle about these issues, right? I've, I've had my own experience of addiction.

[00:40:29] I'm involved in, you know, I'm on the board of a major homeless shelter, housing and behavioral health services provider that I think does incredibly good work along a kind of housing first and harm reduction model. And when I talk to kind of, kind of progressive, sort of the progressive establishment here in Seattle about these issues, one of the things that they really say is a kind of pushback. When I say to them, look, I think things have gotten a little out of whack here.

[00:40:59] Things have gotten too permissive. They say, you know, maybe, but the real problem here is a lack of funding, kind of commensurate with, to the scale of the problem. When you have rampant addiction in a place like Seattle and limited resources, you know, you know, the vast majority of people, if you could just offer them resources, if we had the treatment, if we had the interventions, the services, they would accept them.

[00:41:28] And that's really, so Sandy, why are you fixated on the 5% of people who are the most hardcore when there's 95% of people that aren't getting the help they need because we're too, you know, penny pinchy and greedy and not addressing the root causes. And so, Michael, I'm sure you've heard that argument. And how do you respond to that? Yeah, I don't, first place, I don't, I mean, let me, let me stick my head dangerously over the precipice, but I don't, I don't believe that.

[00:41:58] First place, there's a lot of money in Seattle and there's a lot of money being poured into social, you know, into social services. I'm not going to get into like, you know, should it be more? Sure. I mean, like it's, you know, Seattle's gotten itself into quite a place right now and it isn't entirely Seattle's fault, of course. But the fact is when you for 20, 30, 40, well, 30 years say like, you know, this is the paradigm.

[00:42:25] This is the paradigm and it is not, you know, it's housing first, it's this and that and the other thing. Yeah, you're going to, I mean, it, it, it empirically, I would say you could make a decent argue that it's backfired. And now you're going to have to spend some money getting people out.

[00:42:44] I don't think that that means, in fact, I'm sure it doesn't, that you have to, you know, be able to put people in the most, you know, kind of the most cushiony sort of treatment centers. Frankly, I had two very good friends of mine who went for treatment out in Staten Island, which is part of New York. And it was a city-run treatment center, nothing fancy, like very unfancy.

[00:43:13] They had wonderful experiences there and they're clean. Now, as we know, you have to be always humble with treatment, right? I mean, and, and, and, you know, it's always provisional. It's always, but the fact is, you know, that there are, there are ways of doing this. I remember years ago when I was covering this stuff for another paper in New York, I went and spent a few days in a very bare bones drug treatment center in Brooklyn. Same thing.

[00:43:42] I mean, I thought there was some kind of wonderful stuff going on there. So I don't, I guess I don't buy it that like, I mean, if, if this is, if this is rural West Virginia and you've got, you know, really poor state and a really poor town. Yeah. I think there's a, there's a, you know, there's, there's a decent argument that you've got to, you know, that we're, we've got to bring a lot of resources to bear. Seattle, New York, Burlington. No.

[00:44:10] And, and, and I think it's, and it's also not been if I, you know, out of switch cities, but like, you know, I've gone up to Burlington every year of my life basically, because I have family up there. And it wasn't that way 15 years ago. I mean, there was a political shift. There were, you know, there was a political shift.

[00:44:31] A lot of this shift that we're talking about that kind of trickles outwards from, yeah, I mean, it's in the culture, but also from Vancouver and places like that. But, um, well, Sandeep, I guess my follow-up question may be for both of you, but, um, you know, if you take that area in Little Saigon, there is permanent supportive housing right near there. Um, and I'm not, it's not clear to me that, um, most or all the folks that we see in Little Saigon are actually homeless.

[00:45:01] Many of them may well be housed, but our policy is low barrier shelter, meaning, um, you know, that's the norm now. You can be in there and use drugs. And in fact, all your roommates, all of your dorm mates or whatever are probably themselves using drugs. I'm not going to generalize, but like, there's certainly not, it's not a, it's not sober housing. Let's just put it that way. They may be dealing drugs because that's kind of how it goes, or at least the drugs are really available there.

[00:45:28] And so I think that the, the idea that like, if we get everybody housing, it just sort of solves the problem. It's like, well, what problem are you talking about? It's great that they're housed, man. I mean, folks should not have to be living on the street. That sucks. They're getting physical care. They're less likely to be ending up in the emergency room as a result of that. I mean, all of that is great. It's also, I mean, super expensive. So only a fraction of people who are homeless are actually getting that kind of housing.

[00:45:54] Now we're saying, well, what if we also on top of that got everyone, what are we currently housing? Maybe 10% of people who are homeless in Seattle, something like that. And we're also not getting tons and tons of people, the treatment that they need. Add that cost on top of it. But I think it's more than the city's annual operating budget, like times two probably, just for one year. I don't even know what it would cost. It's incredibly expensive. So I tend to think that unfortunately a lot of folks on my side, which I consider myself pretty progressive,

[00:46:24] I want there to be more money going into treatment and housing and higher taxes. But we're not very good at math sometimes. We act like, you know, there's just an unlimited amount of money for this stuff. I don't think there is. And we're not being honest about the policy side of it, which is people who live in low barrier shelter who are addicted to drugs have to get their money for the drugs somewhere unless we give them drugs. So they're stealing to get the money for that.

[00:46:48] And they're the ones that are out there on the street, some of whom are like harassing that family's daughter on her way to school. I mean, that's just what's happening. So if we don't have any enforcement along with this harm reduction policy, like, sorry, it's not going to work no matter what. Even if we do come up with that astronomical sum, which honestly, yeah, let's get closer to that. It ain't going to solve the problem, right? Like I just don't see how it solves the society's problem.

[00:47:13] Even if you are committing multiple crimes and putting latex paint on David Hyde's cars like every week or whatever, nothing's going to happen. You seem obsessed, David. Obsessed with that. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Bushy David Hyde's car. But anyway. Anyway, that's my rant. Let me jump in a little bit to address your rant and just on the question of – because you bring up housing folks. And so there's the ethos here around homelessness is we operate according to housing first principles, right?

[00:47:43] And I'll bring this to a question to Michael because, Michael, you quote some folks in the piece in your Seattle piece that are kind of, I would say, you know, critics, right, of the current system in Seattle and in some sense sort of dismissed. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

[00:49:10] But that's a pretty sound theory, right? Or no importance at all. I don't know. Right. No, I think there's a lot of truth there. I mean, I think that – right. I mean, I've seen this play out in New York as well. I will say that there's a difference in some parts of the East Coast from the West Coast in that there's not this – well, it's housing.

[00:49:39] But it's also that there are many nonprofit houses in New York and particularly kind of transitional housing that are abstinence. You know, they're based around abstinence and not all of them by any means. But like, you know, you ran into this problem in San Francisco literally and California had a law for the longest time that you could not offer abstinence-based housing.

[00:50:05] You know, all housing had to, you know, essentially be housing first. Low barrier. Yeah, low barrier. Low barrier. And, you know, a couple of good friends, one of them runs a terrific nonprofit north of San Francisco, does a lot of housing. And he said it's kind of crazy.

[00:50:27] He said, you know, like, A, he said we have a lot of problem with people who are tenants who are using drugs. Secondly, he said I can't even – because he's not arguing all abstinence, but he's saying, you know, it would be great to be able to do 25 percent of your housing that is abstinence-based housing. You know, treatment housing. Recovery housing, yeah. Recovery housing. That's what I was looking for.

[00:50:56] And, you know, so that – and maybe that's a little nicer and a little less crazy, and that, like, gives people that they're taking care of an incentive to get into that. But he said as it was, you know, his only – I mean, it's just kind of crazy. He said, like, if somebody was using, as was a big problem, in the lobby of the housing, he could not tell them to stop.

[00:51:23] He could not tell them that you could be disciplined, that you could be, you know, whatever. He had to call the police because the police are the only ones who can show up. And if he – if somebody is smoking fentanyl, they could arrest them. They could do whatever – you know, they can do things. And that's – so that's like what a – I mean, that's a very imperfect way of dealing with a problem.

[00:51:46] And so that's what I guess I wonder is – it's like it would be unrealistic to have 90 percent, 100 percent, you know, abstinence, you know, drug-free. But also maybe 100 percent is a bit of a problem. Let me just also say, just to be clear about my rant earlier, I'm not arguing against housing first at all. And I'm not arguing for all abstinence-only housing.

[00:52:14] What you all are proposing makes a lot of sense to me. What I'm saying is without any enforcement when people have behavioral problems on top of that, right? Like when people are repeatedly breaking the law, they need to have consequences for their own sake and for society's sake is basically my argument. And that the harm reduction philosophy that says you don't really need that piece of it, insofar as it says that, I think it's mistaken.

[00:52:42] Now, I'm not sure that it does say that always. I think you can be a harm reductionist who believes in some role for law enforcement. Right. I mean I tell people, I've said, you know, that if Seattle's permissive policies were in place in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s as opposed to the kind of height of war on drugs policies that were in place then, I'm not sure I would have survived my heroin addiction, right?

[00:53:10] I don't know that I would have ever stopped if you made it that easy for me to keep using. And in fact, we can look at some very recent examples, both Oregon and British Columbia, fully decriminalized, you know, legally decriminalized use of hard drugs, right? Oregon in 2020. And both of them, both of those jurisdictions, we de facto did it in Seattle.

[00:53:38] The King County prosecutor announced he would not prosecute possession of drugs starting in 2018. So we did de facto. We barely prosecute drug use here, but we still, there are drug laws on the books. They fully decriminalized and it was a disaster.

[00:53:55] You know, they both, both B.C. and Portland and Oregon backed away from those policies relatively quickly after there was an explosion of, you know, fentanyl arrived. There was this explosion of overdoses, all sorts of bad things happened on the streets of their cities. And they said that, you know, there may have been progressives who wanted it, who said, well, we just need to kind of fix how we're doing treatment and stuff like that. But the public was not having it, right?

[00:54:23] The public said no, and they backed away from those policies. So I do think there's got to be some kind of middle ground here where we're not just criminalizing and demonizing addiction, but we're also not having this laissez-faire attitude that leads to all of these negative consequences that there is some more proactive interventions, right? Whether it happens under the banner of housing first and harm reduction or not.

[00:54:52] Sorry, that's my editorial comment. Yeah, I mean, look, in British Columbia had started with one injection center. They now, I believe, have over 30 injection centers. And they're, you know, until, I mean, there's been a little bit of improvement, thank God, in the last year or so. But their overdose deaths kept going up.

[00:55:18] So I don't know, like, okay, what's working? Show me what's working in this puzzle. Michael, that article came out pretty recently. And Sandeep and I were both curious. What kind of response have you gotten so far? Largely very favorable.

[00:55:40] But, I mean, look, I'm always aware, you know, that there are no doubt, you know, people who, you know, curse the article and curse my name. I mean, it's just, it's not. But I think that what's been interesting is that a lot of, there's been a lot of interest like this in like, okay, you know, not war on crime people. I mean, it's not Fox television.

[00:56:06] But this, like, there's a real sense that something's broken here and it's not working for those addicted. And it's certainly not working for the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of this, whether it's in Seattle or Burlington. And actually Burlington, not by any means entirely because of the article.

[00:56:30] But, I mean, they're the Democrats who are seen as the, you know, the conservatives in a very liberal city. But they've bought, you know, they've put forward a series of proposals in the last week, really, to deal with this problem.

[00:56:50] And you have very liberal store owners and business owners who have started to just say, this is, you know, this is untenable. You know, I'm losing a million. I mean, literally, like one ski shop was losing over a million dollars a year in, you know, stuff that was shoplifted.

[00:57:12] And so you have, you know, again, to pick Burlington, you had, like, their greatest long-time youth center. Very liberal people, as the kind of people would be who run youth centers, have been very outspoken. Just say, this is broken. You know, my kids are scared. The kids, that is, who use the center. And I've got to go looking for needles every morning. And this is just not, again, not tenable.

[00:57:42] I've been hearing that a lot. And I think that that's, you know, I hate being in the position to say, well, this is what you should do. But rather, like, there's, man, there's a debate that needs to happen. Because what's clear in a lot of these places is that the status quo ain't working. And no one I've heard from says they want a return to the old war on drugs.

[00:58:07] I mean, that almost feels like a too easy straw man, you know, to say, well, what do you want us to do, lock them all? No, no one is, or I shouldn't say no one. But very few people are arguing that. Yeah, I will just say, just in the week plus since your article came out, I've heard a lot of people here in Seattle, in my world, sort of sending it around and, you know, approvingly and saying,

[00:58:30] this is right on, you know, there's been a lot of chatter about your piece here in kind of the politically engaged sort of world of Seattle. But, but, this is the big but here. I have not heard a single elected official or somebody involved directly in, you know, the current system. Raise your article at all, right?

[00:58:53] I, you know, there's a certain imperviousness in our political structure here and an unwillingness to kind of confront some of the challenges that you present in that piece.

[00:59:12] Like, it just seems like there's not an interest in engaging in that conversation or acknowledging the kind of tradeoffs that Seattle has apparently committed itself to make. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they're not going to be doing a ticker tape parade for you in Seattle anytime soon. God damn.

[00:59:42] Michael, we're at time. Thank you so much for coming on. As I said again, it's – I find this to be a must-read article. It's certainly in my world creating a lot of conversation, if not action. And we'll link it, of course, in the show notes. But thank you again for coming on and talking about this piece. I know you put months and months of work into it since you interviewed me back in like, I don't know, it was March or something like that when we talked.

[01:00:09] So you've obviously been working on this for quite a while and it turned out to be worth the wait. So thank you again. Well, thank you. I've learned a lot from this show, so I really appreciate it. And I'm a fan of your show, even when I'm not on it. We love that. Yeah. Thanks, Michael. Thanks for coming on. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik.

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