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What you're witnessing out here on LA's Skid Row.

It's horrifying.

A woman deathly ill, drugged out on fentanyl.

A nearly comatose skeleton trying to survive on the street.

An all too common occurrence here in Los Angeles with a homeless population.

I was unnerved.

The person I'm interviewing was not.

He's seen this all before.

Well, she.

She needs some water.

On that.

One.

She needs something.

You can't leave her like that.

Withdrawal must make.

She's in fentanyl withdrawal.

You.

She needs an ambulance.

Well.

What's going on here?

She's in withdrawal from fentanyl, and the withdrawals are absolutely debilitating.

And so she's lying there on the floor.

She's thirsty.

She wants water.

Can you two.

Can you have your office bring some.

Water for.

Her, please?

Now you got water, but she would do well.

We'll get her.

We'll get water, right?

But the ambulance is going to come.

And hopefully what they'll do is, they can get her on some methadone or some oxygen to help level her out.

But if she returns right back here to the street, she's going to go right back to using again.

That's the problem.

She needs she needs some medical help right now.

Yeah.

And she not only needs medical help, she needs intervention or.

Is that nine.

One one?

Yes.

I'm on the phone now.

Okay.

They're going to send someone.

Can someone get her some water?

How about some?

Thank you so much.

Look, this is the tragedy of addiction.

When I was on the street.

You get to a certain point, and you're so deep into your addiction that it's no longer about getting high anymore.

It's about not getting dope sick.

And that's what she is right now.

She's in withdrawal from fentanyl, and it's the worst possible feeling.

I feel bad talking to you about this right now because I want to help her.

And so we done what we can.

We'll bring in the water we call 911 to try to help her out.

And hopefully the.

What else can we do for her while we're here right now?

Is that the the 911 the ambulance?

That's pretty much unless you want to go buy her some fentanyl and give it to her, because that's what she actually needs.

That's what her body is craving for.

And that is not going to solve a problem.

It's a short term fix and that she'll stop being in withdrawal, but she'll be right back into the situation again.

And two hours later she'll be in which all again, because you have to use fentanyl so frequently.

So what the paramedics should be doing if they take her to the hospital and they'll get her on buprenorphine or Suboxone to stop the withdrawals that will help.

But then they're going to release her from the hospital, and she's going to be released right back out here to the street where she's going to continue to use because they don't have enough shelter beds, they don't have enough treatment.

There's no modicum to force her into drug treatment, which is what she really needs to get clean and get out of the situation.

Instead, everything's harm reduction and everything is just you can think harm reduction is.

And the ACLU, I'm sorry to say it, I look, I'm a Democrat.

I feel bad to say it, but it's true.

The whole argument around body autonomy is not realistic.

We have an obligation as a community to intervene in these situations beyond just calling 911, which again, is a short term fix because there's nowhere for her to go.

And so we just get stuck in this perpetual cycle of this poor woman cycling in and out of addiction and in and out of homelessness, because the city, state, our country refuses to change policy, invest in recovery and treatment for people, and make the tough political decisions that are required to intervene upon someone like that.

Is there a possible solution to this drug crisis?

A solution for this woman strung out on fentanyl, a crisis plaguing thousands of L.A. homeless.

An epidemic destroying tens of thousands of lives in Los Angeles, the Bay area, Seattle, Portland and beyond.

Well, first you have to, like, stop with the promise of harm reduction policies that help get us into this mess.

The argument from harm reduction, folks, is that we're keeping people alive.

But to what end?

That technically, she's alive.

You think that that's a good quality of life for that person?

How does Tom Wolf know exactly what's going on out here on these streets?

How does he know what's going on with this homeless woman?

Well, her tragic story begins with his tragic story.

About ten years ago, Tom had surgery and got hooked on pain pills.

He was married, had two kids, was a child support officer, a Bay area government employee.

Making a good living.

Had a great life.

However, Tom began purchasing oxycodone on the street to support his habit.

After surgery, he spent $100,000 on pills over the next year.

Stop paying the mortgage, hit all the debt from his wife, and then Tom switched to heroin.

He became an IV drug user, lost his job, was unemployed.

His wife gave him an ultimatum.

Get treatment or get out of the house.

Tom chose to leave the house, abandon his family, keep using drugs.

Eventually, Tom was homeless, with nothing to his name.

Now surviving on the streets, he committed crimes to maintain his addiction.

Got arrested six times in three months for being a drug mule.

Tom was the worst of the worst.

A criminal, a drug addict who worked for the drug dealers.

So Tom just doesn't talk the talk these days.

He walks the walk.

Today, a decade later, miraculously, he is now a nationally recognized recovery expert.

He says the current homeless policies are what's destabilizing and destroying every West Coast city.

Policy should be that we build out a what they call a continuum of care.

It starts with stabilization, then goes to detox and residential treatment, transitional housing with job training, and then fully independent living.

She would benefit from going to a stabilization center or hospital to determine her medical needs, and then from there, not being given the choice, being put into detox with methadone or buprenorphine and possibly a locked facility for a period of time.

So we're not just talking about keeping people alive.

We're talking about changing people's lives.

And you do that with recovery and treatment.

And so we as a community, as a state, as a city, L.A needs to fund drug treatment and then change their policies on actually mandating people into treatment.

It's what's destabilizing all of these cities.

It's that you've got thousands upon thousands of people like this out on the street.

It not only creates blight, it's not only bad for them and unhealthy for them, but it puts a strain on our on our systems.

Right.

How many ambulance calls do they take a day to respond to someone who's in withdrawal or somebody who's drug, who's overdosed, or somebody in a meth induced psychosis?

It's not a sustainable model.

We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on him.

And look, the bottom line is that drugs aren't free.

People forget that.

And the government certainly isn't going to get into the business of giving drugs away.

They tried that in the 90s with the OxyContin problem with overprescribing.

That didn't work out so good.

So what we need to do is get this person off of drugs and get them help.

I know that this is difficult.

It's a difficult problem to solve.

But building $1 million per unit housing units where people can use drugs inside is not going to solve her problem.

It's going to solve her problem.

Is treatment and recovery.

Getting her off of the drugs.

And people say, oh, you know, she has to be willing to do that.

Baloney.

I was given a choice to either sit in jail or go to treatment.

And I chose treatment, and it changed my life.

That works for a lot of people.

For the record, I've been repeatedly emailing the office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for the last few years to talk with her about this homeless crisis.

No reply.

They refused to speak with me, let alone answer my many emails or phone messages.

Mayor bass claims the homeless problem out here is getting better.

Where how I get there are various programs like the mayor's inside safe.

Kudos for that.

And to be fair, the mayor and county officials are taking some some homeless folks off the streets.

However, let's just be honest here the L.A. homeless crisis is the worst it's ever been.

For every homeless person, every homeless person the city and county find shelter for or services for so many more.

Make their way out to all of these streets out here.

So many of these homeless get imprisoned with the drugs, with the fentanyl.

So something is very wrong with homeless policy here in LA and throughout the state of California and the city and county and the state of California, just keep repeating the same failed policies and even a few homeless encampments are taken apart and new ones are out here days or weeks later, as I said.

So how are things getting better?

Can someone explain?

Housing first is not the answer.

People are not only promoting, they've been, absolute, adamant that that is the only way to go.

A very expensive, slow to develop failed, model.

For years, Reverend Andy Bales was a familiar name in Los Angeles.

Reverend bales led LA's union rescue mission.

He was hailed a hero among the homeless population, a hero from some Los Angeles city and county leaders.

And he also served as a commissioner of Lahsa, the Los Angeles Housing Services Authority.

Los is a city county partnership.

The same agency that claimed in 2020 for the L.A. homeless crisis was improving, even though no L.A. resident, no L.A. business owner, no homeless expert we interviewed believe that.

And even though these Los Angeles streets tell a completely different story with tens of thousands of homeless people out here living on 50 square blocks of cement, that is LA's Skid Row, Reverend bales hero status kind of changed over the years as he began speaking out about the neglect and lack of responsibility and accountability on the part of the L.A. city and county leaders where homelessness was concerned.

Well, I can tell you, cartels dumped very inexpensive meth on Skid row, destroyed so many minds with that.

And I guess they didn't make enough profits.

So it hired a genius.

I called him the brain, and he added fentanyl to the.

And now on Skid Row, we have a deadly meth fentanyl mixture.

Six prices.

Human beings die every day because we have believed in a housing first free flow of drugs.

Let the gangs rule.

Hands off approach.

So how do you attack this fentanyl drug crisis in the homeless population here?

How do you fight back against this?

Well, you don't cooperate with with the drug cartels every every time the county or city hands out a crack pipe to help somebody continue in their addiction, they're enabling that person to destroy themselves, to destroy their lives, and they are subsidizing the cartels profits, and they need to be called out for it.

You cannot be an enabler.

Easy to say, obviously.

How do you stop the homeless folks out here from doing drugs?

They're addicted.

They'll have massive withdrawal.

They have serious psychosis, schizophrenia and mental health issues.

And it's their fix.

It's their habit.

Yeah, but the answer is not letting them suffer more, add more trauma to their lives, live in a living hell like environment with no hope.

The answer is to reach out and have an immediate, open bed for anybody who seeks to come in under a roof and begin a journey back to recovery, sobriety and productivity.

And we in LA have never offered that.

And we continue, down the road of putting, putting all the all the permanent supportive housing in one area.

Experts will tell you if you put everybody that needs help, mental help or addiction help or trauma recovery help, if you put all of those folks in one area, you've just destroyed that area.

This needs to be a healthy neighborhood, not a neighborhood of only troubled people.

And yet they continue to build towers, even of housing first apartments where there's a free flow of drugs.

Possibly Reverend Bales care too much.

He lost both his legs, the victim of too much compassion for the homeless.

If there can be such a thing as too much empathy.

I've.

I've stopped pipe fights.

I've.

I've stopped sometimes.

I spent the night on the streets.

I've stopped one night, five, five rapes men, attacking women.

That's.

That's normal.

On skid row.

I lost my legs because I had a wound that was almost healed.

And I was wearing a wound boot.

And I delivered 2000 bottles of cold water on a very hot day on Skid row.

And I came in contact with human waste.

And I have lost my two legs.

But we haven't done enough.

We're not doing enough.

You lost your legs trying to help others?

Yes.

Yeah.

And that's okay with me if something good comes of it.

But what has to happen?

What has to happen in L.A. To get people to actually do something about it?

When it got to a point where the city really had no kind of proactive plan to address homelessness, it was just reacting to lawsuit after lawsuit.

Elizabeth Mitchell is chief legal counsel for the organization LA Alliance for Human Rights.

Elizabeth and the Alliance have repeatedly sued the city and county, in part over their failure to comprehensively deal with the homeless crisis and for not honoring various settlement agreements to take homeless folks off the streets, a crisis that has now taken over the streets everywhere, from Skid Row in downtown L.A. to West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, the South Bay and beyond.

Elizabeth agrees that the fentanyl and drug crisis is overtaking the homeless population, and this must be a priority.

However, she also says that as the city and county of L.A. contribute to the homeless crisis, all this must change is unbelievable.

The number of government officials that have been indicted or investigated in the last several years really is shocking.

And you have that.

You have, homelessness.

You have really these two major crises, and people have lost faith in their institutions, and rightfully so.

I mean, we've had audits that have come out recently of, lahsa of the county of the city.

We're expecting a major one of this lawsuit.

And what it's seeing is massive financial mismanagement, potentially even theft.

It's shocking.

I mean, you're looking at like, sidewalk.

That didn't even look like this a few months ago.

Honestly, it's actually getting worse in Skid Row, which I didn't know was possible.

I mean, people that are living in extreme poverty in the name of compassion, to just let people die here is absolutely shocking.

Elizabeth says that while the city and county's mismanagement of the homeless crisis is egregious, what's worse these days is the drug crisis that's now permeating most of LA's homeless population.

90% of the people here are addicted to drugs.

It is such a major problem.

You have fires.

You I mean, you literally.

I'm looking right now at a remains of a fire here, remains of a fire here.

And I saw another one right over there, all lit by people who were likely on drugs.

I mean, people say they're warming themselves, which sometimes is true, but not in the middle of the street.

Right.

Oftentimes there is a link between meth use and setting fires.

Recently we saw huge fires and massive devastation in Los Angeles, and people are frustrated at the inept response of our government.

You layer that crisis on top of the homelessness crisis.

I mean, people here are already at the bottom of the totem pole.

How much worse is it going to get and to have people out on the streets where it is unsafe and unhealthy?

They're either lighting fires to cook things to keep themselves warm, or often because they're just on drugs.

And you're letting that to sit in a place where we just had massive devastation.

I mean, what a terrible idea.

Why why are people on the streets in the first place, right?

Nobody should be allowed to or have to live on the streets of Los Angeles.

And one of the wealthiest cities in our nation.

It is unbelievable.

Why has the city and county failed so miserably in trying to fix this homeless pandemic?

I say pandemic.

I could give you reason after reason.

I think so much of it is sort of political correctness.

And there's this concept that we don't want to criminalize homelessness.

Right?

But nobody is criminalizing poverty.

A criminalized homelessness.

It is criminalizing the criminals.

Right?

You have a vicious population who is preying on the weakest of us here, and we're letting that happen.

Nobody's addressing that issue, right?

Nobody is taking people off of the street to to address their underlying, like narcotic behaviors, their addictions.

Right.

The mental illness.

We're just letting people stay here, letting people die and suffer in the name of compassion.

And it's just talk track that has to end.

Certainly there are people who have become homeless because for because they have lost, a job, because they have lost their rent, because of some significant medical bills.

That definitely exists.

But you stay on these streets for more than a couple of weeks.

You're likely turning to narcotics to deal with the trauma of that.

You have this permissive policies that are letting it happen.

You certainly have a massive drug and gang culture here, particularly in Skid Row, where we have right gangs actually make truces.

It's the only place in the world where what do they say red and blue makes green here in Skid Row, right, where gangs actually have truces and they divvy up the blocks.

Right.

There's so much gang and narcotics activity and we're letting it happen.

And as I said, in the name of compassion, because of these permissive policies, it has got to change.

Their even more tense than the last time you were here.

And part of that, a lot of it has to do with with fentanyl.

We have a whole new population of individuals that are arrived in our area.

Los Angeles businessman Sergio Marino says the fentanyl and drugs that are flooding these streets are bringing more homeless people here every month.

Sergio owns this check cashing store on Skid Row.

This was not today.

Skid row.

40 years ago when Sergio's father, an immigrant from Mexico, purchased a property and business in 1983.

Now, some four decades later, Sergio says, this seventh Street downtown neighborhood is a third world country.

Fentanyl and other drugs are so readily available, enforcement is practically nonexistent.

And on top of that, we're also ground zero for the harm reduction, unfortunately, and for those of you that don't know what the harm reduction is, we have a vehicle that's funded, it belongs to a nonprofit that's funded by L.A. County.

And they go around passing out drug paraphernalia.

A lot of us, a lot of people with common sense would say, wait, you're you're enabling their drug usage.

Basically, I see it as you're going to end up allowing these people to even die more quickly.

I see the same individuals on the street, constant cycle, constant cycle, and eventually they end up passing away.

We just had a fellow who, camped out there, older gentleman, senior citizen.

This one morning, he was alive at midnight.

We just died in the according to the coroner showed up.

It was an overdose.

I know you told me, when we were interviewing you a few months ago.

You see death out here every day.

Death is normal out here.

A few years ago, we had an average of three people die on the on the sidewalks here.

Now it's up to six, six, six.

Human beings each and every day are are dying.

And most of them, you know, obviously, there's violence, drugs, but the fentanyl is just, I think, added that extra, to exponentially increase.

I mean, you're doubling from 3 to 6.

It's like, wow, it's so readily available.

It's a pharmacy out here.

And they mix it with other drugs.

And so people build up their tolerance and build up their tolerance, and, and it's it's a vicious cycle.

And we see it and we see ODS every day.

Estella Lopez is the executive director of the Los Angeles Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District.

Estella and the Bid provide advocacy and services for business and property owners like Sergio Moreno.

Today, the Bid advocates for this 64 block area of about 600 businesses that Estella says are invisible to city and county leaders.

Estella's heart breaks with all the suffering out here, and she says something must be done both for the homeless as well as for the sustainability of Los Angeles and its residents and business owners.

For years, Estella has witnessed the horrific tragedy of the homeless crisis out here, what she also insists is getting worse each month with, in her words, the city and county doing everything wrong to try and fix this disaster.

On a daily basis.

We see people having, that not just the fentanyl itself and the effects of the high, but then the overdose and people rushing to help them with Narcan or calling 901.

And we know that it's here and we know that it's deadly.

It's it's not it's not shielded from view.

It's it's on the public right of way.

It's in the public view.

But, you know, in my position, there's a profound sense of helplessness because I can we can as a community, shout it from the rafters.

But the authorities know and the elected officials know we're not telling them something they don't know.

But then there's no answer.

There's no response.

It's like the cavalry isn't coming.

People being on the street, how whatever the reason, how they got their down on their luck, lost a job, domestic violence.

There are a lot of roads that lead people to get to the street, but once they're here, if they already don't have an addiction problem, oh, they'll get one very quickly.

So we now have how many billions of dollars coming from the feds, from the state and the county and the city.

And yet over the last decade, when those funds have been greater than ever and work where voters have taxed themselves to add even more funding during the last decade, the number of people on the street hasn't declined as a result of that funding, it has exploded.

So if you're a fentanyl dealer, a meth dealer, if you make your living by keeping making people addicted and keeping them there, you've just hit the goldmine because the target rich population for narcotics, all types of substances, is living freely on the sidewalks of Los Angeles with no guardrails, no rules.

It is an accepted part of Los Angeles.

Now, to call it a 24 over seven drug bazaar is exactly what it is, because even when night falls here, we have had a lot of our members share videos with us of what goes on here at night.

And for those who believe that narcotics is a, I don't know, somewhat victimless crime, I mean, if a person's addicted and that's where they're at and that's what they need in order to do well.

But the criminality that springs up around it, first of all, folks who are addicted become victims not just of their own addiction, but of those who keep them addicted.

They have to turn to criminality in order to support their habit.

You can either go to treatment or you can keep studying in jail.

And so I opted to go to treatment, and the next day my brother bailed me out, dropped me off at the Salvation Army in San Francisco, which was a six month residential treatment program.

And I started my journey in recovery.

And six and a half years later, now I'm clean and sober.

This was nothing less than a miracle, in my humble opinion.

How did that miracle happened?

How do you go from the worst of the worse?

Living in the gutter?

Let's be honest to being one of the most renowned recovery advocates in the United States.

Well, first of all, you have to have something to live for.

And so I have a wife and kids.

I had something to live for, but more importantly, I valued my own life and that I didn't want to be that person.

My life wasn't over at 48, and as my head cleared from all the drugs, I started to realize that.

But there's more in my life.

And going back to the street and using drugs, I'm never going to find out what that is.

So I decided to give recovery an honest try.

There is no city that leaves people on the street like L.A. there's no county that leaves people on the streets 50,000.

That's that's maybe five, ten times more than any other city.

I am absolutely broken hearted and frustrated, sad.

And most I'm disappointed that I really thought we could turn things around if everybody worked together.

And so I, I'm.

I'm, disappointed, even in myself, for not doing a better job.

Reverend Andy Bales is a hero, that's for certain.

No blame there.

I'm going to continue to contact Mayor Bass's office, the state of California, to try and get some answers.

I hope to eventually get an interview.

Thank you to all the folks that have helped us for this special homeless report.

We're going to have more on our series later this year.

Thanks for joining us.