More Drug Addicts

... lead to an epidemic of mentally ill homeless people in your cities.

I've had a few up-close and personal interactions with drug addicts in my life. Because of that, I've always been strongly in favor of as much of a War on Drugs as we can manage. You'll never win it, but you have to fight it as best you can because drug addiction is a one-way street to a living death. It never occurred to me what would happen if a city became infested with living dead druggies.

Here in San Diego, we have regions of the city that are festooned with tents on the sidewalk, homeless sleeping in doorways, beggars at almost all major intersections and worse. The problem has grown over the last decade. San Francisco is a horror and Los Angeles, my old home town, is unspeakably filthy and wretched. Almost all of these poor souls are addicts. Some are alcoholic, which we've always had, but I would bet that most of the increase has come from drug use.

If you've known an addict and you thought you knew the price of drugs on civilization, imagine what happens when you've got tens of thousands of them in your community. Wait, you don't need to imagine. You can visit California and see it for yourself.

We didn't have anything like this 20 years ago.