Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1290: The Homeless Crisis With Dr. Drew

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Dr. Drew Pinskey about the homelessness crisis and the coronavirus.  How bad is the homeless issue in California? (3:31) What are the harms that we are seeing from this epidemic? (7:33) The call for psychiatric care for people on the streets with mental illnesses. (11:10) Busting the myth of the housing issue in California. (13:21) Has he seen any change in public policy when it comes to this issue? (16:25) Tackling the puzzle of the effect of the coronavirus on the homeless population. (18:46) How being sheltered in place may be causing more harm than good. (21:10) How can we, as citizens, help with the homeless situation today? (27:55) The Mind Pump crew expressing their frustration on the homeless crisis. (30:37) Featured Guest/People Mentioned Dr. Drew Pinsky (@drdrewpinsky)  Instagram Dr. Drew Pinsky Website Dr. Ben & Candy Carson (@realbencarson)  Instagram Related Links/Products Mentioned May Promotion: MAPS Starter ½ off! **Promo code “STARTER50” at checkout** Special Promotion: MAPS Anywhere ½ off!! **Code “WHITE50” at checkout** Special Promotion (Ends 11:59pm PST 5/11/20): NO BS 6-Pack Abs ½ off! **Promo code “NOBS50” at checkout How Prop. 47 Fueled the Homeless Epidemic California’s dangerous trifecta: AB109, Prop. 57 and Prop. 47 Anosognosia | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness Community Mental Health Act The Problems with the IMD Exclusion - AAF San Francisco gives free drugs, alcohol to homeless quarantining in hotels Why Homelessness and Mental Illness Affects Everyone The New York Times: Obesity Associated with Severe Coronavirus Disease, Especially in Young Adults Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind up, mind up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Welcome to Mind Pump. Now, we are known as a fitness podcast, but we really are a health podcast. So we like to cover topics that fit in this fear of health. Usually, that means we're talking about exercise and nutrition. But sometimes we talk about spirituality, relationships, and public policy.

Right now, now we're based out of California. And in California, in particular, we have witnessed ourselves this explosion of homelessness. I have never seen tent cities pop up in my hometown of San Jose and over the last five years, I've seen them pop up all over the place. And so what we wanted to do is we wanna do an episode where we talked to an expert on this subject that could possibly shed some light on this health epidemic

that isn't just affecting the homeless themselves, but is now starting to affect all of us. And of course, we care. We care about the people who are sick, and we care people who aren't sick who are being affected by this. So this episode is a little bit different, but again, we believe that it contributes

to the entire sphere of total health. So this is an informative episode. We interviewed Dr. Drew Pinsky. He is a doctor. He's been on media for a very, very long time. But more recently, this has become one of his missions. His mission is to change public policy to solve the homeless issue. And so in this episode, we ask him like,

how bad the problem really is, especially here in California, what are some of the potential harms this has on society? What is causing the problem? We hear a lot about affordable housing and how it's so expensive in California and why, how that may be contributing to the issue, he totally, totally disagrees and

shed some light on this problem. Now in this episode, we also asked this opinion on the current state of the coronavirus, you know, shelter in place, how it's affecting the homeless population. So if you are interested in health and general health and you want to kind of shed some light on a problem that may be affecting you and your town, we think you're going to really enjoy this interview and this episode. You can find Dr. Drew on his website drdrew.com, drdrew.com. Now I do want to let everybody know before the episode starts that you have one day left to take advantage of our core training AB workout program.

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nobs6pack.com. That's nobs, the number six, pack.com, and use the code nobs50, that's n-o-b-s-5, zero, no space for the discount. I wanted to talk to you about something that you've been more recently quite vocal about. I would consider you one of the, I think, leading experts on this particular subject, especially in the state of California, and I'm referring to the homelessness problem. Some people are saying it's a crisis of homelessness. How bad is the issue in the state of California? And how bad is this? How big of an emergency is it?

This has been a problem that's been accumulating for decades. And it has become a particular acute in California because of 47 and prop 57, which essentially legalized drug use and drug trafficking and stealing to support your drug habit. So many addicts from all over the country found their way to California. And that has swollen our ranks on the streets.

We're now we're up around, you know, we're approaching 100,000 people that are ill, primarily with mental illness and ill with medical issues that are going unattended because of their mental illness. And we're losing three people a day, dying on the streets just in Los Angeles alone. Well, I mean, with the coronavirus, you know, people were very, they sounded like huge numbers and they are, but it's certainly sort of drifted into the background with our current crisis.

You mentioned two props, and I'm not super familiar with them. How did they legalize drugs and legalize stealing to support drug habits? Well, there's a prop 57 allows you to steal, I think, up to $950 and it's strictly a misdemeanor. And when you issue a misdemeanor citation to a drug addict, they don't show up. They don't show up for anything, you know, any illegal consequence to that. They just go about their business. So law enforcement has actually stopped even setting them because it's not even worth their time. Now that has slowed down again in the coronavirus, but you could have stood in a target before the coronavirus crisis and just watched people walking out around the cash

year all day long, and they stopped fighting it because it was just no point. So this was all an attempt in California to sort of deal with our overcrowding and our prisons. So they essentially made crimes, not crimes all of a sudden. And legalizing drug use was thought to be somehow a compassionate law when in fact that's committing, that's murder. It's murder to legalize drugs because you have people with an illness that goes unchecked will die. And rather than giving them consequences and motivating them into treatment, you're letting them just run their addiction and they will die. Do you think the laws should be more like, you know, if you use drugs in your own private

residence, you hurt yourself, that's different, but if you're in public, you know, you shouldn't be able to use these drugs. Because I know here up here in the Bay Area in San Francisco, I every single time I go up there to visit my brother who lives up there, I see at least one person almost every time openly shooting drugs into their, you know, their hand or their arm or their leg, and it's right there out in the open. To me, there's no difference between out and the open and indoors. It's all going to end up in death if you don't do something about it. So, I mean, there's a bunch of things we got to do. Modifying a prop 47, prop 57 is just one of the things. I know Dr. Ben Carson, who heads up a HUD, is very interested in modifying those laws, because he understands that's one of the major contributors of drug addiction. And that is an illness, and it is fatal, and we are allowing people to die of it in the

name of what? In the name of some ideology? I mean, I've been dealing a drug addiction for 30 years. This is, this is unconscionable. But that's just one piece. There's many pieces of this that are out of whack. What are some of the, the, the, the harms that we're seeing to just society at large from this epidemic? Are we starting to see, aside from the homeless themselves hurting themselves and dying and getting sick? are we starting to see ramifications to everyone else? So drug addiction is just one piece of this puzzle. The other piece is chronic

mental illness. And in, you know, there's a whole history of how we have dismantled our system for dealing with the chronic mental ill. It goes actually back to the 1940s when a couple of do-gooding psychiatrists unelected officials, three guys over the next 30 years determined the policy of the federal government around mental illness and their sole goal, not their sole goal, their primary objective, all three of them, none of whom had ever been in a state mental hospital and worked or really had any experience with treating chronic psychiatric illness, their goal was to dismantle the state psychiatric system.

So 150 years of structured clinical psychiatric care was undone and these people that need custodial care because of their brain disorders were set out into the streets, with no plan for how they would be dealt with. There was something called the Community Mental Health Act in the 1960s that President Kenny initiated that was allegedly going to prevent mental illness and care on a community basis outpatient for these patients, but no provisions made for them, so they were all set out into the streets, the nursing homes, and the prisons, which is where they ended up. And in addition to dismantling the infrastructure, we changed the laws around how you can help people who's brains aren't working

right. It's the craziest thing of all time. Over night, we went from need for care as the criteria for how you determine whether not somebody needed psychiatric care. They needed care that they got care. We switched it overnight with the particular California through the Lanchement Petra Short Act into harm to cell for other. That's a gigantic distance, gigantic distance. So the people that are gravely disabled by their brain disorder are left out in the streets.

Or, if you have a psychiatric problem, if you have dementia, we'll then be rushing and take care of them. But if you have a psychiatric illness that's affecting your brain function, we'll then allow you to touch people. And that is one of the most disturbing qualities of these laws. Dementia's are progressive and inexorable. They go forward no matter what you do. And yes, a compassionate society goes in and takes care of people whose brains are working

right. With psychiatric illness, somehow we stand back and go, oh, we can't talk to them. They're entitled to do whatever they want. They want to live on the street. And we have thousands of family that go up to Sacramento on a regular basis and beg for help. They have resources, they have doctors, they have a place for their son or daughter to stay, but they can't bring them in because of the psychiatric illness. They can't touch them, they can't use law enforcement, and they're essentially every time told to take a hike. It's disgusting.

And the psychiatric illness is the trajectory of those illnesses can be changed if you intervene Unlike dementia, which even when you intervene just keeps going Psychiatric illness the the entire course can be changed if you intervene early and often But we are allowing an entire generation to deteriorate on the streets No other country does this. It's bizarre. We have to take care of sick people. Now, Dr. Drew, do we know how many are what percentage

of the people that are on the street that actually are suffering from chronic mental illness? It's hard to get between drug addiction and mental illness. If you combine them, you get about 70 or 80%. But what other 20% are people that are essentially transiently homeless and the average duration on the street for that population is about three months. And those people use the resources.

They're happy to use resources that are available to them. They're a cumbersome, they're difficult, we don't do a great job with it, but they use them and they get off the streets. The psychiatric patients and the drug addict suffer from something called anisognosia. Anisognosia is an old term that describes how stroke patients perceive their disabilities. If you have a right-sided stroke in your brain, your left side of your body is out, you literally don't know it. That's called anusagnosure. Well, psychiatric patients and drug addicts have anusagnosure to the effects of their illness.

They feel like they're doing fine. They just want to go out of the streets, just want to use. That is the distortion of the brain disorders and that is anusagnosure. And again, if somebody has dementia and anasignosia, we jump in. If they have a stroke and asignosia, we jump in because their brain isn't working right. I mean, if, look, you give a directive to physician, every, you know, everyone is advised

in particularly in California to put in writing your directives to your doctor, should you get into a condition when your brain isn't working right? You end up on a ventilator from coronavirus. What are your directives to your doctor should you get into a condition when your brain isn't working right? You end up on a ventilator from coronavirus. What are your directives to us when your brain doesn't work? We need something we need the exact same directive for psychiatric care. We need a psychiatric Directive to physicians when somebody develops a major psychiatric illness. We just sit down and go, okay You will be compensated in the future.

How would you like me to approach that? Do you want me to pull you in? Keep you in a hospital, give you medication, make sure you get re-compensated. And most people will say yes, of course, but we've not been doing that on a systematic basis. And that's one of the other things we need to do. As citizens, we're strongly led to believe by our politicians that the homeless issue is due to the cost of living in California that we don't have enough. Totally false, totally ridiculous, totally insane. I've spoken on this in Sacramento and they back down when I get up and show the evidence and give the history. That is a ridiculous, if you put these people in, first of all, they don't want to go indoors

because of the anti-signosia. Second, you put them indoors, they're going to die quicker. They have untreated mental illness. And unless we have a plan to deal with that and manage that, this will be a catastrophe. I cannot, I can't, it's unconscionable to me that they cling to this narrative about housing. Yes, we have a housing problem in California, and we have a problem with untreated mental illness and addiction. They are, they are, they overlap a bit, but they are not the same thing. Why then do they push that so hard?

Why do they continue to push that we need to build more shelters that we need to provide? We do need to build more shelters. We need more residential facilities. We need more, but they're talking about building affordable housing and that these people aren't appropriate for independent living. They need help. Maybe one day they will be, but in the meantime, they need a long-term residential care. And so yes, another feature of what we need to do is build residential housing, residential treatment centers. We need to staff that up. And we are blocked from doing so by multiple issues. First of all, the Lantern Petra Short Act prevents us from treating people.

Secondly, there's something called the IMD exclusion, which is something that's been in place since the early 60s, which is that Medicaid, Medicare will not pay for chronic psychiatric care. It's insane. I've been to Washington multiple times and advocated for this, and I get Stonewall. I make some progress with the economic people, the economics committees over at the White House,

and then the legislature does Stonewalls it. When you talk to politicians and then you talk to the public do you do they respond with by saying that what you're offering as solutions Or maybe not compassionate like why would you force people to to to get to get medical care when they don't want it Why would you put people in jail for harming themselves? Is that what happens? I wouldn't people in jail. Okay, I did with the fact that they should they don't belong in jail They do not belong in jail But what are you doing with demented patients? Are you treating them? Mm-hmm Leave them in the streets to die. What are you doing with people with in cephalopathy's leave them in the street to dies?

Why do you treat psychiatric illness differently? It's all brain disorders. It all affects judgment It all affects thinking it all affects judgment, it all affects thinking, it all is fatal. Why in the world? Why in the world? It's more of a country I heard it does this. It's so bizarre, it's really bizarre. Anyone that's, I worked in the psychiatric hospital

for 30 years, seeing my patients dying on the streets, it makes me jump out of my skin. Because your fingers on the pulse of this, are you seeing public opinion on our policy starting to sway and change? Are you seeing any headwind with this? We were making some progress until the coronavirus thing. It sort of fets,

there's sort of faded into the background. I will tell you what happened in Los Angeles. It's shifting and changing, and so we're going to have to sort of address this differently. So when the coronavirus hit, the gangs came off the streets. They were afraid of getting infected. So the drug suppliers brought up, and magically the patients on the street, the drug addicts, became willing to go indoors. Wow. So the governor, very nicely, very appropriately, commandeered a bunch of hotels and motels and put several, a couple thousand indoors and

put some trailers together. This would never happen without the drug supply drying up. So the drug addicts became motivated. They became willing. and they came indoors. And now we've got a problem where the gangs are going out there and now delivering and the liquor stores and the cannabis dispensaries and the gangs are now delivering directly to the facilities where these guys are living. So I don't know quite how we're going to deal with that and it's going to be an interesting evolution.

At least, at least the homeless professionals, the social workers and psychologists that are working with them can get access to them a little more consistent basis now. Let's see if we staff up adequately to meet the needs. They've not been doing that yet. I just read a report that in San Francisco, they're providing alcohol nicotine and marijuana to correct. Well, that's true. Of course, of course, it's true. Wow, that's true. That's just insane. Nobody, nobody attempting to look, if you, if you have a drug addict alcoholic and you don't give them drugs and alcohol, they're going to find drugs in alcohol. That's what they do.

That's what drug addicts do. They use drugs and alcohol. They won't stop just because you put them somewhere. They are overwhelmed by a motivational disorder called addiction, and they will do anything to keep using. And they certainly won't stay in where you want them to stay if they can't get access to their substances then they go out to the streets. Wow. Okay. So now the homeless population would seem to be exceptionally vulnerable to the the coronavirus in terms of infection and death. I mean, they're they're not living in sanitary conditions. They're very close to each other. Are we seeing more infections and more deaths among that population versus the regular population?

This is an interesting riddle to try to tease apart. The incidence is shockingly low unless they're indoors. So it's evidence, which something I suspect is true, that if you're outside, it's very hard to transmit this thing. It doesn't transmit in the sunlight, it doesn't transmit in the outer doors. So requiring homes to go into these recreational centers, it's a little bit weird, but it's a little concerning. So again, in Southern California,

they just require them to go in at night, and during the day they wanted the streets, and to get through their thing. I'm not sure that's a bad thing in terms of the coronavirus. There was an outbreak. Again, the outbreak was in one of the missions. Something like 60% of their population were positive. And the vast, vast majority, a symptomatic, which is kind of interesting. So I don't know what to make of that puzzle yet. It's, you would think it would be a lot worse, you would think it would be a human humanitarian catastrophe.

You think it would rip through them and, and destroy them, that doesn't seem to be happening, at least not right now. But I, by virtue of us putting them indoors, we may inadvertently make things worse. It's kind of crazy. Do you think that maybe because the coronavirus did not start in the homeless population that it was amongst, you know, everyday regular citizens and that regular citizens because

they don't come in close contact on a regular basis with the homeless that maybe they just didn't get it at the same time and now that they're indoors and they're in more close contact with everyday people that maybe they're being exposed more? Maybe, but then again, why such a high incidence of asymptomatic, you know, why don't they get sicker? You would think they would, right? Even the older ones are not getting sick, the older homeless folks. So it's, I don't know what to make of it yet.

I've got something I'm looking at carefully. It's not going bad the way we thought it would, which is kind of just by itself interesting. Well, okay, I'm gonna take a little bit of a left and just ask you what your opinion is on the potential mental effects and maybe drug, the subsequent increase in drug use and alcohol use that's going on right now because of the shelter in place

and the situation, what does going on right now because of the shelter in place and the situation. What does it look like from your perspective? Yeah, we don't know yet. I'm hearing, we're gonna see more drug use, we're gonna see more, I think alcohol's up. There's no doubt about that. But whether we're gonna see more uncontrolled alcohol use once things settle down, I don't know.

We have to see the evidence once we get on the other side of this We're all feeling anxious. We're all a bit dysporic But maybe there will be an exuberance on the other side where people will feel relieved from this I don't know I would caution people from Listening to too many just so descriptions of how things are of course, we're anxious of course we're depressed Is that going to be clinically relevant? I'm not sure, I'm not sure. I can tell you the drug addicts and alcoholics

tend to get their act together during crises. They're at their best during crises. And I'm seeing some of my patients get it together during all this. So I don't know, we'll see. Very interesting. Do you have any opinions on the, just the public policy around the coronavirus in general, just the how we've been, you know, recommended to shelter and

place businesses can't open? Yeah, any comments on that? Again, I have concerns, I, you know, I don't know, but I'm just asking questions and the question I keep asking is look at the homeless, they're better when they're out of doors. Why are you prevent? Why do you allow homeless to be out of doors and benefit from that? In citizens, you restrict them from that access. It's a bizarre, it's really a common thing where homeless are allowed to do whatever and citizens must comply with something much more stringent. And it may be harming the citizens, not allowing them to go outside and get some sunshine, but indeed, UV light all seem to be benefit for this, for this, for this, the idea of

sheltering in place. This is a new idea. It's never been done before. You understand? This is not as though this is the policy of infectious disease consultance throughout medical history. This is a new idea. Throughout medical history, you quarantined and isolated sick people. The only time in history that populations isolated was back in the Middle Ages when they hit

in their houses from infections and it made things a lot worse. They hit and sighed with the respiratory viruses and with the rats and the rat droppings and the fleas. It made things a lot worse. The current policy was initiated. If you look at its history, it harkens back to a high school project of a 14-year-old girl in Albuquerque, Arizona, who built a model with influenza, which is transmitted by children and affects children very badly, influenza that if you shut down schools, you could significantly decrease the rate of an outbreak.

You can flatten the curve, if something would know. Her father was a computer modeler and built a bigger model off of that, and that became the provisional policy for pandemic of the Bush administration that they now are using. So to this, I've talked to Charles Murray, University of Washington. I've talked to the clinical director of the LA County Department of Health and asked them all the same question. How do we know that isolating in place is measurably different than social isolation, social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing? And every time I ask that question of an expert, they go, that's a great question.

It's a great question because they don't have an answer. Now, we are doing a giant experiment. Now, we're going to find out. I would urge people to look at Georgia. If A, the virus doesn't get significantly diminished by summer, which it might just go away in the summer. If you look at Georgia, they picked the exact wrong moment to open up. They were accelerating in their cases.

So if social distancing is measurably worse than isolation, we should really see a take up on the next week or so at Georgia. So keep an eye on that. That will tell us whether there's really an advantage to isolating in place. Yeah, Sweden's another good example. They had such a much more loose approach to how they handle the virus. And of course, hindsight's going to be 2020. So it's going to be interesting to look back and see if we made the problem is, of course, though, I'm sure the argument will be, well, it could have been much worse, which is I don't know how you

could possibly beat that argument That's right. There will never be an answer people will just argue and spin on this forever I would caution against Comparing to Sweden. It's it's such a different situation. It's people live in different settings there It's just very very different than here But I understand what you're saying and that's you know Again, we don't know the answer to all this.

And in the meantime, the good news is their putoks are advancing rapidly. I've dealt a lot with this case. When I was, you know, early on, I was just asking people to calibrate their emotions because you know, we'd just been through a pandemic in 2009 and no one even knew it. I had to vote H1N1 swine flu. It was horrible. It was very contagious, but not as fatal as this one. Also influenza killed 35 to 60,000 people every year.

Infects, 30 million or so. The happens every year. People don't even know what's happening. So I was trying to give people to calibrate their emotional response to this. I will tell you, I've seen a few of the cases, you know, I've dealt with it quite a bit now. And man, if you check the risk box of metabolic syndrome, you have hypertension, hyperclestral lemium, you maybe have an antifosophilipid antibody, let's say you have central obesity, you get this thing, it is brutal, it is not the flu. It is something altogether different.

Now we're beginning to zero in on the cytokine activation associated with this virus. There is CCR-5 inhibitors, there's IL-6 inhibitors, there's JK inhibitors. So we're sort of getting improvisational, which how we inhibit this cytokine cascade. I think we're gonna get that the next few weeks. And if we do, then that crazy syndrome where it just kills people in days, hopefully that will be mitigated. Very interesting. So one last question in regards to the homeless situation,

aside from petitioning our politicians, supporting some of the work that you're doing by getting these people to change our public, our policies. Is there anything that we can do as citizens and consumers to help the situation? Is it helpful when we give them money? Is that hurtful? What are some things that we can do now to help that situation, if anything at all. It is, unfortunately, I don't know how you, as a human, walk past these people and not give them money and food, but we are absolutely adversely affecting them. The food thing, there's too much food on the streets. Now we have a rat explosion that is carrying its own disease as we had a typhus outbreak

here in Southern California, which I knew what happened. We have millions of rats that are with no policy for how to manage that. And there are more serious illnesses that follow on the heel of typhus. So that's coming. So the food, giving food, ends up in the rats. I don't know what we do that way. I will tell you there's Senator Morlock. State Senator Morlock has been proposing AB640, which is to give

families the capacity to bring their loved ones home, uh, you know, really pressure your state senators to, to drop the ideology and be, be clinical. I mean, you've been saying you want to follow the science on coronavirus, follow the science from mental illness. And this ideology is just, it's killing people. It's thousands. And how can, how they can allow that to go on when there's easy fixes so we can use the law to help people get wealth in these mental illnesses, pressure your state representatives. They're the ones that can make the difference.

Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you allowing us to interview you and ask you these questions. Again, we consider you to be one of the best voices on this particular situation. So thanks again, Dr. Drew. Well, there's lots of ideas, and I would say just one thing for sure, we got to juice up, we got to expand the facilities to be able to manage this. And that's a piece that nobody's looking at right now. And my fear is, as we, you know, we're getting into deeper financial waters, none of this is going to get dealt with. And you're going to see

an acceleration of people dying on the grids of illnesses that everywhere on their own or all other illness, all the country treat sick people. We, when your brain gets sick, decide, oh no, no, that's different. We can't treat that. Unbelievable. Thanks again. Thanks guys. Or you guys as frustrated as I was listening to Dr. Drew talk about like the real cause of this this problem. I think I was clenching my teeth that entire time, just an anger. Oh, I could feel you over there because I know you who have already expressed

your issues that you have up in Santa Cruz because you've watched it and you're, Yeah, it's visibly right in front of me every day. And you can see the problem, it's drugs and it's mental illness. And I just, I get so mad that we're not addressing that head on. That's what we need to focus on. Yeah, I think the big problem, and this is not just the problem

with this particular situation. This is a problem that happens with a lot of different kinds of policies is that politicians pass feel good laws that do not produce good results. So when they get up to get elected, they'll say things like being homeless shouldn't be a crime or if you, we shouldn't spend money on treating these people, it's their choice or we feel bad for them

and it's because we don't have cheap housing. That's the reason. And it feels good. It sounds good, but the results are the exact opposite. It's the opposite. I've lived in California my entire life, and before my eyes, I have seen in the last like five years, the homelessness population explode.

I've never seen in San Jose ever. I've lived here my entire life, right? I've never seen tent cities in this city, never. And now there are, I mean, when I'm driving to work, I see at least two or three of them. It's everywhere. On the way to work. It's crazy.

It's insane to me, but what was really infuriating is that he's talking about this kind of stuff and they don't, like, I don't wanna take him seriously, and it's kind of weird. I was surprised by the percentage. I didn't realize that and you've alluded to it before. You've never actually dropped the percentage on an OVF talk to off air about this that many of them are suffering from a mental illness. I was not privy to that. I was under the impression that maybe a smaller percentage had mental illness and then the rest of them,

either one chose to do that or like you said in Transiit where they're in between houses and they just choose to go do that. I didn't realize that you're talking about close to 80% of the people that are suffering from a mental illness. Yeah, and they have nowhere to go. There's no treatment facility for certain types of mental illness. They don just, I mean, they don't really have an answer or a place besides like, you know, let's give them their own spot to kind of figure this out.

It's like, let's get them treatment. Like, what does that look like? And why don't we have that established here in California especially? They don't even know that they need treatment. You know, I forgot the term he used, but it was like, you know, when you're mentally ill and you don't know you need help. Yeah. So they he used, but it was like, you know, when you're mentally ill and you

don't know you need help. So they won't even seek it out because they have no idea that they're that as bad as they are. But statistically speaking, people without mental illness and without major drug abuse issues who are homeless do not remain homeless for very long. This is a statistic across the US. If somebody does become homeless, typically it's a couple months. They end up on a person's couch, they end up in a shelter, they get back on their feet. It's rarely a permanent problem for people who aren't mentally ill, who don't have a drug. What do you say three months was a typical yeah, if those cases, you weren't a drug addict or you didn't have mental illness, it was about that time.

Yeah, now what was, and I've seen videos of this, by the way, my brother sends these to me because he lives up in the city. And it's videos from people who work in like Walgreens or Target or whatever. And they're literally filming because they can't do anything. Just stealing, right?

Oh, they'll go in with garbage bags and just put deodorants and hairsprays and whatever in the bags. They know the exact amount. Yes, as long as it's under what you say, $900 or something. $900, yes, fits. And then they'll just walk out

and the reason why they let them is because when they stop them, the cops let them basically, oh, put it, then they come back and do it again. And he said that he's seen them do this, walk around the corner, put the deodorants out on the street and sell them for like 50. So they're literally stealing the stuff and then selling it around the corner for 50 cents a piece, making their money to feed their drug habit. And that, I mean, that's going to destroy this problem. We're going to allow more crime.

Yeah. And that's going to destroy the city because I know if I'm not mistaken, Walgreens is like telling the city, we're gonna start pulling our stores. If you don't handle this, there's no, why would we have our stores here? If you guys are gonna keep doing this. Yeah, and it's unfortunate that, you know, all that momentum kind of going up

into this specific issue kind of got halted because the coronavirus came through and it's like, it's very much downplayed now. That's on everybody's top of my mind. How about how crazy that was? He was saying that a smaller percentage of the homeless are getting affected with coronavirus than everyone else.

That's really interesting. And I know he said to caution about what people are saying about predictions of what's gonna happen because of COVID, but I can't help but think about that. I can't help but I mean, I just read that thing in Australia, the report that was coming out there, the prediction of suicide rate and I, you got to think the homelessness that's going to skyrocket here in about 30 days when they pull the moratorium on evictions.

How many people are going to be on the streets because of that? And I know that these aren't the mental illness people and the people that he's probably really concerned about. But I would think that would just make the problem 10x because of that. Well, I think if you're depressed, anxious, lost your job, lost your house, a percentage of those people might turn to drugs, which then could fuel latent, you know, mental illness or create mental illness, you know, problem. So I think you might be right at them with that one, but, you know, with sucks is there's not a whole lot of stuff that we can do aside from. Well, yeah, you know, problem. So I think you might be right at them with that one. But, you know, with sucks is there's not a whole lot of stuff that we can do aside from. Well, yeah, that's, it's really, this is a really tough one for me to even talk about.

You know, I was sitting there listening to him and I'm like, everything I'm hearing him say, like I agree and he's right. But then I also feel like we have, what's the solution? Yeah, there's no solution. I can't, so for me, I struggle when we talk about a topic like this that I feel like nobody has the real answer. And it's strange to me, because if you unpack something and go deep enough, especially when it comes to situations like this, it almost always has something to do with money. We're not going to make money off of it,

or it's going to cost too much money. And it's weird to me that we wouldn't just create, I mean, the government loves to create new subsidies. Like why wouldn't we do that in this situation and why is it keeping them from legislating that? I don't understand. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't feel good.

So if you're a politician in San Francisco and you come out and say, we're going to make drug use on the street illegal and we're going to, you know, if you steal, it's going to be a felony, then they're going to come out and say, that's not nice. And you know, that's mean. It's because it's like punching down, right? Yeah. Like people that are already down and out and now we're going to arrest them for, you know,

their problems. Like it doesn't feel as good. Yeah, but the answers to not do anything is not a better answer. Yeah, make it worse. No. It's not a better answer. It's not a better answer.

No, the one thing that he said towards the end there was he talked about all the other core morbidities, core morbidities that dramatically increased the negative symptoms or the potentially fatal symptoms of COVID. And he named a bunch that were related to just poor metabolic health and obesity. And that is right along the lines of all the other stuff that I've been reading.

I know in New York, I think they said that that was the number one, number one reason that people would get COVID and die from it. It was all related to obesity and obesity-related diseases. Which would explain why a lot of the homeless are not because when was the last time you saw an obese homeless person? Maybe, yeah, that might be... And they're exposed to the elements a lot more and getting sunlight. And I thought that was interesting about people being outside, a lot more versus inside. Like, this is a grand experiment keeping everybody inside. It does make me wonder if how much weaker people's immune systems are, because they've been at home,

maybe eating worse, maybe drinking more alcohol, not getting as much vitamin D from sunlight, then they're reopening. So now we're re-entering into exposing ourselves with a weaker immune system potentially. Is that gonna cause more problems? I don't know, very interesting. But again, very interesting episode.

And I wish we could have more solutions, but what I really hope is that people listening get as enraged as I am, or at least motivated enough to tell your politicians, and what ends up happening. If the politicians see that there's enough people talking about this, it then becomes beneficial for them to run on a different policy. So I think they need to know that if they run

on different policy that they'll get elected and if they don't, that they won't get elected or definitely not get reelected, that's the big one. I think the people, especially in California, they should get them all out because they've already caused this problem and send a big signal to our local governments and to state and even federal governments that you mess this problem up, you're not going to get reelected and we're going to kick out.

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