California dying

There are so many memorable quotes, songs and movies about Los Angeles for a lazy writer to reach for to open a piece. But LA is a city built on clichés, has pumped so many into the international consciousness, and is a city seemingly immune from shame, that one more won’t hurt. The description of LA as “paradise with a lobotomy” has never seemed more apt. Many of the inhabitants must have also undergone this old procedure; not just the masses of homeless, but the ruling elite as well, to allow the apocalyptic scenes I have now seen there.

The most visceral example of this is in the infamous Skid Row. This area, squashed between the city’s fashion, financial, historic and arts districts, has long been a byword for rundown, dangerous poverty. But driving around it this week, the scene is quite probably the most shocking thing I have ever seen in my life. And I served in the last Tory government.

Simply, there are just so many drug addicts, all in one place, in the open, in the middle of the day. The scene of wasted (literally and figuratively) humanity is so primevally upsetting that it’s hard to believe it’s real. Street after street of filthy, destitute people. They are oblivious to their physical ailments, despite them often including missing limbs, open sores and full-blown, shouting-at-thin-air psychosis is hard to stomach. 

For every body sat on the street “enjoying” their latest high, and every one shouting and howling into the abyss, many more strung out on fentanyl in the now notorious suspended zombie pose — their repose literally clinging to life as the chemicals inside fight a duel to the death.

To see this scene of devastating suffering, caused by the ceaseless grip of narcotics on my fellow man, has stripped any lingering libertarianism from me. I still close my eyes and see these poor, lost, broken creatures. 

More shocking still is the context in which this American horror story is unfolding. These people live, if that is even the right word for their liminal existence, blocks away from movie stars and moguls, revelling in unimaginable opulence and influence. They are more than happy to lecture the rest of America, and the world, on their moral and material failings. Meanwhile they vote to continue policies that would shame Somalia. To see such suffering a nightmare of suffering blocks away from the Hollywood dream machine has been little short of shattering to me.

How Skid Row got to this point has been a long time in the making, with many guilty parties. In the 1970s, an unholy alliance of trade unions, business, activists and nearby nimby’s agreed on a ‘containment’ plan, that focused all homelessness, medical drug support and NGO activity to the area, with vagrants heavily discouraged from leaving that area.

At around the same time, then-Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed a bipartisan state bill that did for mental illness institutionalisation what that other notable leftie, Enoch Powell, did in Britain in the 1960s. It was scaled it back enormously and the area flooded with the former inmates of asylums. 

Reagan was likely influenced by his alcoholic father and the belief that they should have been treated as patients, not prisoners. Cost cutting, too, played a part. Regardless, having so many unwell people “unhoused”, in the new nomenclature, went as badly as one can imagine with the benefit of hindsight — despite the fair weather.

Waves of further damaging factors followed. Crack, as cheap as it was addictive exploded in popularity in the 1980s. In the mid-noughties, hospitals were caught discharging patients onto the streets of Skid Row itself. And all the while, actual rooms to house these people in the area decreased.

Most recently, fentanyl has supercharged the drug problem and led to huge fatalities, often by contaminating other drugs and pulling more people into the hell now visible to the world through shocking videos on X. Having now seen the real thing, I can tell you that the footage of these fentanyl zombies doesn’t come close to capturing the awfulness it causes in people already near rock bottom.

Recent efforts by the Democrat super-majority in the city have been built around principles of housing first and harm reduction. It would be another cliché to tell you that I saw a blue haired woman, pride lanyard around her neck, an NGO worker looking over her total and utter policy victory. It reminded me of the line Tacitus gave to Calgacus attacking Rome: “They make a wasteland and they call it peace”. No one can say that this experiment has not been given a long trial time. 

Just this weekend, a drug addict died on a Skid Row livestream. By some claims, that fatality will be one of 6 a day. The obvious truth is that these people need to be incarcerated in custom facilities that provide long-term rehabilitation and cold turkey programmes. And that crucially removes them from the mainstream population. 

Naked drug addicts, defecating in public and injecting drugs outside schools has somehow become a norm

This is an idea of such obvious common sense that it would take just such an NGO industrial complex as Skid Row has to be blind to it. And so naked drug addicts, defecating in public and injecting drugs outside schools has somehow become a norm. The one-time favourite in the face for the Los Angeles Mayoralty said on record that she expected the election to be about bicycle lanes. 

This has now changed. After yet another shocking failure of governance — the burning down of the extremely wealthy Pacific Palisades district in a large brushfire last year, exacerbated by empty reservoirs and environmental regulations that allowed the fire to run rampant — many once-wealthy Angelinos are now as homeless as the drug addicts of Skid Row (to add to the dystopia, one progressive activist is currently on trial for arson, with allegations that it was motivated as an act against inequality).

An insurgent campaign by Spencer Pratt, a former reality tv show villain turned online crystal salesman, has turned the mayoral race on its head after he and his parents and friends all lost their houses in the fire. Running a highly viral — and highly personal — campaign that focuses on poor governance, Pratt is focusing on the insanity of Skid Row. Running against the woman whom he claims ‘burned his house down’ and focusing on mothers scared about the safety of their children and the abuse of street dogs, Pratt is showing the future of political campaigns.

Following in the footsteps of Donald Trump, he combined name recognition built from years of television fame, with sharing objectively hilarious AI generated videos that highlight the insanity of the whole situation. The broader irony is that it has been the socialist politicians of Los Angeles have led to a complete breakdown of state control in the heart of the city. And it is a celebrity whose on-screen persona was generating confected chaos for the enjoyment of viewers who promised to bring order.

Hollywood loved a plot twist. Immediately after the primary results, Pratt looked nailed on to the two-person run-off. After some distinctly dodgy looking late votes from California’s distinctly dodgy looking election system, this Hollywood fairytale is, like everything else in Tinseltown, turning into a tragedy. And just as audiences continue to swap the silver for seasons of streamed shows, LA’s nightmare likewise looks set to run and run.