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MY VIEW –
“It’s a reality that drugs destroy.” Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán
Outcomes are the judge, not intentions. Not slogans. Not “compassion.” Not “harm reduction.” Not press conferences of sniveling virtue signaling. Nor by the believe-me gestures of incumbent politicians who say they will do better if only you give them another 4 years. Judge the system by what its government has produced.
By this standard, California’s governing class has produced a criminal narco-cartel: a state where fentanyl and methamphetamine are tolerated in public, drug addiction is converted into a permanent funding stream, because of taxes, that seemed like good ideas at the time of enactment. Law enforcement is restricted, repeat offenders are excused, voters who want safe streets are overruled by City Hall and the State Legislature, and taxpayers are forced to finance their own destruction.
This is not merely a drug crisis. It is a governance crisis. Drugs are the accelerant, but the political system is the arsonist. Fentanyl and super-meth are now central to California’s collapse. They fuel homelessness, theft, psychosis, encampments (open-air drug dens), emergency-room overload, family breakdown, street disorder, and death. Los Angeles County reported 2,438 drug-related overdose and poisoning deaths in 2024, with fentanyl and methamphetamine the major categories of drug death. That is not a policy abstraction. That is a mass-casualty event happening year after year under leaders who insist they are compassionate and know best.
Anyone with eyes can see what the official language tries to hide. Try walking through parts of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, or even once-stable suburban corridors. You will see addicts bent over on sidewalks, people screaming into traffic, encampments filled with stolen goods, merchants operating behind locked cases, and ordinary citizens altering their daily routines to avoid danger. This is not normal urban inconvenience. It is the visible collapse of consequences, once called the rule of law, the thin blue line.
Meth destroys bodies and minds. Fentanyl kills with terrifying efficiency. Dealers are not misunderstood, entrepreneurs. They are the merchants of poison. One serious dealer can ruin hundreds of families and kill dozens over time. A society that cannot muster the authority to change this outcome has surrendered the moral clarity to govern, and its leaders are culpable of crimes against humanity.
Other countries understand what California refuses to admit: drug trafficking is warfare against the individual, the family, and the social order. It’s a business model for predators who profit from addiction, misery, and death. Singapore imposes some of the world’s harshest penalties for drug trafficking, including capital punishment for specified quantities. China treats large-scale drug trafficking as a capital offense. El Salvador, without using the death penalty, has used mass arrests and severe imprisonment to break the power of gangs and drug networks.
If California would like to join civilized society, it would do well to apply the lessons of countries that don’t tolerate drug runners and their crews. Drug markets shrink when dealers fear the state. In California, the public fears the dealers, the addicts, and the continuous wave of break-ins, while the dealers fear nothing.
California’s ruling ideology has spent years promoting the predator, denying addiction, mental illness, and criminality. Enforcement and incarceration, they claim, are racist and cruel. Theft becomes social justice and evening the score, equity. Addiction becomes a social-service opportunity despite dozens of laws on the books about importing, dealing, and open-air drug use.
The Democratic supermajority thinks that if you call a social worker to ask an addict whether they would like to get off the street, addiction and crime will go down. Give them a million-dollar apartment you and I can only dream about, and it becomes their stash house. That fixes nothing. The results are predictable. If the government reduces consequences, tolerates encampments, normalizes open-air drug use, and allows people to run amok all day and night, then builds a bureaucratic edifice of an NGO economy around managing and encouraging addiction, addiction unsurprisingly expands. Show me the incentives, and the outcome becomes predictable.
This is the core of the narco-enterprise argument. California does not have to officially legalize fentanyl markets to function as a narco-state. It only has to tolerate them, subsidize the ecosystem (NGOs) around them, restrain the police, and pay an army of contractors to keep the system going. Homelessness and drug addiction are hand in glove with our suicidal, empathetic leadership.
The California State Auditor reported that the state spent or allocated roughly $24 billion over five fiscal years on homelessness and housing programs, yet concluded that the state needed to do more to assess whether those programs were cost-effective. CalMatters summarized the problem bluntly: California could not reliably determine whether its homelessness spending was working. (California State Auditor)
That is not a bookkeeping error. That is the indictment. A state that spends tens of billions of dollars and cannot prove what worked, what failed, or where the money produced measurable results is not running a public-service system. It is running a money-laundering operation. This cannot be overstated: This is not a housing problem; it is an addictive drug problem.
Homelessness policy has become the perfect laundering language for drug-policy failure. The public is told the money is for compassion. In practice, the money funds six-figure salaries, outreach teams, consultants, nonprofit executives, hotel conversions, dashboards, litigation, grant administrators, and endless reports. Meanwhile, the addicts remain addicted, and the encampments grow and remain dangerous to be near.
Worse, when the State Auditor exposed the inability to track outcomes, Sacramento had a chance to impose basic discipline. AB 2903 would have required state agencies administering programs to the addicts on the street to report annual cost and outcome data to the California Interagency Council on Homelessness. Newsom vetoed it. His veto message acknowledged that the bill would require standardized reporting of “homelessness” cost and outcome data, but rejected it anyway. In plain English: after billions moved through a system that could not prove results, the governor blocked a bill designed to make the system prove results. (Governor of California)
That is not an innocent administrative dispute. That is the governor protecting his cronies. The rule of law means little when agencies receive more funding despite failing to show results and when the governor’s veto kiboshed audits. This is how fraud, waste, and abuse hide in California: behind process, compassion language, procedural loopholes, and the deliberate refusal to ask simple questions. Where did the money go? Who got paid? What worked? Who failed? Who was punished?
This is why “harm reduction” is a joke. In theory, it means keeping people alive long enough to recover. In practice, California’s approach has become harm accommodation. The addict is kept alive but not restored until he finally creates for himself an unrecoverable overdose. LA County DPH-SAPC 2024 Annual Report reports 2,364,474 sterile syringes, 591,069 naloxone doses, 75,523 fentanyl test strips, and 31,791 wound-care kits. Yet the dealer has no fear. The neighborhood is sacrificed. The taxpayer pays. The nonprofit bills. The politician lies about how many people have left the street in the middle of a mass casualty event.
Los Angeles has spiraled to such a catastrophic stage that students, librarians, school staff, and public employees are expected to carry overdose-reversal medication (Narcan) because public policy has shifted from suppressing the drug market to managing the casualties it produces.
A society in deep decline hands sidewalks to fentanyl, parks to meth, and public transit to dangerous psychosis. A civilized society intervenes. Sometimes that means treatment. Sometimes it means conservatorship. Sometimes it means prison. But it always means consequences. Not free taxpayer apartments.
California voters understand this better than California politicians. That is why voters passed Proposition 36 in 2024. The state describes Proposition 36 as modifying Proposition 47 to increase accountability for certain drug and theft crimes and creating a treatment-mandated felony process for repeat drug convictions. That vote was not ambiguous. Californians were done with the revolving door. They were done watching shoplifters walk out of stores. They were done watching addicts die in public while elected officials call the status quo humane. (DHCS)
Yet Sacramento is always willing to protect the criminals. AB 2108 requires prosecutors or county probation departments, for certain theft offenses, including shoplifting and vandalism, to determine whether specified defendants are eligible for theft diversion. Translation: let’s send these felons to night school to meet and greet other thieves so they can become better at their trade. That is how California politicians reverse the voters without saying the word “repeal”: not by openly eliminating consequences, but by building procedural escape hatches around them. (Digital Democracy | CalMatters) The public says enough. The ruling class says catch and release.
The same contempt for public safety appears in policing. Los Angeles and other California cities have spent years demonizing, demoralizing, defunding, or restricting law enforcement while expecting residents and business owners to absorb the consequences of lawlessness. The Los Angeles Times reported that the L.A. City Council voted to limit LAPD pretextual stops, while noting that LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell and others defended those stops as an essential law-enforcement tool against guns, gangs, and drugs. (Los Angeles Times)
While fentanyl, meth, theft, guns, gangs, and street disorder grind down neighborhoods, the political class is preoccupied with restricting police. It is obsessed with the theoretical misuse of enforcement tools while ignoring the daily misuse of drugs and public space by criminals. It sees the criminal suspect as an uber rights-bearing client of the system, but the law-abiding resident as a complainant to be ignored. California has created a two-tier justice system in which ordinary citizens are punished for compliance, severely punished for non-compliance, while favored Offenders are treated as a protected class above the law.
In practical terms, California has created a hierarchy of rights. The addict may occupy the sidewalk, but the shopkeeper must comply with every permit requirement. The thief may cycle through diversion, but the homeowner faces penalties for even the smallest code violation. The dealer benefits from police restraint, prosecutorial hesitation, and judicial leniency, while the taxpayer is compelled to finance the very systems that refuse to protect him. This is not equality before the law. It is preferential treatment for criminal activity.
Criminals are not stupid. They respond to incentives. If they believe the police will not stop them, prosecutors will not pursue them, judges will release them, and politicians will excuse them, they adapt. Flash mobs, retail theft crews, catalytic-converter rings, street lighting stripped of its copper, dealers, and encampment predators can practice the darkest form of laissez-faire capitalism. This is the rational outcome of irrational governance.
This is why California increasingly resembles a protection racket with a state flag. The private sector creates the wealth. The state confiscates it (taxes, fines, penalties, tolls, and fees). Workers produce. Families pay. Homeowners carry the burden. Businesses navigate impossible regulations and usurious taxes. The government takes the proceeds and redistributes them through systems that fail to deliver safety, sobriety, accountability, order, or decent infrastructure.
The narco economy also functions as an invisible tax on ordinary citizens. Every theft crew, smash-and-grab, overdose call, emergency-room admission, security guard, locked retail cabinet, insurance claim, vandalized storefront, stolen catalytic converter, stripped copper wire from street lighting, and police response adds to the system's cost. Businesses do not absorb those losses out of charity. They raise prices, reduce hours, close locations, hire more security, or leave entirely. Insurance premiums rise. Construction costs rise. Transit maintenance costs rise. Retail prices rise. Taxpayers pay once through taxes, again through higher prices, and a third time through diminished quality of life. The criminal narco economy is not separate from inflation; it is one of the ways crime becomes embedded in the cost of living.
The defenders of this system will say the critique is too harsh. They will say addiction is hard, homelessness is hard, policing is hard, and poverty is hard. Of course, these problems are hard. That is why serious societies judge leaders by results. California’s ruling class wants the authority, salary, pension, title, emergency powers, and moral superiority, but not the accountability or bona fide results.
The verdict is plain. California’s drug crisis is simply the result of permissiveness and lack of enforcement at each stage of the smuggling process. From cargo, to mule, to street pusher. This is the result of a political system that refuses to impose consequences, refuses to defend public order, refuses to audit outcomes honestly, and refuses to admit that addiction without enforcement becomes civic collapse.
California is not failing because it lacks money. It is failing because failure has become profitable. Fentanyl, meth, open-air drug dens, theft, and disorder have become inputs to a permanent public-finance machine. The addicts run wild. The dealer is tolerated. The nonprofit is funded. The bureaucrat is protected. The politician gets a press conference. The taxpayer gets the bill. Citizens and business owners get the shaft and the mess.
At a minimum, California is aiding and abetting the criminal cartels and gangs while giving vast license to drug addicts. At its worst, California is a criminal narco-enterprise masquerading as a government.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
