In this series
In this series
Thirty years ago in Seattle, I was sad to see a homeless man sleeping in a park at the top level of a double slide. It was a nice playground—I could imagine little brothers enjoying a race down that slide—but as things were, parents and kids stayed away.
What I witnessed then was nothing compared to what Michael Powell recently reported in The Atlantic about that same park today:
As I arrived, a drug user squatted next to a child’s slide and relieved himself. Others had set up tents and colonized the park pavilion, where they heated fentanyl on tinfoil and inhaled the fumes with glass pipes. A few went old-school and injected it.
Likewise, I remember Burlington, Vermont, as a beautiful city. But Powell reported the view from City Hall now: “At least 70 users and dealers, many looking hyperkinetic in the way of the strung out.”
He quoted Shabnam Nolan of the King Street Center, where poor children get tutoring: Why does drug users’ “right to ‘dignity’ violate children’s right to come to our center without seeing blood and needles?”
The Burlington Mayor’s Office website warbles about “harm reduction,” which means opening a $2 million center (with funding from the state legislature) so addicts can use their drugs in private. And yet, Powell talked with one mother of three young children who has a fentanyl dealer for a next-door neighbor. “Everyone talks about needle exchange and harm reduction,” she said. “I mean, okay. But it’s like my children and I are living in the zombie apocalypse.”
Others see it differently. The New York State Department of Health describes harm reduction as a “social movement” committed to “building leadership” among drug users. Placing ideology above health, those health officials state, “People who use drugs would not need harm reduction measures if not for structural harm to our communities.”
But what of structural harm to brains? The Los Angeles Department of Public Health’s “Reaching the 95” program was named for the homeless people who experience addiction and could have treatment—but 95 percent refuse it because “they’re terrified of being away from the drugs.” Just south of Los Angeles, formerly homeless Jerry, age 41, told me how much he loved meth: “You feel like you’re Superman for three or four days—personality sharper, brain smarter. I’m 5’6” but I felt like I was 10 feet tall.”
Love for drugs above all else is not new. In 1995, I interviewed men trying to overcome addictions while staying at the Gospel Mission in Washington, DC. Rudy, then 45, had a typical story. As a production technician at a television station, he scoffed at stories of middle-class people selling their houses to finance drug purchases. Then he took his first cocaine hit, and “the bells were going off in the center of my brain.”
If we understand sanity as the capacity to think and act rationally, addicts like Jerry and Rudy were insane. They were willing to die for another high—and I couldn’t find out whether Rudy survived.
Many homeless and formerly homeless people have told me they’re fine with living in city shelters because drugs are often available. And a pseudonymously published article “How a Homeless Shelter Drove Me Away from the Far Left” shows why dealing with addiction should not be a partisan issue.
A former staffer of a Los Angeles public shelter, the author writes that “drug use was so routine that checking for dead bodies had become part of normal operations. The drugs came through the gate,” with money for them provided by a full-scale expensive e-bike theft run out of the shelter, stolen bikes piled on the lawn. The shelter was dogged by danger too:
One night, a resident threatened the one security officer there with a knife and began smashing everything in sight. We called the police. An hour later, roughly 20 police cars, and a helicopter even flew over the facility. Officers struggled with him on the ground before taking him away. He was back the following night.
In this series, I have deliberately concentrated on everyday homeless life and avoided sensationalism. But I would be dishonest not to mention the dangers of homelessness both from disease and violence. In 2025, Los Angeles news stations reported that someone beat up a popular street vendor who served free meals to the Skid Row homeless, and a homeless man assaulted a woman in another Los Angeles neighborhood.
Similar stories are evident coast to coast. In May 2026, Justice Laura Ward of New York’s State Supreme Court sentenced one homeless man who lived in city shelters, Randy Santos, to 40 years in prison for killing four other homeless men. She said his brutality exemplified the “coming together of three horrible symptoms of this city: homelessness, mental illness and narcotics abuse. … I’ve been on the bench for about 30 years, and those are the three things that seem to be the constant in almost all of our violent crime cases.”
Some homeless people are perpetrators. Others are victims. Some are both. A UCLA study in 2023 reported “16.0% of participants experience[ed] physical violence and 7.5% experienc[ed] sexual violence” during the previous month alone. Around half of those who are chronically homeless in the US suffer a violent attack at some point. Homeless women are almost always victimized eventually.
Studies find a high prevalence of cognitive impairment among those who have spent years on the street, but it’s hard to know which came first: traumatic brain injury due to violence or high alcohol and drug use. Meanwhile, many city officials, for either liberal or libertarian reasons, have been passive.
I grew up in Boston and know the terrain near Fenway Park. In 2023, at one Boston homeless campsite not far from there, dealers yelled out the names of drugs they were selling. Users overdosed while police did nothing. Boston Globe reporter Danny McDonald described how “people shoot opioids into their veins. One woman is passed out, her cheek pressed up against the sidewalk pavement, her legs and arms stuck out at odd angles.”
McDonald also reported on how some well-meaning Bostonians enabled such destructive addiction:
Shortly after Ryan Jordan, 37, finishes getting his fix, a sedan rolls up and stops. The driver asks if he’s hungry. Jordan stands and, with blood still dripping from a hole in his right arm, his left hand still clenching a syringe accepts a pizza box from the man, who drives off. “Happens all the time,” Jordan says of the free food.
This doesn’t happen all the time now, at least at that location: Boston mayor Michelle Wu finally ordered a cleanup. Boston police have called Ubers to take drug users to detox facilities, even though few stay there for long. A Boston radio station told the story of one woman dropped off for detox who said she “didn’t even walk in the door.”
Why didn’t she? McDonald’s experience in interviewing other homeless addicts is like mine and suggests an answer: Some “dream of a different life, as an illustrator, a bicycle rickshaw driver, a carpenter, a chef, or an interior decorator. But for now, addiction controls them, and erases other ambitions.”
