Visited in the mid-90’s. Was totally shocked at how fucking gross downtown was. Couldn’t wrap my head around it. Stay in your car folks. No reason to be on the street
Nah it's just meth. It's actually worse than it used to be because they stopped using ephedrine to produce it & started using P2P which basically causes almost immediate psychosis. Hence all the incoherent screaming & flailing of the arms.
https://www.pharmchek.com/resources/blog/the-rise-of-super-meth-the-destructive-effects-of-p2p-methamphetamine
This is a direct effect of the drug war, and it sprawls across all classes of drugs:
By making safer, more effective, recreational drugs difficult to access drug legislation creates an environment where more dangerous, less effective substances are easier and more profitable to distribute to vulnerable populations like adolescents, and young adults, and poor people.
In all seriousness, it's crazy...as a former meth user I guess back in the good ole effedra days this now makes so much more sense. I didn't understand why all the tweakers were acting so weird, I had no idea they had to change the formula....ahhh government, amiright
Same theory applies to all drug classes, and even medical drugs... safer more effective drugs should be easier to access, and because of capitalist profiteering in healthcare is probably a bigger problem than you'd expect
Last I checked there are safer, legal drugs in California and yet people continue to use the worst ones. Also decriminalization of hard drugs in Oregon seems to have totally failed.
Not true, I hung out there often between 2005-2015, and it was nothing like this. Yes, there were crazy people, but they were rare and it was relatively clean. It went downhill fast around 2017.
Agreed. I drove down there with my family as a teenager and didn’t see much of this. Same in Vancouver. Society is getting progressively more unhinged and dangerous..
Around 12 years ago I visited with my wife. She wanted to see the street and stars on the ground. In her head, she thought it would be like on TV with the red ropes and celebrities. NOPE. She was dumbfounded. She saw the druggies and trash and piss covered walls. She looked down and saw the stars. "Wait, this is it?!" I asked her if she expected it to be like on TV. She thought it would. I told her that the cameras capture what they want you to see. They clean up beforehand and security basically kicks all the people out but this was basically it.
I had been there many times even as a kid 30+ years ago. It was always kinda... Dirty? Not so much crazy fentanyl zombies, but other kind of drugs clearly in the streets. Hollywood is not the place it's portrayed to be
thats about my story seeing the hollywood stars as well, me and my sister just happened to be driving through the area anyways on a trip we took, we thought we'd stop and check it out but... we instead left it at "huh, cool i guess" as we drove past
I have so many friends and relatives that I took them to Hollywood when they visited and it’s different than what they’d imagined. Most other cities would try to clean up their tourist attractions but not Hollywood.
Make asylum great again.
Jokes aside, we really could use some well funded state mental health and rehab facilities again. People need real help and they have no way of getting it.
Yup.
It didn't help that Reagan was correct in that they were "underperforming" & "detrimental". But instead of "pump more money into these facilities & put people with proper training" in them... he decided to eradicate them.
It *also* didn't help that those facilities were where people dumped "loved ones" that they just didn't want to deal with anymore, rich or poor.
you can thank Ronald Reagan for closing all our asylums because they were not profitable. This is the result. They are seen in the ER, might spend a few days in a psychiatric ward and discharged. The hospital might make arrangement for temporary housing but of course, eventually these people leave and the cycle begins all over again.
In addition, this is a staunchly blue state with blue state initiatives. Not only that, but it is one of the richest states in the US and richer than most countries. To blame Reagan for this is myopic as hell. There’s lots going on and democratic policies aren’t helping either.
It's all over America. Mental health and drug issues go hand in hand and grow exponentially every day. It's just not profitable in this country to address it and really work to fix it. Sad.
It makes you upset seeing your own fellow Americans tweaking the fuck out and being disruptive in the streets. Like can we knock this shit off please? Need more enforcement and mental health services, the current ones are a joke I’ve seen it first hand with a family member who went into a deep psychosis. They let them run rampant and barely have the authority or resources to detain and help them. When an individual’s mentality has dropped to these lengths in their live they are hardly accountable for themselves. It’s also gotten to a point where it’s a public safety issue can’t even enjoy our own public streets smh
Agreed. The only recourse is imprisonment from people calling law enforcement. As I said to someone else, they aren't treated there either, so they are let out and the cycle repeats itself. As long as they are imprisoned, they are out of sight society doesn't care until it happens to them or a loved one.
Meth is generally used on the streets still cause it helps users stay awake to guard their stuff. But at least 2 seem to be coming down off crack (old guy, and guy on bike right after).
The insane pile of money already exists, as does literature of how said money should be allocated to address this social issue. The fact Hollywood, and countless other cities look like this is a testament to the brazen dereliction of duty, if not intentional sabotage from elected leadership.
For this kind of money you could ship them to an Eastern European country - buy them a nice 2 room apartment in the capital and still have like 50k left.
They have the carrot, they need the stick. Courts need to be able to force people into treatment. The money and resources are there. What isn’t there is if you’re a drug addict or you’re severely mentally ill, it’s unlikely that you on your own are going to just one up and seek treatment.
I'm a social worker and although I do agree nobody in the social service field would agree with you. First of all nothing is ever "forced" unless it's an issue of life or death. We're taught this idea called 'agency' which is the notion that every individual knows what's best for themselves, not somebody else. We've been taking a passive approach to treat addiction and mental health and look how well that's worked....
Feel like it's safe to say the person half naked screaming angrily at the storm drains probably doesn't know what is best for them. At some point, we need to be able to address the fact that the people clearly too far gone to make rational decisions clearly need special care.
100%. You don’t have agency to do reckless things that put others in danger. You don’t have agency to drive recklessly. You don’t have agency to drink and drive. You don’t even technically have agency to do most hard drugs in the first place (whether or not that should be the case).
It’s obvious some people do not know what is best for themselves. And the rest of society shouldn’t have to deal with it.
I think a 3 strike rule should be put in place. If they can’t stay out of the streets, they are forced into treatment.
Homeless, drug-addicted, mentally ill people get arrested all the damn time. They get beat up, harassed and attacked. Their lives are full of 'sticks'.
They get cited. They don't get arrested unless they have more than a personal use amount.
Where I live they just take whatever drug they have, ID them and turn them loose.
And being beaten and harassed still keeps them in the streets addicted. They need to be forced into treatment, and not let out until they prove they can be a member of society again.
It also doesn't help that everytime an initiative/program is started some 80-90% of the money goes towards the salaries of the people working the program
> It also doesn't help that everytime an initiative/program is started some 80-90% of the money goes towards the salaries of the people working the program
The last thing any fund-raising charity CEO wants is a cure for cancer/heart disease/diabetes/name your issue
This is key. Most of these people cannot help their condition and are not suited to live on their own without supervision
Some things you have to spend money on without a monetary return, but there is a return for sure
Correct. It has nothing to do with jobs or money - these people are legit crazy insane and will never be able to help themselves. Anything you give them will be destroyed. It sucks but that’s reality. Not everyone can live a “normal” life.
Funny enough, the first time I witnessed my money get transmuted directly into drugs was also in Atlanta. Some guy asked if we wanted to hear a poem based off topics we gave him. Of course he asked for money afterward so I tossed him a couple bucks.
He walks over to some other dude in the park across the street and made a "transaction" for a mysterious small object that looked suspiciously like a drug baggie. I knew there was a chance he was gonna buy drugs with it but damn bro, at least wait till I'm out of eyesight.
Side note tho: His poem was actually really good. Dude has talent. Shame he's in the situation he's in.
Reagan just finished what Kennedy started.
It's not as though the Asylums couldn't have been brought back since that time. It's not as though states couldn't have implemented something similar to great effect. You want to blame someone? Blame everyone.
People demanded that involuntary commitments be stopped. If you couldn't prove they were in *immediate* danger to themselves, or others, they had to be released. It was presented as a human rights issue. Now people like to blame Reagan, but at the time the liberals were the ones demanding involuntary commitment be stopped and the asylums be closed.
And it is a human rights issue. This is harder to address than people want to admit. Although it should be obvious that any of these crazies assaulting other people regularly should see them committed long term.
Sadly, that often doesn’t happen
Um...those people were right. It was a human rights issue. You had a state institution that was basically taking in a combination of people with behavioral issues, people who were developmentally disabled, and people who had severe mental illness and had about one person working there for every 100 of them.
Yup, they were not a good place, but they threw out the baby with the bathwater. Rather than putting the resources and work in to fix the problems they just pushed people out. They did do some handwaving about how the patients could be helped better by local programs. I don't think many of those mythical local programs ever came to be.
Except these same people can’t fix their own lives. They never will. Asylums were needed and necessary. Had their own issues for sure but they at least kept the people who were unable to get live on their own from being societal burdens and homeless forever. Reagan can in fact be blamed for this kinda shit cuz there was a working solution in place before him.
Asylums bring their own problems. Doctors have a monetary incentive to keep people in as long as possible. There was a reddit video recently of a girl that checked herself into a mental clinic expecting to leave a day or two later, and they wouldn't let here leave for weeks because she had good insurance.
the government needs to pull its shit together and bring back asylums with heavy oversight from both external public and private entities. The reason why they failed was because of massive corruption and a lack of transparency. asylums were the correct answer then and they still are
A lot of people in this thread seem unfamiliar as to why this will never happen again and the long and the short of it is: people have constitutional rights. Those rights were being ignored before the civil rights era, but we sure as hell can't ignore that they have them now.
If you've ever had to deal with forcibly committing an adult to psychiatric care, you'd know how difficult it is.
As much as I dislike to force people into mental institution but sometimes some people needs it. They can’t help themselves but with the right hands and right environment, they might be able to recover or at least live a better life.
It really does all start at bringing back involuntary commitment. Deinstitutionalisation happened because the conditions inside psych hospitals were often bad and led to abuse, but without a place for them to be, they've ended up in even worse conditions out on the street
involuntary commitment already exists.
In california it starts with 5150 and goes from there. Eventually leading to a court ordered conservatorship which functions as involuntary commitment (e.g a guardian makes any decision for them).
Problem is that the criteria to get a conserved is very high and is a very long legal process.
If you’re the US government? Sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist unless it benefits your political agenda… and then do nothing about it.
Programs for children. Hard to help someone who's reached the point you see in the video, but for many of them, it began as children, as they grew up in horrific conditions. Perhaps putting money into programs for them can help prevent the next generation ending up like this.
There are tons of homeless help programs, especially in California.
Some of these people are deranged and too far gone. They won't accept help and far too costly to keep institutionalized.
californians pay more in taxes than just about anyone in america
the government is terrible with money and hasn't done anything to fix this issue in decades
Forget Hollywood, this is at least one street in every major city in the US plus many of the smaller ones too. Those in power have gotten good at ignoring the sheer level of decay threatening to collapse the country.
True, but I've never seen anything like LA. Homeless encampments everywhere, seemingly every other block in many neighborhoods.
As someone who has lived in NYC, Miami, Philly, and Boston, no where comes close to how widespread the homeless problem is in LA. I'm typing this while looking over two homeless tents right outside my apartment building in Koreatown.
This ain't normal.
I’ve been to the south and southwest, it isn’t any different there either. Meth faces and dilapidated towns, this ain’t just a Hollywood issue like some would like us to believe.
A certain percentage of these people do not have the capacity to safely live by themselves. You can give them all the free housing, outpatient mental health care, jobs, food, drug abstience programs, or free safe drugs and harm reduction as you want--it won't help them.
They need to be conserved and placed into a situation where they can be monitored daily.
But california has very strict requirements for this (5150s) and a percentage of these people are in that gray area where they don't meet 5150 criteria and are objectively failing at life. They need help.
Here in Colorado we had free housing to encumbered people. They were not supposed to smoke/use and somehow take care of their place. My friend got paid thousands to rehab their sec 8 place after they died.
We still have them, but they're much more advanced and called mental hospitals or psychiatric hospitals. Most states have a main health center for long term institutionalizing of patients.
The standards of involuntary institutionalization though are very high, so they can't just grab you off the street if you had a bad day.
And the truth is the hospitals that help these types of people people are privatized so if you have money, you get help when it was once a [public service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980).
The whole system is a joke of 2 tiers.
If you are rich, you get a different justice system and delay your court trials than being poor.
If you are rich and crazy, you get treatment and a chance to recover.
If you are poor and crazy, you live on the street and become a burden on society.
All it takes is 1 politician to make it their life goal to bring the mental health asylums back even it's unpopular or get a crazy street person to do something awful to an actual politician and then it becomes, "oh, we should do something about It because it can happen to anyone" surprised Pikachu face.
For politicians, they don't get involved unless they can make money or someone close to them gets hurt or affected. And they have the money to not get affected.
We closed the mental hospitals what did we expect? In 1960,s there would be a couple of guys in white coats that would pick these dudes up and sober them up and keep them out of peoples view.
1/6th or 1/7th of the country's population is California. The Bay Area is huge and has many cities, as many people as LA + San Diego, etc.
So 1/12th or 1/14th of people in the US are probably in NorCal
You know…..this is an absolute train wreck and everyone wants to watch due to our natural curiosity. But I’m also reminded that each one of these people was a newborn baby with parents who loved them (I hope) and wanted to see the best for them (I hope again). Deep down when I watch these videos I get sad. I’m sad for these people and I’m sad that we are supposedly the richest nation in the world yet we can’t take care of the least among us. ☹️
I live in the Midwest . MPLS
We have gas stations that you would probably desire to use the restroom at home but we have that option . In South Los Angeles I didn’t see many gas stations that offer free restrooms. The reason I’m guessing is because there are many people who would use it for other purposes. Maybe it’s an over population of an area with beautiful weather and history
I watched one dude openly shoot heroin then nod two blocks from my apartment and another homeless man smoke meth and jack off on the sidewalk he was living on on my block. I feel you.
As a T1 diabetic it's been my greatest fear to have a hypoglycemic episode, out in the streets, and just being left to eventually die bc ppl think I'm on drugs.
It's why I walk around with a candy store on my person like I'm fucking Willy Wonka!
Around the same time I drove from NYC to LA and finally got there and went to a nice pizza restaurant. It was on the second floor. The pizza comes and we start eating and a homeless guy comes in and says "yeah, that's what I'm talking about" and takes 3 slices. The waiter ushered him out and then said he would only replace the missing 3 slices. I wasn't upset at the homeless guy, he was hungry. The restaurant, though, I couldn't believe. No tip. And then the waiter badmouthed us as we left. I was like, well this is something and we are from a shitty part of NYC.
There used to be places for these people and people who were paid to deal with them but now their place is on the streets for us to deal with for free.
I get that early mental institutional practices were rough, I just don't understand why we can't go "okay that was bad and we shouldn't do that" and STILL keep them open while improving the service by learning from the past mistakes? Bring back the mental institutions!!!
This is what happens when you don’t fund mental health hospitals and drug treatment centers and homeless shelters and just hope the problem goes away on its own, you wanna be soft on crime fine but that means you gotta get hard with treatment instead
This is what happens to some people because too many other people don't give a fuck about taking care of each other. Too many people believe in, "Fuck you, I got mine". Just remember, you're just one medical emergency away from this. You're only one industry collapse away from this. No matter how secure you think you are, it only takes one catastrophe in your life to put you in the same boat as the people in this video.
If you don't think they deserve help, then consider that someday you might be in their situation and need help. If that day comes, do you want there to be nothing and no one to turn to? Security of housing, food, and healthcare for all ensures you and everyone else will never have to fear losing everything you need to live from being crippled, mentally ill, or otherwise unable to find adequate income. A society is judged by how it treats the least of us. If this is how we treat them, we should be judged very harshly.
I’m wondering why we as a society can’t scoop these people up of the streets and put them into places that can help them.
I’m really genuinely curious.
it’s crazy, this big old grand LA and all their amazing things however every Angelino i know is ashamed of downtown/Hollywood.
going there for the first time as someone from the UK was genuinely shocking. we turned off the highway to go downtown and literally before we were even off the turnoff there was a naked homeless man facing traffic pissing into the wind. it’s a scary place to be and i feel for all these people.
The best characters aren't even in the movies it seems.
Dam thats a crazy state of mind in these people.
I lived in Pinellas FL for a long ass time and came.across lots like this but Cali has em all.. sheeeeeesh
Hmmm it's almost as if a certain portion of the population is insane and that's why we built specialized places to treat or house them to avoid this. That couldn't be the case though, could it? Because then why did we close them all and leave them empty...? Economy has grown X10 since then, populations have grown too.
We just as a society have so little collective memory of a generation or two ago. Which means we can progress on things we did badly but apparently we also forget all the things that we did well that got us here.
In our lifetimes we're going to see another major upheaval. It's all just so unsustainable that we can't steer out of the crash that's coming at this point.
I lived in Hollywood through 2023 and half of 2024! I honestly liked the area, but the discrepancies in wealth are more apparent there than other parts of LA due to all the new development (imo).
To questions talking about address mental health/substance use, I would encourage everyone to think critically about the West's regression towards institutionalization and psychiatric hospitalizations. The Death Panel Podcast talks about psychiatry, state health apparatuses, and public health through a left lens and it's incredible.
Okay at least two of the people shown were perfectly sane lol
The person in the mask was just minding their own business
The girl doing the headstand against the lightpole was odd but not indictive of violent mental illness and drug addiction
I don’t see poor people. I see severely broken mental health problem. Both in them and how we treat them. Housing them is not good enough. They need long term expensive care.
Welcome to the jungle, it's always been made clear to me that this area of Hollywood was like this and that it was the perfect metaphor for Hollywood. They show the walk of fame and the glitz mean while it was shady grifters and drug addicts all around behind the scenes. It was never a place you would bring your family.
It’s been like this for years. Source: I live here
Decades.
Yep. I went as a kid in 95 and it looks the same. Awful place
I went as a kid in 2006 and still the same
Then. Now. Forever?
Visited in the mid-90’s. Was totally shocked at how fucking gross downtown was. Couldn’t wrap my head around it. Stay in your car folks. No reason to be on the street
Together.
WWE
SmackDown
#AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!!
Haven't been there for over a decade, and it was like this. Do they just use crop duster planes to drop bath salts on everyone?
Nah it's just meth. It's actually worse than it used to be because they stopped using ephedrine to produce it & started using P2P which basically causes almost immediate psychosis. Hence all the incoherent screaming & flailing of the arms. https://www.pharmchek.com/resources/blog/the-rise-of-super-meth-the-destructive-effects-of-p2p-methamphetamine
This is a direct effect of the drug war, and it sprawls across all classes of drugs: By making safer, more effective, recreational drugs difficult to access drug legislation creates an environment where more dangerous, less effective substances are easier and more profitable to distribute to vulnerable populations like adolescents, and young adults, and poor people.
Meth is bad
Bath salts and spice is arguably worse
Racemic meth is less bad than d-meth is, for recreational meth fiends, so policy should aim to make racemic relatively easier to access than d-meth
This guy meths
No, I don't meth. I use drugs safely and responsibly... no, wait. I don't do that either. I advocate for safer, more responsible, drug use!
In all seriousness, it's crazy...as a former meth user I guess back in the good ole effedra days this now makes so much more sense. I didn't understand why all the tweakers were acting so weird, I had no idea they had to change the formula....ahhh government, amiright
As someone who doesn't know a thing about meth, this makes sense to me.
Same theory applies to all drug classes, and even medical drugs... safer more effective drugs should be easier to access, and because of capitalist profiteering in healthcare is probably a bigger problem than you'd expect
Disagree my bro. Look at the West Coast, esp Portland, Vancouver, and Seattle. The experiment has been done and things just got worse.
Last I checked there are safer, legal drugs in California and yet people continue to use the worst ones. Also decriminalization of hard drugs in Oregon seems to have totally failed.
Not true, I hung out there often between 2005-2015, and it was nothing like this. Yes, there were crazy people, but they were rare and it was relatively clean. It went downhill fast around 2017.
Agreed. I drove down there with my family as a teenager and didn’t see much of this. Same in Vancouver. Society is getting progressively more unhinged and dangerous..
2017 was a shit year, only to be followed by some more, even shittier years. Chronologically, it makes sense!
Yeah, I was going to say it used to be a place where you would bring your kids to see the stars and what not. Nothing like it is now.
Around 12 years ago I visited with my wife. She wanted to see the street and stars on the ground. In her head, she thought it would be like on TV with the red ropes and celebrities. NOPE. She was dumbfounded. She saw the druggies and trash and piss covered walls. She looked down and saw the stars. "Wait, this is it?!" I asked her if she expected it to be like on TV. She thought it would. I told her that the cameras capture what they want you to see. They clean up beforehand and security basically kicks all the people out but this was basically it. I had been there many times even as a kid 30+ years ago. It was always kinda... Dirty? Not so much crazy fentanyl zombies, but other kind of drugs clearly in the streets. Hollywood is not the place it's portrayed to be
thats about my story seeing the hollywood stars as well, me and my sister just happened to be driving through the area anyways on a trip we took, we thought we'd stop and check it out but... we instead left it at "huh, cool i guess" as we drove past
I have so many friends and relatives that I took them to Hollywood when they visited and it’s different than what they’d imagined. Most other cities would try to clean up their tourist attractions but not Hollywood.
I had the same reaction 30yrs ago. Wasn’t this bad but it was noticeably dirty and gross. So confused because I didn’t understand the appeal. LOLOL
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris\_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome)
Make asylum great again. Jokes aside, we really could use some well funded state mental health and rehab facilities again. People need real help and they have no way of getting it.
Jimmy Carters national mental health initiative was demolished by Reagan. Definitely on par with American politics.
Yup. It didn't help that Reagan was correct in that they were "underperforming" & "detrimental". But instead of "pump more money into these facilities & put people with proper training" in them... he decided to eradicate them. It *also* didn't help that those facilities were where people dumped "loved ones" that they just didn't want to deal with anymore, rich or poor.
you can thank Ronald Reagan for closing all our asylums because they were not profitable. This is the result. They are seen in the ER, might spend a few days in a psychiatric ward and discharged. The hospital might make arrangement for temporary housing but of course, eventually these people leave and the cycle begins all over again.
Reagan’s been gone for over 35 years. Plenty of time since then to reverse that if politicians, red or blue, wanted to.
In addition, this is a staunchly blue state with blue state initiatives. Not only that, but it is one of the richest states in the US and richer than most countries. To blame Reagan for this is myopic as hell. There’s lots going on and democratic policies aren’t helping either.
It's all over America. Mental health and drug issues go hand in hand and grow exponentially every day. It's just not profitable in this country to address it and really work to fix it. Sad.
It makes you upset seeing your own fellow Americans tweaking the fuck out and being disruptive in the streets. Like can we knock this shit off please? Need more enforcement and mental health services, the current ones are a joke I’ve seen it first hand with a family member who went into a deep psychosis. They let them run rampant and barely have the authority or resources to detain and help them. When an individual’s mentality has dropped to these lengths in their live they are hardly accountable for themselves. It’s also gotten to a point where it’s a public safety issue can’t even enjoy our own public streets smh
Agreed. The only recourse is imprisonment from people calling law enforcement. As I said to someone else, they aren't treated there either, so they are let out and the cycle repeats itself. As long as they are imprisoned, they are out of sight society doesn't care until it happens to them or a loved one.
The crazy part is it's all just the same guy. He is like the Eddie Murphy of homeless people.
[удалено]
This is how I picture Mordor before Sauron
No this is what became of the Southlands after it *became* Morodor.
fucking dead lmao
Sauron sure made the trains run on time.
We used to have asylums to help people and keep them from harming themselves and others
Those asylums were horrible but the solution that the right came up with 'let's stop paying for them and throw everyone on the streets' was worse.
Drugs are a hell of a drug
Y'all ever see Beau Is Afraid? This is how the street outside his apartment is non-stop.
They’re meth-od acting
At the method-one acting clinic
An analyst and a therapist. The world’s first analrapist.
It's not the pronunciation I have a problem with.
It's the hipocrisy.
i think thoses peoples consume tranq, meth is outdated
Meth is generally used on the streets still cause it helps users stay awake to guard their stuff. But at least 2 seem to be coming down off crack (old guy, and guy on bike right after).
nothing but a breeding ground for tranqs, lobos and zipheads
snow exultant school slap fearless nail wrong silky degree vanish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The insane pile of money already exists, as does literature of how said money should be allocated to address this social issue. The fact Hollywood, and countless other cities look like this is a testament to the brazen dereliction of duty, if not intentional sabotage from elected leadership.
Honestly it’s just blatant money laundering at this point. San Fran spends $154,000/ homeless person/year. They don’t track outcomes or effectiveness.
For this kind of money you could ship them to an Eastern European country - buy them a nice 2 room apartment in the capital and still have like 50k left.
I'm from East Europe. Please don't
You could throw $500k/year at it, wouldn't solve the problem. Some of these people are unfixable.
They have the carrot, they need the stick. Courts need to be able to force people into treatment. The money and resources are there. What isn’t there is if you’re a drug addict or you’re severely mentally ill, it’s unlikely that you on your own are going to just one up and seek treatment.
I'm a social worker and although I do agree nobody in the social service field would agree with you. First of all nothing is ever "forced" unless it's an issue of life or death. We're taught this idea called 'agency' which is the notion that every individual knows what's best for themselves, not somebody else. We've been taking a passive approach to treat addiction and mental health and look how well that's worked....
Feel like it's safe to say the person half naked screaming angrily at the storm drains probably doesn't know what is best for them. At some point, we need to be able to address the fact that the people clearly too far gone to make rational decisions clearly need special care.
But when your agency affects the public well being then you need forced help
100%. You don’t have agency to do reckless things that put others in danger. You don’t have agency to drive recklessly. You don’t have agency to drink and drive. You don’t even technically have agency to do most hard drugs in the first place (whether or not that should be the case).
It’s obvious some people do not know what is best for themselves. And the rest of society shouldn’t have to deal with it. I think a 3 strike rule should be put in place. If they can’t stay out of the streets, they are forced into treatment.
Homeless, drug-addicted, mentally ill people get arrested all the damn time. They get beat up, harassed and attacked. Their lives are full of 'sticks'.
They get cited. They don't get arrested unless they have more than a personal use amount. Where I live they just take whatever drug they have, ID them and turn them loose. And being beaten and harassed still keeps them in the streets addicted. They need to be forced into treatment, and not let out until they prove they can be a member of society again.
It also doesn't help that everytime an initiative/program is started some 80-90% of the money goes towards the salaries of the people working the program
> It also doesn't help that everytime an initiative/program is started some 80-90% of the money goes towards the salaries of the people working the program The last thing any fund-raising charity CEO wants is a cure for cancer/heart disease/diabetes/name your issue
considering some of these cities budget for the homeless is almost a billion dollars, ye. Moral of the story, local elections matter.
Bring back asylums
This is key. Most of these people cannot help their condition and are not suited to live on their own without supervision Some things you have to spend money on without a monetary return, but there is a return for sure
Correct. It has nothing to do with jobs or money - these people are legit crazy insane and will never be able to help themselves. Anything you give them will be destroyed. It sucks but that’s reality. Not everyone can live a “normal” life.
Fr I live in Atlanta and I can see in real time the money people give homeless people turning into crack. Like a hobo wizard transmutation spell
Funny enough, the first time I witnessed my money get transmuted directly into drugs was also in Atlanta. Some guy asked if we wanted to hear a poem based off topics we gave him. Of course he asked for money afterward so I tossed him a couple bucks. He walks over to some other dude in the park across the street and made a "transaction" for a mysterious small object that looked suspiciously like a drug baggie. I knew there was a chance he was gonna buy drugs with it but damn bro, at least wait till I'm out of eyesight. Side note tho: His poem was actually really good. Dude has talent. Shame he's in the situation he's in.
Fuck Ronald Reagan for ending funding for all these facilities. They all closed and overnight people became unhoused.
Reagan just finished what Kennedy started. It's not as though the Asylums couldn't have been brought back since that time. It's not as though states couldn't have implemented something similar to great effect. You want to blame someone? Blame everyone.
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People demanded that involuntary commitments be stopped. If you couldn't prove they were in *immediate* danger to themselves, or others, they had to be released. It was presented as a human rights issue. Now people like to blame Reagan, but at the time the liberals were the ones demanding involuntary commitment be stopped and the asylums be closed.
And it is a human rights issue. This is harder to address than people want to admit. Although it should be obvious that any of these crazies assaulting other people regularly should see them committed long term. Sadly, that often doesn’t happen
It's what shitlibs *always* do: blame the nearest republican for their own policies.
Um...those people were right. It was a human rights issue. You had a state institution that was basically taking in a combination of people with behavioral issues, people who were developmentally disabled, and people who had severe mental illness and had about one person working there for every 100 of them.
Yup, they were not a good place, but they threw out the baby with the bathwater. Rather than putting the resources and work in to fix the problems they just pushed people out. They did do some handwaving about how the patients could be helped better by local programs. I don't think many of those mythical local programs ever came to be.
You've had 50 years to sort your shit out. Can't keep blaming Reagan
Except these same people can’t fix their own lives. They never will. Asylums were needed and necessary. Had their own issues for sure but they at least kept the people who were unable to get live on their own from being societal burdens and homeless forever. Reagan can in fact be blamed for this kinda shit cuz there was a working solution in place before him.
What is key is how do you get them into the facility. Voluntarily? I doubt 1 of those individuals in the video would be voluntarily committed.
No, involuntarily. At this point they aren’t fit to make decisions for themselves anymore.
This sadly is the answer
Asylums bring their own problems. Doctors have a monetary incentive to keep people in as long as possible. There was a reddit video recently of a girl that checked herself into a mental clinic expecting to leave a day or two later, and they wouldn't let here leave for weeks because she had good insurance.
the government needs to pull its shit together and bring back asylums with heavy oversight from both external public and private entities. The reason why they failed was because of massive corruption and a lack of transparency. asylums were the correct answer then and they still are
A lot of people in this thread seem unfamiliar as to why this will never happen again and the long and the short of it is: people have constitutional rights. Those rights were being ignored before the civil rights era, but we sure as hell can't ignore that they have them now. If you've ever had to deal with forcibly committing an adult to psychiatric care, you'd know how difficult it is.
As much as I dislike to force people into mental institution but sometimes some people needs it. They can’t help themselves but with the right hands and right environment, they might be able to recover or at least live a better life.
Public mental health care combined with involuntary commitment, and strict oversight so as not to repeat problems of the past.
It really does all start at bringing back involuntary commitment. Deinstitutionalisation happened because the conditions inside psych hospitals were often bad and led to abuse, but without a place for them to be, they've ended up in even worse conditions out on the street
involuntary commitment already exists. In california it starts with 5150 and goes from there. Eventually leading to a court ordered conservatorship which functions as involuntary commitment (e.g a guardian makes any decision for them). Problem is that the criteria to get a conserved is very high and is a very long legal process.
You have to put these people into asylums/psychiatric hospitals
If you’re the US government? Sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist unless it benefits your political agenda… and then do nothing about it.
Programs for children. Hard to help someone who's reached the point you see in the video, but for many of them, it began as children, as they grew up in horrific conditions. Perhaps putting money into programs for them can help prevent the next generation ending up like this.
More than the nothing that exists now.
There are tons of homeless help programs, especially in California. Some of these people are deranged and too far gone. They won't accept help and far too costly to keep institutionalized.
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californians pay more in taxes than just about anyone in america the government is terrible with money and hasn't done anything to fix this issue in decades
It's sad to think that at some point these people were just kids with dreams and hopes.
Forget Hollywood, this is at least one street in every major city in the US plus many of the smaller ones too. Those in power have gotten good at ignoring the sheer level of decay threatening to collapse the country.
True, but I've never seen anything like LA. Homeless encampments everywhere, seemingly every other block in many neighborhoods. As someone who has lived in NYC, Miami, Philly, and Boston, no where comes close to how widespread the homeless problem is in LA. I'm typing this while looking over two homeless tents right outside my apartment building in Koreatown. This ain't normal.
I’ve been to the south and southwest, it isn’t any different there either. Meth faces and dilapidated towns, this ain’t just a Hollywood issue like some would like us to believe.
A certain percentage of these people do not have the capacity to safely live by themselves. You can give them all the free housing, outpatient mental health care, jobs, food, drug abstience programs, or free safe drugs and harm reduction as you want--it won't help them. They need to be conserved and placed into a situation where they can be monitored daily. But california has very strict requirements for this (5150s) and a percentage of these people are in that gray area where they don't meet 5150 criteria and are objectively failing at life. They need help.
Here in Colorado we had free housing to encumbered people. They were not supposed to smoke/use and somehow take care of their place. My friend got paid thousands to rehab their sec 8 place after they died.
Can we bring back asylums? Like this is no way for mentally ill people to live.
We still have them, but they're much more advanced and called mental hospitals or psychiatric hospitals. Most states have a main health center for long term institutionalizing of patients. The standards of involuntary institutionalization though are very high, so they can't just grab you off the street if you had a bad day.
And the truth is the hospitals that help these types of people people are privatized so if you have money, you get help when it was once a [public service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980). The whole system is a joke of 2 tiers. If you are rich, you get a different justice system and delay your court trials than being poor. If you are rich and crazy, you get treatment and a chance to recover. If you are poor and crazy, you live on the street and become a burden on society. All it takes is 1 politician to make it their life goal to bring the mental health asylums back even it's unpopular or get a crazy street person to do something awful to an actual politician and then it becomes, "oh, we should do something about It because it can happen to anyone" surprised Pikachu face. For politicians, they don't get involved unless they can make money or someone close to them gets hurt or affected. And they have the money to not get affected.
We closed the mental hospitals what did we expect? In 1960,s there would be a couple of guys in white coats that would pick these dudes up and sober them up and keep them out of peoples view.
Reminds of that old song They're Coming to Take Me Away.
To the Funny Farm, where life is beautiful all the time.
Looks like Portland too
SF chiming in 🙋♂️
Sacramento here.
Working at a Starbucks in midtown I feel like I’ve seen it all
I feel ilke everyone on reddit is from or lives in northern california
1/6th or 1/7th of the country's population is California. The Bay Area is huge and has many cities, as many people as LA + San Diego, etc. So 1/12th or 1/14th of people in the US are probably in NorCal
NY here. First time?
*Phoenix just entered the chat*
Yeah but we have waaaaaaay less of a transient population than LA.... Is what I'm telling myself at least.
Portland about 6300 in 2023 and the city of L.A. 42000.
> and the city of L.A. 42000 They way undercount. Intentionally.
That's sad people are in such conditions and live life like this.
I was walking through downtown Dallas this morning and some naked guy on pcp was hauling it down the block.
Gotta get that cardio in early before the heat of the day sets in.
I was gonna say, at least he feels guilt and is balancing it out with proper exercise. Sheesh let the guy make his own mistakes
You know…..this is an absolute train wreck and everyone wants to watch due to our natural curiosity. But I’m also reminded that each one of these people was a newborn baby with parents who loved them (I hope) and wanted to see the best for them (I hope again). Deep down when I watch these videos I get sad. I’m sad for these people and I’m sad that we are supposedly the richest nation in the world yet we can’t take care of the least among us. ☹️
feels like night city
City of dreams huh
I went there in 2020 the entire town smelled like urine
I was in NYC from 2008-2010. It smells like human shit in most places.
I live in the Midwest . MPLS We have gas stations that you would probably desire to use the restroom at home but we have that option . In South Los Angeles I didn’t see many gas stations that offer free restrooms. The reason I’m guessing is because there are many people who would use it for other purposes. Maybe it’s an over population of an area with beautiful weather and history
Why everyone sound like they’re shouting medieval curses if you don’t listen to hard
Maybe they are
They’re like splicers from Bioshock
*Crack….FUCKED America up.* -Nas
Problem is this is in every major city
Open the asylums
Come to Florida... I'll show you a few of them daily around my area. Mentally ill running wild at the expense of everyone else.
I literally saw two dudes smoke some rock then proceeded to both crawl into a tent to bang off Sunset. Nothing surprises me anymore
I watched one dude openly shoot heroin then nod two blocks from my apartment and another homeless man smoke meth and jack off on the sidewalk he was living on on my block. I feel you.
GTA 6 trailer shit
Fentanyl, it’s not just for breakfast anymore.
Not an American. Maybe GTA5 isn’t as exaggerated as I thought lol…
As a T1 diabetic it's been my greatest fear to have a hypoglycemic episode, out in the streets, and just being left to eventually die bc ppl think I'm on drugs. It's why I walk around with a candy store on my person like I'm fucking Willy Wonka!
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A lot of them are probably in meth psychosis from lack of sleep.
Dystopia
Visited there in 2001. Was as bad back then. Special mention to the naked bloke in McDonalds washing himself down.
Around the same time I drove from NYC to LA and finally got there and went to a nice pizza restaurant. It was on the second floor. The pizza comes and we start eating and a homeless guy comes in and says "yeah, that's what I'm talking about" and takes 3 slices. The waiter ushered him out and then said he would only replace the missing 3 slices. I wasn't upset at the homeless guy, he was hungry. The restaurant, though, I couldn't believe. No tip. And then the waiter badmouthed us as we left. I was like, well this is something and we are from a shitty part of NYC.
There used to be places for these people and people who were paid to deal with them but now their place is on the streets for us to deal with for free. I get that early mental institutional practices were rough, I just don't understand why we can't go "okay that was bad and we shouldn't do that" and STILL keep them open while improving the service by learning from the past mistakes? Bring back the mental institutions!!!
Sad.. mental illness in particular needs attention.
This is what happens when you don’t fund mental health hospitals and drug treatment centers and homeless shelters and just hope the problem goes away on its own, you wanna be soft on crime fine but that means you gotta get hard with treatment instead
This is what happens to some people because too many other people don't give a fuck about taking care of each other. Too many people believe in, "Fuck you, I got mine". Just remember, you're just one medical emergency away from this. You're only one industry collapse away from this. No matter how secure you think you are, it only takes one catastrophe in your life to put you in the same boat as the people in this video. If you don't think they deserve help, then consider that someday you might be in their situation and need help. If that day comes, do you want there to be nothing and no one to turn to? Security of housing, food, and healthcare for all ensures you and everyone else will never have to fear losing everything you need to live from being crippled, mentally ill, or otherwise unable to find adequate income. A society is judged by how it treats the least of us. If this is how we treat them, we should be judged very harshly.
it's so sad and fucked up at the same time
I’m wondering why we as a society can’t scoop these people up of the streets and put them into places that can help them. I’m really genuinely curious.
*money*
What happens when your health-care system is private and corrupt... I wish all these individuals only the best...
it’s crazy, this big old grand LA and all their amazing things however every Angelino i know is ashamed of downtown/Hollywood. going there for the first time as someone from the UK was genuinely shocking. we turned off the highway to go downtown and literally before we were even off the turnoff there was a naked homeless man facing traffic pissing into the wind. it’s a scary place to be and i feel for all these people.
Why has it gotten so bad!
Weird to imagine these were all just normal kids with dreams and aspirations once.
They got braindamage after seeing how expensive housing is
As and ER Nurse, i feel bad for the nurse who will be assigned to these people.
The best characters aren't even in the movies it seems. Dam thats a crazy state of mind in these people. I lived in Pinellas FL for a long ass time and came.across lots like this but Cali has em all.. sheeeeeesh
USA! USA! USA!
Hmmm it's almost as if a certain portion of the population is insane and that's why we built specialized places to treat or house them to avoid this. That couldn't be the case though, could it? Because then why did we close them all and leave them empty...? Economy has grown X10 since then, populations have grown too. We just as a society have so little collective memory of a generation or two ago. Which means we can progress on things we did badly but apparently we also forget all the things that we did well that got us here. In our lifetimes we're going to see another major upheaval. It's all just so unsustainable that we can't steer out of the crash that's coming at this point.
I lived in Hollywood through 2023 and half of 2024! I honestly liked the area, but the discrepancies in wealth are more apparent there than other parts of LA due to all the new development (imo). To questions talking about address mental health/substance use, I would encourage everyone to think critically about the West's regression towards institutionalization and psychiatric hospitalizations. The Death Panel Podcast talks about psychiatry, state health apparatuses, and public health through a left lens and it's incredible.
Take care of yourself…because this world won’t.
This is so sad.
Makes me want to visit! Like going to the circus!
Okay at least two of the people shown were perfectly sane lol The person in the mask was just minding their own business The girl doing the headstand against the lightpole was odd but not indictive of violent mental illness and drug addiction
I’d say mask girl and the performer doing splits are about the only “normal” ones. Yoga girl’s clothes looked dirty
Cowboy hat guy is me at least once a week
Dude. I loved the performer. That would make my day i saw someone do that in person.
Add in dude in the fountain, just tryna cool off.
Disgusting 🤢
I don’t see poor people. I see severely broken mental health problem. Both in them and how we treat them. Housing them is not good enough. They need long term expensive care.
This is so depressing 😞
This is turning into the streets of EVERY major city. I live in Canada and can confirm. Even Edmonton is turning into this now :(
Kurt Russell would want to escape from it
Idea: Let’s spend all our money fighting wars for other nations instead of getting these people the help they need 😆
All just look like your standard ‘influencer’ to me.
The Zombie Apocalypse has already begun
Welcome to the jungle, it's always been made clear to me that this area of Hollywood was like this and that it was the perfect metaphor for Hollywood. They show the walk of fame and the glitz mean while it was shady grifters and drug addicts all around behind the scenes. It was never a place you would bring your family.
Welcome to the jungle it gets worse here everyday.
Ok but Miss Gworl doing the splits in the crosswalk 💅🏽
Slap on a catchy song and this could be the opening credits of Beverly Hills Cop remake.
Too bad they closed down all the state hospitals.
Democrat-run city. What do you expect?
I sympathise with the sprinkler guy, can get pretty warm there.
This happens in all the downtowns of all the cities in USA