Los Angeles is Beautiful
...from a distance
If you watched the recent Adele sunset concert staged at the Griffith Observatory, I bet you were as wowed as I was. The glittering lights flickering below the observatory, the soft undulation of the hills as they dip towards the ocean, and of course Adele’s full throated voice and warm elegance—magnificent and artful. But down below, life is not as rosy.
Down below, the city of Los Angeles is in a state of what I call “pre-collapse.” No one collects the garbage or fixes the broken sidewalks. No one trims the trees, so you have to bring your GPS everywhere because you can’t read the street signs. And ask any police chief in California and he will tell you that many of the 150,000 so-called homeless people who populate their streets and open spaces are really drug addicts from out of state. But why do they flock here? Of course, the weather is more hospitable than Chicago or New York, and the criminal justice system is tolerant of drug use and the crimes that go along with it. But a bigger reason is that addicts throughout the country are recruited and flown to the Golden State by “body brokers” who are paid by recovery centers for each body admitted who stays long enough for the golden spigot of Obamacare drug rehab benefits to open. California makes it easy, for everybody in the drug world.
I saw an Amazon film recently and can’t get it out of my mind. “Body Brokers,” written and directed by John Swab, a recovering addict and former broker himself, tells the story of two young addicts, who live in Ohio in a hopeless loop of scoring drugs, coming down, and thieving to pay for more. One day they meet a sympathetic stranger, who buys them a burger and sweet talks them to sign up at his rehab hospital, all expenses paid, on the beach in California.
Money permeates the whole Dickensian system: the recovery center pays the broker, the broker cuts in the patient, and then the patient, sadly, upon release to a sober living home pays the sober living home owner for a room—and often for more drugs. After all, the patient can always re-admit to the recovery center and start the whole lucrative process again. The body brokers know it and encourage it. So in essence it’s another variation of human trafficking.
The number of rehab centers and sober living facilities on the state is daunting. Our legislature knows this. A map created by the Orange County Register for its excellent, comprehensive series that broke the “rehab Riviera” story makes its visual point. These represent the licensed facilities, and no licensing is required if the house takes care of fewer than six clients. And many of the homeless addicts on the street are “graduates” of such programs. The rehab center in the film is actually one of the good ones. To his credit Swab does not sensationalize his story—the truth is horrific enough. But in many substandard facilities, patients die from ODs or simply end up in the streets until they die. The movie is now streaming on Amazon and is well worth watching, not only for its drama but to encourage this kind of truth in the arts.
Yet our elites, often well-meaning people, don’t want to admit that the ACA is a reason for our current ugly chaos. Oprah Winfrey recently expressed her grief and agita at the murder of a beloved friend, Jacqueline Avant, at the hands of a burglar, out free on no bail despite numerous prior offenses. She mourned, “The world is upside down.” Indeed it is, and the policies of our ruling class caused this. Tragically, our city’s splendor I viewed that night from the hilltop at this point exists only in our imagination.