How are LA’s homeless to escape addiction and poverty if the nonprofit organizations that are supposed to help them are mired in drugs themselves?
That’s the urgent question after a bust Thursday that saw Christopher Johnson of People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) arrested for alleged possession of fentanyl and meth near MacArthur Park.
The park has become synonymous with homelessness, crime, and open-air drug use in recent years.
Federal law enforcement, led by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, has targeted the drug dealers and gangsters who sustain the drug trade near the park. The LAPD and other law enforcement agencies, at every level, have stepped up the fight to restore the park for all Angelenos to enjoy.
But their work is undone if a “substance use disorder specialist” from a local nonprofit group that is meant to be helping the homeless is allegedly carrying around drugs himself.
This is likely more than a story of personal struggle with substance abuse.
Essayli told the California Post that this arrest is no coincidence, and that nonprofit groups have long been suspected of distributing drugs in the park, not just helping addicts obtain safer needles or navigate their way through government services.
Some of these nonprofits, he added, receive millions of dollars from the city.
Essayli also questioned how Johnson ever found employment with PATH, given “prior gun and drug charges.”
While the answer awaits a full revelation of the facts in court, the question itself points to the broader problem.
Critics call it the “homeless-industrial complex.” It refers to the nefarious partnership between the government and nonprofit organizations that supposedly exist to help the homeless, but which, in reality, try to keep the problem alive as a way of keeping the flow of public money going.
The idea of the “complex” explains why so much money is spent on homelessness — nearly a billion dollars in LA last year alone — with such poor results.
It explains why homeless encampments often keep reappearing on the same sidewalks and in the same parks, weeks or even days after they are removed.
And it would explain why an official whose job it is to wean homeless people off drugs would be caught with drugs himself near MacArthur Park.
The only way to unravel the complex is to enforce the law, and break the chain of public money that cycles through gangs, politicians, and non-government organizations.
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