The L.A. Mayor's Race is About Meth and Fentanyl

Los Angeles is a display case for the profound damage these drugs have caused, and the city's ineffective response, with upstart candidate Spencer Pratt channeling constituent anger.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about Los Angeles.

The city is a display case for what I’ve written about in my books and other places: The profound damage of the spread of methamphetamine and fentanyl out of Mexico.

The L.A. mayoral primary, held June 2, is largely about that, as well.

Polls show Spencer Pratt, a former reality-show star and a Republican using only social media, running second behind Mayor Karen Bass and ahead of left-wing Councilwoman Nithya Raman. (The top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election in November.)

Pratt has channeled the deep constituent anger that I’ve encountered over how the country’s second-largest city has been run, and where it’s headed.

Issues such as the Pacific Palisades fire and rescuing the film industry are part of this mix.

But so much of this anger is rooted in significant changes revolving around the tangled issues of homelessness and encampments, drug addiction and mental illness. And much of that, in turn, is connected to those drugs out of Mexico that have spread across Los Angeles in relentless supplies: Hyper-pure meth (beginning in 2012-14), and lethal fentanyl (in 2018).

Addiction to these drugs made people homeless. Also, though, with supplies of these drugs so vast, people who were homeless for non-drug-related reasons began using — further chaining them to the street in addiction and mental illness.

Together, these two drugs combined with the trauma of street life to change L.A. homelessness.

Years ago, the homeless population was fewer in number, peaceful, usually concentrated in Skid Row, east of downtown. In city neighborhoods, their numbers were small and they were often known to residents.

But in the last decade, as these drugs have arrived in staggering quantities, the homeless population grew much larger. It also grew “aggressive, belligerent, threatening, sometimes naked, severely hyped on drugs and extremely mentally disturbed/psychotic,” according to a 2023 citizens committee report from the city’s Los Feliz district.

Most important in this change was hyper-pure meth. It creates symptoms of schizophrenia, a mental illness that organically afflicts less than one percent of the population, and usually only those from late teens to late 20s.

Meanwhile, encampments of all-but stationary tents spread across the city, beginning in Skid Row. Tents abetted this addiction, and were vectors for human exploitation – rape, pimping, drug and gun running, etc.

Skid Row L.A.

The city’s attitude, however, was that case law prevented it from doing anything about the spreading encampments.

This was crucial. What had been happening mostly on Skid Row now visited many city neighborhoods. More Angelenos came to find they now resided near some version of Skid Row -- just as the homeless were more likely to be in the throes of psychosis.

Residents increasingly saw deranged behavior all around them.

Typhus, a centuries-old disease, emerged first in Skid Row and is now citywide. Part of the rising cost of filming on Los Angeles streets became battling theft, noise and more that grew from tent encampments.

Homeless squatters took over abandoned houses while displaying the symptoms of meth-induced psychosis: up all night, yelling and fighting, throwing things, hoarding junk. Homeless- or tent-related fires spread and now average 46 a day, with some 75,000, of widely varying sizes, reported between 2020 and 2025, according to an ABC7 review of Los Angeles Fire Department data published earlier this year.

Homeless fires at abandoned houses that they have squatted often threaten, in some cases destroy, nearby properties.

The L.A. County Medical Examiner’s office began counting deaths of homeless people in 2014. The figure rose continually until peaking in 2023 at 2500 — an average of seven deaths a day. In 2024, the figure has dropped to 2200 a year.

[See below for links to substantiating sources and stories.]

What especially angered people I spoke to was that city officials and progressive activists reacted as if those objecting to all this were insufficiently compassionate. At community meetings, constituents report being dismissed as “segregationists,” “racists,” “NIMBYs.”

“There was a complete blindness to the impacts on a neighborhood of having a hundred people living on the sidewalk,” said Connie Brooks, a Venice-area former social worker. “It was crazy-making. It’s so obvious to virtually anyone else. But city officials and people in charge of fixing it? No.”

Meanwhile, city and county officials were spending millions of dollars on homelessness, to little apparent avail or accountability.

Other responses have been, in part, to tweak approaches from eras before meth, then fentanyl flooded the streets.

“Housing First” originated years ago – that homeless people were often economic refugees and thus needed the stability of a house first to get on their feet. The policy has continued, though meth and fentanyl addiction often render people incapable of managing a house.

During the 1980s AIDS epidemic, needle exchanges were used to help slow the spread of the disease. Today, in county-funded programs, needles and meth pipes are given away, without receiving contaminated implements in return.

In a recent debate, Mayor Bass proclaimed herself against the practice. This moved Norm Langer, owner of Langer’s Deli near the city’s MacArthur Park, which is overrun by drug users and where dirty needles are often found, to insist the practice be stopped immediately.

“All we are doing by giving out needles is, number one, attracting more people that we didn’t have before and, number two, fighting a never-ending battle of helping people shoot up,” Langer told the media.

City fencing on sidewalks near MacArthur Park to prevent tent encampments.

Amid all this, the city’s ability to provide basic services visibly eroded. The Palisades fire was part of that.

Uncollected trash piled up in some neighborhoods, forcing volunteers to stage clean-ups. Stephanie Keenan, a Hollywood resident, was so alarmed by accumulations of trash in her neighborhood that for three years she paid a woman to ride the area every week noting and reporting the trash piles to the city’s 311 line.

Keenan and a neighbor also hired a truck driver to pick up bulky items, aware that they provided the foundations to tent encampments that the city would then do little to clear. Discarded mattresses, sofas, and chairs, she told me, are “hours away from being an encampment.”

In the Los Feliz district, neighbors on Commonwealth Avenue complained for months about large potholes on their small but essential thoroughfare. Finally, some of them bought ready-mix asphalt and filled in the holes. A city crew came later to fill in the worst pothole, but they dug up the ready-mix and left the other holes, said Chris Laib, a realtor and former president of the Los Feliz Improvement Association.

“That is like being at war with the city you are paying taxes to, to deliver a very basic service,” Laib said.

Also galling to some is the policed language of many activists. Instead of “homeless people,” residents were told that the proper language to display one’s compassion was now “people experiencing homelessness” or “unhoused neighbors.”

Mentioning drug addiction and mental illness was frowned upon. Affordable housing was the lone acceptable cause, and cure, of homelessness. At community meetings, Connie Brooks said, “you were stonewalled. `We need to build more housing,’ we were told -- the `Housing First’ mantra. Independent units for every person on the street. Nothing else was allowed to be discussed.”

“You cannot try to handle a problem if you cannot publicly identify what the problem is,” said Stephanie Keenan. “Woke, DEI ideology -- having to be afraid of being cancelled. That’s what led to Spencer Pratt.”

The most disgruntled constituents I’ve encountered were liberal Democrats who grew quietly disillusioned, then publicly outraged, with progressive policies governing the city. (Only 15 percent of registered L.A. voters are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats.)

Cases in point were two Bridge Home shelters – one in Venice, the other in Los Feliz, proposed in 2019.

City officials promised a different kind of shelter: Each Bridge Home would provide programs moving homeless people from the street into stable housing, and each would be temporary.

Both shelters were supported by liberal constituents, who say they believed they needed to step up to provide solutions to homelessness.

In both cases, those now ex-supporters say, the shelters provided no bridge to more permanent housing. Instead, they gave rise to large numbers of people behaving in deranged ways, disrupting neighborhood life. Massive tent encampments formed around the Venice shelter. In Los Feliz, they say, the shelter prompted an increase in crime.

Venice-area Councilman Mike Bonin, supported by the Democratic Socialists of America, angered constituents by refusing to close the shelter. Bonin decided not to run for re-election in 2022. His successor, Traci Park, closed the shelter.

In Los Feliz, the temporary shelter will soon enter its eighth year, largely due to the support of Raman, the area’s councilwoman.

“We gave up asking [Raman] for anything,” said one long-time Los Feliz resident. “They attack you like you’re a NIMBY. You’re a far-right crazy person because you like a safe street for you, your family, and your community.”

“We’re sick of it,” said Chris Laib, the Los Feliz district realtor. “We’ve had it. Our threshold has been met.”

Mayor Bass contends homeless numbers have fallen for two years in a row. Part of Pratt’s showing is because several strong candidates opted out of the race early. And it’s not clear how many of his social media followers are L.A. voters.

Like others I spoke to, Chris Laib said he likely will not vote for Pratt, some of whose ideas he locates on the political fringe.

Others say they believe Pratt cannot win a general election in a heavily Democratic city like Los Angeles, and thus his campaign serves Karen Bass’s re-election in November. They favor Adam Miller, a moderate who has polled in the single digits.

Even so, “it’s the fact that [Pratt] is throwing it in their face like we want to do,” Laib said. “To a certain degree, even if he isn’t successful, it shoots a cannonball across the bow. Maybe charter reform and some other things will actually take place. It isn’t working for us anyway, so why not shock the system. I think that’s part of the appeal.”

For more on the topics I cite above:

My 2023 story in Los Angeles Magazine about skid row, homelessness, meth, and court cases.

The spread of typhus in Los Angeles.

One landlord’s experience renting to a tenant under “Housing First”.

Why the purity of methamphetamine matters.

Latest LA County Medical Examiner report on homeless deaths.

NBC4 report on audit of city/county homeless finances.

Trash volunteers emerge to clean up LA.

Schizophrenia by age and gender.

Homeless fires at abandoned buildings threaten nearby properties.

A homeless fire at one abandoned building consumed a neighbor’s home.

A story about the Los Feliz Bridge Home Shelter

The ABC7 review of Los Angeles Fire Department data published earlier this year.

And, of course, you can read THE LEAST OF US: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, which is where I first wrote about this stuff, breaking the story of meth’s impact on mental health and homelessness.

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PHOTO OF THE WEEK: The Virgin of Marisol Market, L.A.