Column: ‘I can’t deal with life’: The response to MacArthur Park’s drug epidemic is inadequate

She was bent at the waist, frail and naked on the dirty pavement at the end of the road where fires smoke, drug users gather day and night, and death lurks.

Slowly, he pulled into the back parking lot Yoshinoya Restaurant at Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street. It wasn’t the usual way, but in MacArthur Park, you see it every day.

The head hangs down. The eyes went dark. Fentanyl, over time, attacks the muscles and spine, cuts people in half, twists them into knots, and buries them. In 2022, 1,910 fentanyl overdose deaths were recorded in Los Angeles County.

When the man paused in the parking lot, I approached. His face was scarred with gunshot wounds and blood-red scabs and sores. This is also a common sight, and a sign of fentanyl being laced with the animal tranquilizer xylazine.

He said his name is Aaron and that he came to LA two years ago from Louisiana. He couldn’t remember what happened to his shoes. One foot was bare, the other was covered in a dirty sock. He told me that when he uses fentanyl, “It’s like, you just start floating outside of yourself.” But then the withdrawal sets in, you feel sick and need another hit.

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer winner.

He was still a young man. If she had the chance, I asked, would she go to rehab and try to start her life over?

“Everybody wants it,” he said. “But is it possible? Don’t hesitate.”

Aaron, 31, said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. When I asked what would help him and other people to become clean, he said, “People don’t want to be clean.” They want to go up.” It would be better, he said, to just give them prescriptions for the medicines they crave.

He said: “I can’t deal with a life out of control.

A homeless man, wrapped in a blanket, walks past two men fixing a pipe to inject him with fentanyl near a street in Westlake known for drug use.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

I’ve seen a lot of Aarons over the past few months. They hang out in the park, sleep on the streets around, and hang out in the drug scene again I marched in sad situations physical breakdown, stripped of everything but the will to get the next hit.

So, what is done about it?

The short answer is less, but not enough.

Los Angeles City Council member Euniss Hernandez, who represents the Westlake area, scheduled a news conference Thursday morning to announce “plans aimed at improving public health, safety and cleanliness in the park.”

I went already written about some of his plans, including cleaning workers, peace ambassadors, drug overdose response teams and a health care organization aimed at treating the sick and getting them into stable homes. A homeless resource center is up and running, and a small playground, which burned down a few months ago, will be rebuilt in the new year.

All of this is admirable, but the addiction problem in the MacArthur Park area is a public health emergency, and I feel like I’m watching firefighters go up and down a burning building without enough personnel or equipment.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

The problem in the MacArthur Park neighborhood remains a public health emergency despite efforts to direct homeless clients to housing and treatment.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

There was a time when people were arrested for drug possession and given the option of going to jail or treatment. But laws, policies and attitudes changed, and there is a general consensus that addiction should be treated as a disease rather than a crime.

The problem is that for many Aarons out there, it is not treated at all.

Dr. Gary Tsai, who heads the substance abuse prevention and control division of the LA County Department of Public Health, said various community and nonprofit groups have targeted MacArthur Park.

The list includes substance abuse counselors, mental health professionals, substance abuse prevention centers and social workers who try to guide homeless clients to housing and treatment. Harm reduction teams provide clean syringes and syringes to prevent the spread of disease while trying to build relationships that can lead to treatment.

“I think we all want quick results,” Tsai said, but he pointed that out death by excess have increased as services have been increased.

Unfortunately, fentanyl is highly addictive, further complicating what was already an incredible challenge across the country: Only about a quarter of the nearly 50 million people with addiction problems receive treatment. And for those not in treatment, Tsai said, 95% “are not interested or see no need for such services.”

My colleague Emily Alpert Reyes reported earlier this year on Tsai’s strategies for “getting more people in the door” of treatment programs and keeping them there. That means lowering service barriers and zero-tolerance rules for expiring customers. Tsai also worked to increase the use of drugs that help reduce drug cravings.

A man collapsed on 7th Street, about a block from Langer’s Delicatessen-Restaurant, in the MacArthur Park neighborhood.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Undoubtedly, many drug users will benefit from such methods. But UCLA psychologist and addiction expert Richard Rawson said some people — especially those who use a lot of drugs and may have mental health problems — are too disabled and “can’t make the decision to go into treatment.”

“If you have a serious drug user… Rawson said.

“But when you have someone who is so disabled that they can’t even stand up … to say that you’re going to give them a reduction in damage and hope that they don’t die, I think that falls short of the responsibility that we have.” to each other and to people who are very sick.”

He thinks policy makers have to find a way to walk a fine line, respecting people’s rights while realizing “how much they are at risk of dying.” And if they are very sick, they may have to do something forced.

“We have to have a way to say these people really need help and get them into treatment,” Rawson said. It’s not a prison, but some kind of health center where we can start treatment and help them rewire their brains to make voluntary decisions and work on next steps.

Social media professional Catalina Hinojosa gets a hug from Barron Gay at the MacArthur Park Metro station. Gay is trying to find a place to live for his family.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Catalina Hinojosa, a former meth user who went to prison and now leads an outreach team that tries to talk drug users into housing and treatment, told me she would prefer more forceful tactics.

He leads the Christ-Centered Ministries team that works out of the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station, canvassing the grounds from 7 to 9 every morning to find clients, and often meets the opposition of the most addicted people.

“They need someone to make decisions for them, because they can’t do it for themselves,” said Hinojosa who told me that he is thankful that he went to prison because it forced him to rethink his life and get help.

Recently, she was overwhelmed by one client she was able to retain, who was resistant to fentanyl addiction treatment. “This girl is the third of my age, and she looks like me,” said Hinojosa, who tries to get her customers’ attention by telling them about all the users who “fall,” her time to die.

This echoes a decades-long debate in California about serious mental illness and unnecessary treatment. Others argue that forced treatment would not be necessary if adequate care and preventive measures were in place.

But they are not, and people continue to suffer, wasting away in the public eye.

Lights and drugs lie on the ground in MacArthur Park after police told suspected drug users to empty their pockets.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The same thing happens with addiction. Even with all the teams working in the MacArthur Park area, it’s not enough to meet the demand.

The shocking daily display of human misery is a serious, deep-rooted tragedy, and Councilor Hernandez himself cited a severe lack of needed resources. Making a difference will require more prevention, intervention, treatment and something traditionally lacking from local leaders – a consistent, long-term, coordinated sequence.

Successful rehab is not a driving experience. It is an annual obligation.

But there are enough success stories to hold hope, and to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

I spoke with 35-year-old Andrew, who is one year into a residential rehabilitation program at Beacon House in San Pedro after battling depression and addiction to alcohol, cocaine and fentanyl throughout his life.

He said: “It took me 20 years to get here, but now I don’t want to kill myself every day.”

People flock to the group in MacArthur Park, a neighborhood known for drug use.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

In the parking lot where I met Aaron, he told me that he had overdosed and had been revived with Narcan about 20 times. A guy named James, 41, pushed his bike next to us and was listening to our conversation, so I asked if he had any thoughts on how to deal with the drug epidemic.

“It’s a mandatory detox,” said James.

I asked what he was doing.

“I’m addicted,” said James. His drug is crystal meth, not fentanyl, which he considers more harmful.

“I’ve seen a lot of people die out here,” James said, and something drastic has to be done to end this madness. “Within five to 10 days … a lucky kid comes to LA, and a week later, he’s shoeless. And he is dead.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com