For years, Shawn Pleasants did nothing but stand up.
He was a high school valetician, went to Yale, got banking services on Wall Street, and started his own business.
And then for years he did nothing but fall.
His business, his home, the car he lived in lost and ended up in the streets of Los Angeles.
For about six years, the home for him and his common-law husband was a meager one near the 7th and Hobart in Koreatown. And like many of LA’s extensive homeless population, Pleasants were addicted to methamphetamine, a cheap and widely available drug.
“It always felt like I fell off a fire escape, and as soon as you hit the ground, the ladder was 12 feet in the air,” Pleasants told me. “I always thought, ‘If only I could get to the first step. ‘But the first step is so far away. ”
Not anymore.
Farmers found the bottom step of the ladder in November 2019 when he went into a residential rehabilitation program. He now lives in an apartment with his husband and has been drug-free for more than 500 days.
We have heard endless policy discussions about shortages of housing and mental health services, but not nearly as much about the addiction epidemic. I do not see how we will ever make a serious dive into the growing homeless population without freeing people on the street – many of whom also struggle with mental illness – from the grip of drugs and alcohol.
What are we doing right, what are we doing wrong, and what should we do differently?
These are the questions I asked Pleasants and others.
“We did not treat drug abuse and access to mental health care the same way we had a cardiac arrest,” said Sarah Dusseault, a board member of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency.
“If you scratch your knee,” Dusseault said, you have a choice from several urgent care centers that are conveniently located, among others.
But it’s harder to get addicted – and it’s hard to get and pay for it. Dusseault said that when someone finally tells an outreach worker that he or she is ready for rehabilitation, the chance is often lost because there is no bed available at that moment.
“I think there needs to be a cultural change, where we do not see anyone using drugs as the scum of the earth and nothing worthy, and that they ended up in this and therefore get what they deserve,” said Dr. Susan Partovi of Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles. She has practiced street medicine for many years and estimates that the vast majority of her patients, many of whom are struggling with some form of trauma, have an addiction issue.
Partovi said there is hope that drugs that can reduce the use of methods can help, and she is also a proponent of safe, legal drug use sites such as those in Denmark and Portugal.
Her colleague Mark Casanova, who traveled to Copenhagen to examine their system, said that drug use was considered a public health problem and not a criminal problem, and that it was acknowledged that not all users were ready for rehabilitation. not.
Casanova said anyone who uses it can go to a safe institution under supervision and use drugs legally, which helps prevent overdose, move drug use off the streets and connect clients with rehabilitation and other services that can help them lives to turn.
This is a limitation and reduction of damage, Casanova said. And that’s the thinking behind California’s SB 57, introduced by several lawmakers in December, that would make overdose prevention programs available in Los Angeles County and in Oakland and San Francisco.
The bill argues that such programs operate in ten countries and are ‘effective in reducing HIV overdose deaths and transmissions, and in increasing access to services, counseling, treatment and other risk reduction.’ Research has also shown that they help reduce the use of emergency medical services, reduce public drug use, reduce spraying and not increase crime or drug use. ‘
Pleasants themselves do not claim to have all the answers. But the story of why he started using – and how he stopped – offers insights.
Pleasants, who is an African-American, grew up primarily in Texas, a nerdy loner, as he describes it, with multiple health problems and poor eyesight from birth. He had the good fortune of having a stable, loving family, and he did so well in school that he had his choice of elite colleges.
But after Yale, he realized he hated his job on Wall Street, and around that time, he was shocked by the death of his younger sister in a fire in Texas. He left banking to start a small business that eventually disbanded, and the death of his mother due to cancer made him feel lost.
When he could no longer pay the rent on his home in Highland Park, he thought he would get a job quickly and rebuild. But that did not happen, and so he surfed on the couch, thankful that he at least had another car, where he and David often slept. But the vehicle was impounded because he kept getting parking tickets despite his disabled poster, and for six years the house in Koreatown was a survival.
Some people develop addiction that leads to homelessness.
Plaintiffs became addicted to drugs due to the despair of homelessness.
Regardless of the tension, Pleasants said, “People turn to drugs for a reason.” You come to believe, “he said,” that this is the only thing that will not let you down. “Meth is easy to get and cheap,” he said. A goat or two will fix you up.
“With the first hit, you think everything will work out. It’s freedom, an escape, ” Pleasants said, adding that meth also had the benefit of keeping you awake at night to prevent attacks.
Farmers found a community of trusted friends and learned to lead their way over drug wars over drug dealers. But there is always a threat that your method could be fatal, and that the danger lurks in the shadows. Once a newcomer in the street demanded that the residents share his stock, and when he refused, he was stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver.
Pleasants also developed pneumonia twice, and his vision deteriorated. He said he spent about $ 600 of his $ 1,000 monthly disability income on storing his belongings, $ 100 on food and $ 300 on drugs. When he first landed in Koreatown, he avoided setting up a tent because it would have indicated that he would stay for a while. But before long, he could not see how he would ever get a job or a decent place to live.
‘I’m a Yale graduate and think,’ How can I even explain to someone the situation I’ve found myself in? “It’s hard to ask someone for help for something you feel you are responsible for because of the choices you have made,” Pleasants said.
When outreach workers passed by, there was no offer for rehabilitation, Pleasants said. They had water or food or clean socks, or sometimes a crib in a shelter or a temporary motel room. But that means you lose most of your possessions, leave the one place where you have determined how to survive, and move to a strange place without any hope of long-term solutions.
How then did he turn it around?
In 2019, he appeared briefly in a story on CNN about homelessness in Los Angeles. Kim Hershman, a local lawyer who attended Yale at the same time as Pleasants, saw the video and went looking for him.
“She said, ‘What do you need?’ ” Remember Pleasants, and she came back for three weeks and earned his trust, and so did David.
Hershman, who is also an African-American, started making calls for help, but found one hurdle after another in a system full of contradictions and hampered by limited resources. But she did not give up. She actually did the intensive, individualized case management that most homeless people need but do not have access to.
Hershman eventually persuaded Pleasants and his partner to briefly stay at her home while she began making medical appointments. Placenta went to an ophthalmologist who told him that he might have gone blind if he had waited much longer. David ends up in surgery for a heart condition.
“It was all very difficult, more than I would ever have expected,” said Hershman, who was looking for residential rehabilitation programs before taking them both to a Tarzana facility. Hershman told me that upon their arrival they would be on the waiting list for those with Medi-Cal. Hershman then took out her checkbook.
“They said it would cost $ 10,877 per person per month,” Pleasants recalled. “She said well, and suddenly we were number 1 on the list.”
Eventually Medi-Cal covered the bills, but rehab can be very difficult to get without money. Pleasants said he got through four days of detox without too much effort, and then struggled a bit in the residential program, while on the other hand trying to imagine a new life for himself.
But he kept saying to himself, “If I had come this far …” Two months of care, which includes classes, counseling, and behavior change, is followed by six months in a sober home. David struggled a little more than he did, but they both made it through and now live in a Section 8 apartment in Van Nuys.
Pleasants said he is still dealing with the trauma of being on the streets for so long, but he hopes to find a career in which he can influence public policy improvements. He has just completed a training program at Southwest Los Angeles College called Careers for a Cause, in which participants learn how to use their experiences to help others.
He is on boards and committees and remains attached to the homeless advocacy group Ktown for All and the St. James Episcopal Church, who helped him when he was down. And he tries to follow his late mother’s advice to just keep going.
One day we had a few blocks from St. James walked to where he had lived for six years. Pleasants found an old friend – Salvador – who still lives in a tent that was next to the old place of Pleasants. They hugged and as we walked away, the pleasures seemed all the more determined to help others get to the bottom step of the ladder.