What is the California Peace Campaign?

The California Peace Campaign is a movement of individuals and organizations seeking to restore peace to our state by ending drug deaths, open drug scenes, untreated severe mental illness, and homelessness. We are open to all who want to advocate with us. We are nonpartisan and want policymakers to work together to enact our agenda. We met at an anti-fentanyl protest in Venice Beach, in a tour of Skid Row, and across the state in the spring and summer of 2021. We are parents of children killed by fentanyl, recovering addicts, parents of homeless addicts, and others, came together to create the California Peace Campaign.

Who funds you?

We are entirely self-funded by the members of the Coalition. We will accept donations but only from individuals who have no financial interest in the future of mental health care and homeless treatment in California.

Why did the California Peace Campaign form?

We believe drug deaths of all kinds are the number one problem facing the United States and California. In 2020, over 93,000 Americans died from drug poisoning or overdoses. Over 9,000 Californians died from drug poisoning or overdoses in 2020. 

Homelessness rose in California by 30 percent between 2010 and 2020 while it declined nationally by 18 percent in the rest of the United States. Today California has over 161,000 homeless residents, 113,000 of whom are unsheltered. 

Nationwide, around one third of the homeless have severe mental illness, and the severely mentally ill are ten times more likely to be in a jail or prison than receiving treatment from a state mental hospital. The California Hospital Association recommends a minimum of 50 psychiatric beds per 100,000. In 2017, California had 17 beds per 100,000, leaving thousands with poor care. This unjust and immoral situation contributes to the chaos and sorrow Californians see in their families, their communities, and on their sidewalks. 

Why is it called the California Peace Campaign?

Our movement is called the California Peace Campaign because California lacks peace in our communities and in the minds of many of our citizens. It doesn’t have to be this way. When our streets are walkable again because homelessness, severe mental illness, and drug addiction and poisoning are banished, we will know peace. 

Are you guys liberals or conservatives? Democrats or Republicans?

We are explicitly nonpartisan. We have come from all political parties and ideologies to develop an agenda that is practical and effective. We have looked to the best solutions from around the U.S. and the world. We are anti-ideology. We want to do what works. And we are open-minded, and will consider changing our mind on important issues. We aim to be like Mothers Against Drug Driving (MADD) in advocating policies but not endorsing political candidates. That said, we will praise policymakers who show leadership and do the right thing. But we are choosing not to endorse candidates at this time.

What makes the drug death crisis America’s most pressing problem?

The drug crisis is America’s biggest issue because so many are dying through overdoses and poisonings. Over 93,000 people died from overdose and poisoning in 2020, up from 70,000 in 2019 and 17,000 in 2000. That’s unacceptable. In 2020, nearly 9,000 Californians died from drug overdoses and poisonings — more than twice as many as died in vehicle accidents. And San Francisco has the fourth-highest drug overdose death rate of any major city in the United States, rising sevenfold between 1985 and 2020. 

What about victims of drug dealing and shootings involving drug dealers?

We are very interested in expanding our work to including families of victims of homicide related to the drug crisis. Most of our agenda would also reduce violence associated with open drug scenes, including murder, rape, robbery, and arson.

What makes fentanyl different from other drugs?

Fentanyl is more fatal and more addictive than any other drug available. It is fifty times more powerful than heroin and up to one hundred times more powerful than morphine. It is a drug so potent that a saleable amount can be sent through the mail without detection. That also means its fatality rate is immense. In 2020, the Drug Enforcement Agency published its Drug Threat Assessment, which reported that half the drug deaths in the country and in California were attributable to fentanyl. Its potency also makes it perfect for counterfeiting opioids pills because it can be easily disguised and sold for mark-up. But that also means that dealers end up poisoning and killing some of their buyers who think they’re taking something different and less harmful. 

What’s the difference between an overdose and poisoning?

An overdose is when someone accidentally or intentionally takes more of a drug than their body can handle. A poisoning is when someone believes they are buying one type of drug, but are instead purchasing a different or contaminated substance, which injures or kills them. 

What is Harm Reduction?

Harm reduction addresses the harms that result from addiction, such as HIV susceptibility, abscesses, and overdoses, without requiring abstinence for treatment. Harm reduction practitioners distribute free needles to reduce the spread of disease, give out Narcan to reverse overdoses, and provide free medical care. They also advocate for supervised consumption sites where drug users can take drugs under the watch of medical professionals, which allows medical providers to reverse overdoses.

Harm reduction practitioners provide valuable services and genuinely help drug users live safer lives. But many proponents of harm reduction misunderstand the nature of addiction by avoiding any measures requiring abstinence. Many addicts will not stop using voluntarily. By supplying housing and other services with no strings attached, San Francisco misses an opportunity to incentivize addicts to get better. 

While some harm reduction measures are positive, they are not enough to stop addiction, as skyrocketing drug deaths show. We need to provide real incentives to drug users to break their addiction, including contingency-based housing predicated on abstinence and the introduction of mandatory treatment as an alternative to incarceration. 

Are you calling for a new drug war?

No. The drug war focused on incarceration rather than rehabilitation and peace. We oppose mass incarceration, overly long jail sentences for drug use, and arresting people who are using drugs peacefully in their own homes. But without mandatory treatment for drug users who break the law (apart from their use of illicit drugs), the alternative to incarceration is the growth of open drug scenes.

What is California’s Senate Bill 350 or “Alexandra’s Law”?

Senate Bill 350’s “Alexandra’s Law” is named for Alexandra Capelouto who was murdered in 2020 at the age of twenty by fentanyl poisoning. She had purchased a counterfeit prescription opioid pill from a drug dealer on Snapchat. 

SB 350 is modeled after the notice provided to drunk drivers, which advises convicted drunk drivers that driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs is “extremely dangerous to human life.” Once warned, if their behavior continues and someone is killed, they can be charged with murder. Similarly, SB 350 would provide notice to convicted fentanyl drug dealers that their product can kill people. Through the warning, drug dealers have the chance to change their ways, instead of immediate incarceration. However, if they repeat their offense and someone dies from their product, they can then be charged with voluntary manslaughter or murder. While seemingly harsh, this measure is fair to the dealer, who was notified, and to victims and families who deserve justice.

What else do you want?

We want California Governor Gavin Newsom to lead the effort to restore mandatory drug treatment as an alternative to jail for people who break the law, for local governments to break-up the open-air drug scenes, and for drug dealers to stop selling dangerous drugs.

But won’t that require changing the laws and maybe the constitution?

There is a lot that the governor can do now but long-term he may need to change laws and even pass ballot initiatives. But that is what past governors did to create the situation we are in. And nearly 90% of Californians surveyed in 2019 said they support “involuntary commitment of homeless individuals who have severe mental/behavioral issues that may be a danger or harm to themselves or others in the community.”

Are you only concerned about fentanyl?

No, other hard drugs pose a major danger, too. From 2008 to 2020, meth overdose deaths rose 500 percent in San Francisco, and half of psychiatric visits to San Francisco General Hospital are related to meth. In 2019, meth was the most common drug in California overdose deaths. We are focused on fentanyl because it is what threatens or has killed loved ones of members of our coalition. Meth, cocaine, heroin, prescription opioids, and other hard drugs are also dangerous and deadly and our policies aim to stop overdoses and poisonings from those drugs as well.

How did it get so bad?

In 2014, California voters passed Proposition 47 to make three grams of hard drugs for personal use a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Proposition 47 also ended jail sentences for people convicted of many nuisance crimes, including public use of hard drugs, public defecation, and shoplifting.

Didn’t Portugal legalize all drugs?

No, that’s a myth. It’s true that Portugal expanded drug treatment, but people are still arrested and fined for possession of heroin, meth, and other hard drugs. And drug users are typically sent to a regionally administered “Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction,” composed of a social worker, lawyer, and doctor who encourage, push and coerce drug treatment.

How can cities break up open-air drug scenes like the ones in Skid Row and the Tenderloin?

Cities need to use carrots and sticks, services and law enforcement. A major study found that five European cities (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna, and Zurich) ended open drug scenes through the combination of social services and law enforcement. The same worked in the U.S. In North Carolina, police broke up drug dealing with community outreach workers. They offered the dealers jobs and help with restarting their lives as an alternative to arrest and incarceration.

But even if you break up the drug scene, won’t people still be able to buy drugs?

Yes, but it will be harder, the drugs will more expensive, and the drug dealing will be less disruptive. Ending the open drug scenes in the Tenderloin and Skid Row will eliminate an attractive nuisance for addicts and those trying to recover.

What about opioid alternatives?

Many progressive nations like the Netherlands use medically-assisted mandatory drug treatment where opioid addicts get a prescription to Suboxone or methadone and an assertive case worker to help them employment, re-affiliate with families and friends, and recover from addiction. We should expand the use of Suboxone, under a doctor’s supervision, to help addicts quit fentanyl and heroin.

What do experts say?

One leading expert is Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University addiction specialist and advisor to President Joe Biden. “What’s happened in these places [San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland] is just the removing of all pressure,” he said. “The thinking was, ‘Oh, people will just show up automatically and go into treatment.’ But that doesn’t happen very often in addiction. Usually there’s pressure.”

What are open air drug scenes?

Open air drug scenes are places like the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco and Skid Row and Venice Beach of Los Angeles where people of all ages and races inject and smoke meth, cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl on the sidewalk. Large homeless encampments, prostitution, and violence are common features of open air drug scenes.

Why do open air drug scenes increase crime? 

Open air drug scenes increase crime first and foremost by entrenching an illegal drug economy in a concentrated area. With the drugs come assault, theft, prostitution, homelessness, and general public disorder. All of these braid together to create a rising tide of lawlessness and despair. 

What is mandatory drug treatment?

Mandatory drug treatment is treatment offered to drug users who’ve broken the law as an alternative to prison or jail. Specialized “drug courts” handle cases of those who are addicted, and their offering of mandatory drug treatment has been shown to reduce recidivism. 

Mandatory treatment works nearly as well as voluntary treatment. One study found that people sentenced through drug courts were two-thirds less likely to be re-arrested than individuals prosecuted through the normal criminal justice system. Another group of researchers estimated that every dollar spent on drug courts saves approximately $4 in spending on incarceration and health care. Eighty percent of treatment providers say they support short jail stays to motivate treatment compliance. Some parents want their children to go to mandatory treatment once it is clear that they will not ever voluntarily do so.

We can provide the right treatment. Inpatient treatment works better than outpatient treatment, and we should expand inpatient treatment so that patients aren’t required to leave right when their cravings peak. For those addicted to opiates, medically assisted treatment is a proven method to stop addiction.

How many of the homeless are severely mentally ill or addicted to drugs?

Nationally, around a third of the homeless have severe mental illness. In Los Angeles, two-thirds of the homeless have severe mental illness, addiction, or both. In San Francisco, half of the homeless have both severe mental illness and a drug addiction.

What are the current services for the mentally ill?

Current services for the mentally ill are woefully inadequate. The California Hospital Association recommends a minimum of 50 psychiatric beds per 100,000 people. In 2017, California had 17 beds per 100,000. This means people needing treatment and stabilization often must wait for several hours, sometimes an entire day, to get a bed, even when their needs are urgent. 

Someone who is severely mentally ill is nearly 10 times more likely to be behind bars than in a state mental hospital. The Los Angeles County Jail has more mental health beds than any hospital in the country. Many of the severely mentally ill do not know or understand that they have a mental illness, making treatment nearly impossible without mandates. Voluntary care should be pursued before mandatory care, but sometimes the mentally ill need mandated care.

In California, when someone has a severe mental illness and poses a threat to themselves or others or is gravely disabled, that person can be mandated into treatment in a hospital for up to 72 hours. Unfortunately, many people with severe mental illness need more time than that to stabilize and return to health. Many of the severely mentally ill who are homeless cycle between jail and short hospital stays, never getting well.

What is conservatorship and assisted outpatient treatment?

Voluntary care should be attempted before mandatory care. But sometimes mandatory care is what patients need to prevent them from harming themselves or others, or ending up in prison, which is what happens today. There are more mentally ill in the Los Angeles County Jail today than any other psychiatric institution in the country.

There are two main ways to require long-term psychiatric care in California: conservatorship and assisted outpatient treatment. In the past, such things could be abused. But under conservatorship, which is called guardianship in other states, a judge appoints a relative or other qualified person to make financial, legal, and other key decisions on behalf of a person deemed “gravely disabled” by a physician. This is the most serious of decisions and cannot be made lightly. This is the measure of last resort overseen by the courts.

Under assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), courts can require mentally ill people to follow treatment plans, like taking medication, to prevent violence, addiction, and crime. Those who do not comply with their treatment plans can be held for up to seventy-two hours to determine if they meet the standard for involuntary hospitalization. 

Evidence suggests that AOT is highly effective. Nine out of ten AOT programs studied in California significantly reduced criminal justice involvement. Six out of seven programs reduced homelessness. AOT in other states has been shown to reduce homelessness by up to 74 percent and arrests of the mentally ill by up to 83 percent.

AOT prevents the mass lock-up of patients in mental hospitals. AOT realizes the promise of community-based treatment by allowing the mentally ill to live outside of institutions. This lighter mandate is proven to work, which is cause for celebration.

What is the Housing First model?

The Housing First model is an approach to the homelessness crisis that sees housing and poverty as the primary drivers of homelessness. Housing First advocates believe that building more affordable housing would fully solve the homelessness crisis. They often see housing as a human right and essential to human dignity. They believe that permanent housing should be offered to the homeless without preconditions. They hold that other solutions to the homeless issue—like temporary shelters, housing with preconditions, and mandatory drug and psychiatric treatment—misdiagnose the problem and should not be implemented. 

Proponents of Housing First are right to encourage the building of permanent supportive housing, but their philosophy goes too far. By excluding shelter and transitional housing, Housing First causes many homeless people to live unsheltered, where they are more likely to be victims of violence or suffer from addiction. Unsheltered homelessness also encourages the creation of open drug scenes. And, many homeless people do want access to basic shelter. There are frequently long lines outside of shelters in San Francisco and some homeless people have to be turned away.

In San Francisco, it seems unlikely that Housing First will ever build enough housing to end homelessness. Guided by the Housing First philosophy, San Francisco passed Proposition C, a new tax which will likely raise $800 million over the next two years. Yet it is expected to only add 500 new permanent supportive housing units for the homeless over the next five years, which will barely dent the number of homeless people in San Francisco, which currently totals over 8,000. Permanent supportive housing units are expensive to build in California and take many years to complete. 

Housing First doesn’t recognize the root of the homeless problem: drug addiction and severe mental illness. People are usually on the streets because they are addicted to drugs or struggle with untreated severe mental illness. Policies that ignore these factors have significant downsides. Housing First has been shown to not improve the health outcomes of those it houses, because it gives housing without preconditions. Contingent housing, which requires its recipients to follow certain rules, like abstinence or accepting medical treatment, has been shown to improve health outcomes and self-sufficiency.

What is contingency-based housing?

Contingency-based housing is housing offered to the homeless with conditions, usually requiring that they address their underlying substance abuse or mental illness through abstinence, therapy, or medication. It has been shown to effectively house people as well as make them healthier and self-sufficient. In contrast, Housing First has been shown to have either no effect or a negative effect on its clients’ health and well-being. 

What is the difference between sheltered and unsheltered homelessness?

According to HUD, an unsheltered homeless person resides in a place not meant for human habitation, such as a car, park, sidewalk, or abandoned building. A sheltered homeless person resides in an emergency shelter, or transitional housing, or supportive housing.

What is Cal-Psych? 

Cal-Psych would be a new, statewide agency to tackle the problems of homelessness, drug addiction, and untreated severe mental illness. It would serve these populations and get them off the streets through new policies and assertive social workers with “whatever it takes” mandates. you can read a detailed overview of Cal-Psych here.

How will Cal-Psych work?

Cal-Psych is centered around empowered and assertive case workers who have the resources and solutions they need to get the homeless off the streets, and the addicted and mentally ill into treatment or other support. Cal-Psych case workers will be able to track their clients and know if they stop taking medication, break their abstinence, leave their housing, or commit a crime. There will be enough Cal-Psych case workers such that they have the time to provide the support their clients’ needs. Cal-Psych is based around solutions that work: contingency-based housing, expanded voluntary and mandatory treatment for the addicted and mentally ill, and a right to shelter. By being a statewide agency, Cal-Psych will have the buying power and accountability needed to solve the issue of homelessness. 

Why do you want to amend Prop 47?

Proposition 47, or “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act”, reclassified seven non-violent categories of crime as misdemeanors, limiting the length and type of sentence available for those crimes. Prop 47 has the important goal of reducing mass incarceration. It made possession of up to three grams of hard drugs for personal use a misdemeanor and ended jail time for many nuisance crimes, including public use of hard drugs, public defecation, and shoplifting of items worth less than $950.

Unfortunately, it has had negative side effects. Through high tolerance for public drug use, Prop 47 has encouraged an increase in addiction-related crime and disorder like shoplifting rings, public defecation, public urination, public drug use, and more. Users can’t be jailed for possession, which allows them to continue to use drugs and doesn’t disincentivize addiction.

We want to amend Prop 47 to make it possible to arrest addicts who commit crimes related to their addictions and offer them mandatory treatment as an alternative to jail so that they can win their lives back, and so our streets are clean, open, and safe. 

How is social media part of the drug trade?

Drug dealers sell on apps like Instagram and Snapchat (where messages between dealer and buyer can disappear minutes after they’re sent and received). Through hashtags, buyers, both minors and adults, find or are sought out by local drug dealers who then deliver the substances to the buyer’s location. These transactions are incredibly hard to monitor due to the nature of the internet and the privacy-centric ethos of the apps’ business models. And, social media is causing a paradigm shift in fentanyl deaths; during COVID, dealers took to social media and bored teenagers responded to ads for prescription pills, most which contained highly addictive amounts of fentanyl, some deadly amounts. In the past year there has been a dramatic rise of 13-17 year olds’ deaths by fentanyl poisoning, who often times tried drugs for the first time. Teenagers should learn from their mistakes, not die from them.

What is Section 230?

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Congress passed in 1996, protects Internet and communications providers from being held liable for the activity that takes place on their websites. The Act made sense at the time, when the Internet was new, but today it gives the media companies too much power. Selling illicit and potentially fatal substances should not hide behind speech protections. Nor should censorship. Nor should the manipulation of the psychologies of our children. Reforming Section 230 may be an important step in breaking up the app-based drug markets that lead to fentanyl poisoning, reversing the harms created by social media companies on adolescent psychology, and make the Internet a force for freedom, not censorship.