A recent study from California researchers found over a third of homeless people were regular drug users.
University of California San Francisco researchers surveyed several thousand adults experiencing homelessness over the span of a year and across eight counties. Their investigation was published last month in the medical journal JAMA.
Thirty-seven percent reported regular drug use in the prior six months. About two-thirds said they’d used drugs regularly at some point in their life.
Methamphetamine use, 33%, was the most common.
About a fifth of those who reported regular drug use said they wanted treatment but couldn’t get it, according to the study.
The mean age of the homeless people who participated in the survey was 46.
“Our research shows there is an increased risk of becoming homeless if you use drugs; and that homelessness itself increases drug use because people use it as a coping strategy,” Dr. Margot Kushel, the director of the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative and senior author of the report, said in a UCSF news release.
Despite public perception, most people who are homeless aren’t using drugs regularly, the UCSF news release noted. A quarter of the homeless people in the survey had never used drugs.
But drug use was higher among the homeless population (37%) than the general public (13%).
California has over 187,000 homeless people, about a quarter of the nation’s homeless population.
And there’s no disputing the connection between drug use and homelessness for Tom Wolf, a drug recovery advocate and San Francisco native who has lived the life of a homeless addict and emerged from the other side to push for change.
He’s now director of West Coast initiatives for the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions.
“We can argue all day about the causes of homelessness. And there’s a hundred different ways that someone can become homeless,” Wolf said. “But for the people that are experiencing homelessness today, all you have to do is go to Skid Row in L.A. or go to the Tenderloin (neighborhood) in San Francisco and walk the streets. You don’t even have to talk to people. You can walk the streets, and you can see the open drug use and the various states of suffering that people are experiencing as a direct result of fentanyl and meth addiction. It’s obvious. It’s in our face.”
Wolf said high rents and a lack of housing might be the primary reason people fall into homelessness. But he said drug addiction and untreated mental illness are also drivers of homelessness.
“And more importantly, they are what keep people homeless,” Wolf said.
He called drug addiction “an anchor to the street.”
The UCSF study found 42% of homeless people who had used drugs did so before they became homeless, and 23% began using regularly afterwards.
Wolf said drug use and homelessness can be a vicious cycle. Simply housing people without addiction treatment and proper supervision won’t break the cycle, he said.
Wolf said homeless addicts need help, and they need to be given the choice of going to treatment. And then they need to be placed in drug-free supportive housing to help lengthen their recovery and avoid a relapse.
He said there are disparities from city to city in treatment facilities and funding, so it could be difficult for some homeless addicts to get the help they need.
Wolf mentioned a 2019 California Policy Lab report that found unsheltered people were more than five times as likely as sheltered people to report a substance abuse condition.
And he said the UCSF study undersells the scope of the homeless drug addiction problem, because it relied on self-reported data. A lot of addicts will deny they have a problem, he said.
“I’ll tell you this from my own personal experience, from when I was homeless in 2018. If you came up to me and asked me if I was struggling with drug addiction, my answer to you would have been no, I’m just out here chilling. Honestly,” Wolf said.
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