Mandate addiction treatment. Audit homelessness nonprofits. Provide housing and education to help people who can get back on their feet. Supply mental health treatment for those who can’t. Those are some of the prescriptions for improving our cities’ handling of the drug-fueled homelessness crisis as suggested by Jared Klickstein, who discusses his own time spent dealing with addiction, homelessness, crime, and indifferent official agencies on the newest episode of the Voice Weekly podcast.
Klickstein is the author of the new book Crooked Smile from Bombardier Books, in which he describes going from being a child of heroin addicts to his own addiction to heroin and the dark life he led on Skid Row in Los Angeles and San Francisco’s Tenderloin. As he relates to Voice Weekly cohosts Melissa Caen and John Zipperer, it’s a tale he’s lived to tell only after getting treatment himself, something that was never mandated for him but which saved his life.
He went from scolding his fellow students at the University of California, Santa Cruz for their use of heroin to working for his heroin dealer as a delivery driver — and being forced to use meth by the dealer. He says school counselors and professors failed to do anything other than enable his use, a pattern that would be played out by city agencies and public policy as he later lived on the streets and survived by thievery.
I want people to stop dying slowly in the gutter for all of us to watch while we walk around the downtown of our city.
Today he’s healthy, back with his family, employed — and a newly minted author — while he makes up for more than a decade of his life lost to drugs. He hopes he can offer inspiration to others struggling with addiction, showing that sobriety can be achieved. The cost of failure is measured not just in the unsafe tent encampments across West Coast cities but in the mortality count.
“Since 2020, I know over 25 people that have overdosed and died — 25 friends. I want my friends to stop dying,” Klickstein said. “I want people to stop dying slowly in the gutter for all of us to watch while we walk around the downtown of our city.”
Listen below or download the episode wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
