Tracy Ellis: It’s The Elephant in the Dome, the official podcast of the Washington State Senate Republican caucus. I’m Tracy Ellis, with Senator Chris Gildon. Washington is still facing a homelessness crisis. Is the legislature doing enough? We’re joined by investigative journalist Jonathan Choe. Jonathan, thanks for coming up and joining us today. Appreciate you.
Jonathan Choe: Absolutely. Next time we got to do it in person.
Sen. Chris Gildon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. So I guess let’s jump into it. And I’m going to start off with something that may be a little bit provocative. And I may start off with a statement that says: is homelessness actually the problem? Right? I remember a couple of years back—a long time ago, actually—I read Dr. Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And one of the things that he was talking about in regards to solving problems is “diagnose before you prescribe,” right? To make sure that you’re solving the right problem. And to my mind, whenever someone says that we need to solve the homelessness problem, well, that entails that housing is the solution. But is housing the solution to the problem that we have in Washington state?
Jonathan Choe: Great distinction. And it really depends, because what we’re seeing currently real-time on the streets of Washington state—especially in Seattle and King County—is a drug-fueled mental illness crisis that is just exacerbating the problem. And fentanyl has been the game changer. We’ve never seen a lethal drug like this, where we’re seeing a record number of drug overdoes on the streets, an entire generation of Americans being wiped out. And also, it’s what’s keeping the crisis going right now. So is housing part of the solution? Eventually. But the priority must be treatment and detox. And I truly believe, like the author has laid out and based on my own reporting and research, what we’re seeing again is a drug crisis on the streets, and it’s being misdiagnosed as a homeless crisis.
Sen. Chris Gildon: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely spot on because you can give someone housing, but until you address that root cause of the addiction and everything that goes along with it—or maybe the undiagnosed mental illness—you’re not really solving the root problem. So you’re out there on the street all the time. What are people’s willingness to accept services?
Jonathan Choe: Look, I can tell you right now—this is based off of my five-plus years of reporting, which includes my time at KOMO News as the homelessness reporter out there. But also, you know, my time now here at Discovery Institute and Turning Point USA covering Seattle—not just Seattle, but the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland. And the bottom line here is that we are seeing just people who are, quote-unquote, “service resistant”. Eight out of ten people, when I ask them, “Hey, do you want housing? Do you want to go in right now and get better?” they say no. And I ask them, why not? They say, “Well, actually, I don’t need housing because I already have a family and I do have a home, but I can’t stay there under that roof because I’ve got a sister and my family doesn’t want me to be around this fentanyl use”. So that’s number one. A lot of these people on the streets actually do have homes.
Sen. Chris Gildon: Okay.
Jonathan Choe: And the second is that, again, the fentanyl has been the game changer. It’s so addictive right now. People are willing to sell their bodies for money; they’re willing to steal; they’re willing to rob people just to get that high.
Sen. Chris Gildon: You know, I hear people say all the time that drug addiction is a mental illness, but it doesn’t really seem like we treat it as such, right? Like if you’re out there on the street and you see a senior citizen who has Alzheimer’s, and you ask them if they want to get off the street and they say “no,” that would be elder abuse if you didn’t give them help. But we don’t treat people who are addicted the same way. You know, we say that it’s a mental illness, but we don’t treat it as such.
Jonathan Choe: Look, we’ve heard all the time from our doctors and even medical professionals who say, “get a second or third opinion”. That’s what we need in this case, because the academics, the medical professionals who initially diagnosed this problem on the streets—who initially gave the recommendations and the solutions—well, those aren’t working anymore. The current plan is not working. We’re using strategies like harm reduction—giving away free meth pipes, fentanyl foil right now at the expense of taxpayers—for solutions like, or rather, problems like the AIDS crisis or diseases on the streets. We’re using those same strategies to treat a fentanyl addiction. Those aren’t working right now. These harm reduction kits are essentially suicide kits. Critics will say taxpayers are funding instruments that now allow drug users to use fentanyl in perpetuity. Look, the DEA just a few years ago, you may recall, had the “One Pill Can Kill” campaign. Okay, that basically meant that they know how lethal fentanyl is, and you don’t know what’s now laced in the powder and pills. So when someone takes it, they could easily overdose and die. And yet, at King County Public Health, we’re giving away the foil so they can smoke fentanyl. We’re giving away the straws. We’re giving away the cookers. Make it make sense.
Sen. Chris Gildon: I think you bring up a really good point that probably most people don’t realize is that governments across our state—many areas of our state—are giving out, they call it harm reduction, but they’re giving out the tools to enable people to slowly commit suicide by illegal drug on our streets. And I wonder how much money is going to that.
Jonathan Choe: We’re working on those numbers at Discovery Institute, but we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. Look, you come to Seattle, I’ll give you the tour myself. We go to 12th and Jackson, we go to Chinatown, we go to 3rd and Pike, we go to 3rd and Pine. You’re going to see foil remnants everywhere. You’re going to see needle caps everywhere. You’re going to see glass meth pipes broken on the streets. This is all being given out by numerous providers right now, again, that are taxpayer-funded. Look, I get it if it’s private entities that are doing this on their own volition, but the fact that you and I, without really any choice, are now being forced to have our taxpayer dollars used for this? This is out of control.
Sen. Chris Gildon: Yeah. I think most people across our state, if they actually realized that this was happening and their tax dollars were going to this, I think their heads would explode. But I think even more so is they would be surprised by what I perceive as a huge lack of accountability. You know, they give out these harm reduction type items, but then what type of follow-up does the state government do? Or do they just say, “Go enjoy your drugs”?
Jonathan Choe: There’s absolutely zero follow-up when it comes to the efficacy, the outcomes of whether or not these harm reduction kits are even working or actually saving lives, and more importantly, the money. Nobody knows what happens to the money once the city, the county, or the state gives it to the nonprofit provider. It’s like—poof—it’s gone. I mean, look, we’re finally seeing the headlines on King County and Seattle, you know, untraceable money—millions of dollars that have gone to certain agencies, especially here in the “homeless industrial complex”. And we can’t account for it. This system—this accountability system—is broken.
Sen. Chris Gildon: You know, we’ve always tried to do that in the state Senate—at least I have. Anything that spends money, I always try to attach to it measures of performance, measures of effectiveness, a review period where we come back and we review. Is this meeting the intended objective? Is it not? So many times those just get voted right down and rejected by the majority party. It’s just absolutely infuriating a lot of times. But you have to wonder why.
Jonathan Choe: You have to wonder why it’s being voted down. Because as an observer, as a journalist, I’m wondering why, right? Because that’s what’s leading to the fraud, waste, and abuse.
Sen. Chris Gildon: Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything that’s going good with the current model, the current system?
Jonathan Choe: Look, I think the only positives I’m seeing now—and I have to wait and hesitate, I’m kind of caught off guard by that question because my coverage, again, is the accountability reporting that has continued to spotlight a lot of the crime, chaos, and death coming from these “Housing First” models, from these harm reduction models. But you know, if there is one positive, it’s that the Trump administration put out an executive order last year that essentially now takes money from Housing First—which is essentially giving away apartments, free apartments and studios to anybody on the streets, no questions asked, no strings attached. That means no one’s required to go into treatment recovery or to even find jobs. To a model now that’s more focused on treatment and recovery. So I’m seeing now the “old guard,” what I refer to as the Homeless Industrial Complex or Homeless Inc., now scrambling, pivoting, trying to find ways to incorporate more treatment and recovery. But we’re on to them right now because what they’re also trying to do is not necessarily change their Housing First model; they’re trying to change the language or just attach to this “treatment and recovery” and not change what they do. So again, one of the positives, as you said, is that more pressure from the feds on the local level and the local governments and the agencies—that’s what’s slowly, potentially going to bring some change.
Sen. Chris Gildon: Well, so I guess, kind of as we’re coming towards the conclusion of this, in your mind, if the legislature could make just like one meaningful reform—one thing that the legislature could do this next cycle—what do you think the legislature should do to help with this problem, Jonathan?
Jonathan Choe: You know, it’s allowing for everything that you’ve been trying to implement into these crazy spending bills. And that’s accountability. That’s being able to know where this money is going, demanding outcomes, demanding reports, and not just giving away this money like candy, because that’s been the biggest problem here right now. And the question I have—and my colleague and friend Nick Shirley in Minnesota initially started with a citizen journalism movement in exposing the Somali daycare fraud. That stuff is happening here in Washington as well. We started an investigation around the very same time, me and my other investigative reporter colleague, Cam Higbee. There’s just so much fraud here, though, we just scratched the surface. And that’s what’s so sinister about this. And when we brought this to the attention of Attorney General Nick Brown, when we brought this to the attention of people like Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and other Democratic lawmakers, they completely shut it down and said the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) was enough to do these investigations. But we find out later from the state auditor—actually, it isn’t—that there are millions of dollars that are also unaccounted for in DCYF that went to some of the Somali daycare. So again, the question I have is why? Why not put in more safeguards, accountability measures, and demand the outcomes before giving out more money? Again, that’s the million-dollar question. I don’t have an answer to that right now.
Sen. Chris Gildon: Well, I think you’re on to something. I mean, that’s certainly something that Senate Republicans have been all over is demanding accountability, making sure that every dollar that the state spends has a name, a job, and some type of measure of accountability attached to it. Jonathan, thank you so much for your time today.
Jonathan Choe: All right, thanks. Let me add one quick plug and criticism. At the end of the day, it’s on us, the media. We’re the “fourth estate”. We’re supposed to be the watchdogs. We’re supposed to be holding these public officials accountable and reporting on the sector, but we’re not. So we’ve got to do better.
Tracy Ellis: Our thanks to Jonathan Choe. Please subscribe to this podcast and our YouTube channel. And for Senator Chris Gildon, I’m Tracy Ellis. This is The Elephant in the Dome, the official podcast of the Washington State Senate Republican Caucus.