November 12, 2025 • 36 mins
In this powerful episode of The Tudor Dixon Podcast, Tom Wolf opens up about his devastating descent from middle-class stability into homelessness and opioid addiction. He exposes the growing impact of fentanyl, the failures in America’s addiction recovery system, and the urgent need for reform. Tom shares how accountability and access to real rehabilitation can save lives—and what policymakers must do to combat the homelessness crisis driven by addiction. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. I have Tom Wolf
with me today. I think his story is very interesting
considering what we're seeing across the country right now. If
you're not aware, we have a pretty severe homeless epidemic
in a lot of our big cities. This is a
serious problem in many of the cities in the state
of Michigan. But I know we see it in California,
(00:22):
we see it in DC, we see it in New York.
I think we have about a quarter of a million
people in the United States right now that are in
this situation that are homeless. Tom Wolf is formerly homeless,
also a recovering heroin and fannyl addict from San Francisco.
He's been clean and sober for seven years now. Your story,
(00:43):
Tom is pretty wild. I mean, I think it's the
same story that so many people know. You had surgery,
right and then ended up as an addict.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's right, and Tutor, it's great to be here. And
I don't mean to correct you right out of the gate,
but it's seven hundred and fifty thousand people experiencing homelessness.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Any seven and fifty thousand.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, it's a much bigger problem than people seem to understand.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And it's three quarters of a million.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, three quarter of a million, and it's really manifested
out here on the West Coast. But yeah, I have
a pretty wild story of falling into addiction and then
homelessness and then finding recovery. I first of all want
to preface it by saying, I'm a regular guy. I'm
just a regular middle class guy, married with two kids,
living in a suburb of San Francisco. And back in
(01:27):
early twenty fifteen, when I was working for the City
and County of San Francisco, I had to have surgery
on my foot to repair an old injury where they
had to break my foot and reset it and put
two titanium screws in my foot to kind of stabilize it.
And they sent me home with a thirty day supply
of oxycodone for the pain. And I didn't use those
pills as directed, so to speak, one pill every four
(01:50):
to six hours wasn't cutting it. So I started using
two pills. And I still remember the day where I
took three pills or thirty milligrams all at once, and
that's when I kind of crossed this threshold into the
I so to speak where all my problems melted away.
It wasn't just the pain, but any marital problems or
financial problems. I had small kids in the home. All
those stresses kind of went away for a few hours.
(02:12):
And I absolutely loved that feeling. I loved it. It
was like someone putting a warm blanket over you, where
you just felt kind of safe and happy. And that's
the hook. That's the hook with opioids. That's why so
many people fall prey to that addiction, is that they
want that feeling, and so over the next you know,
(02:33):
eighteen months, I continued to use. Obviously, when I couldn't
get more pills from my doctor, I went to the street.
I started purchasing pills on the street, and in twenty fifteen,
you could find a variety of different opioids on the
street in San Francisco. And my addiction increased or grew
until I was taking five hundred and sixty milligrams a day.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
But I mean, how does that happen? I really, I
feel like this is the part that if you haven't
had this happen, you don't understand. Had you ever had
you ever taken any drug before, had you ever had
alcohol problems. Were there any other addiction problems in your past.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Well, not in my past, but in my family. So
alcoholism runs in my family. I have two siblings that
are in recovery from alcoholism, and my dad was a drinker.
So I think it's kind of genetic, like I had
the predisposition for addiction. It's just a mind manifested with
opioids instead of alcohol. And you know, the big thing
here is that when I couldn't get more pills from
(03:30):
my doctor, I was going into what they call withdrawal.
I was getting dope sick, right, I wanted more. I
was having anxiety. I was feeling the physical effects of
starting to run out of these days?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Did you know that? I mean, at that point, do
you go, man, I think I have a real serious problem.
I mean, what is that transition like? Because you go
from being like a pillar of society. Really people think
of you as this amazing man. You were. You had,
you have a wife, you have two kids, You work
for the city. You're doing great work for the city,
(04:02):
like you're doing God's work for the city, you know,
and you are suddenly in a situation where I assume
you had no idea that this you would have that predisposition.
Even when you see your family members have a problem
with alcohol, you don't immediately connect that if I have
a surgery, I'm in danger. So how I mean this
(04:24):
seems like it happened pretty fast for you to suddenly
have this complete personality change.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, And that's the power of addiction, right, So it's
kind of like it's hard to explain. The only thing
I can tell you is that you know, there was
a moment where I admitted to myself that, you know what,
I'm just going to be addicted. I'm just I can
manage this. I can handle it. And I think that's
the other big trick in addiction for people is that
(04:51):
they think that they can manage their addiction. They think
that they can still function at a high level with
their addiction. They start nationalizing that it's okay if these
things fall by the wayside. It's okay. If I pay
that bill late, it's okay. If maybe I don't pay
my mortgage this month and use that money for drugs,
It's okay. If I missed that pickup of my kids
(05:12):
at school, or I'm late because I have to go
get my drugs first. You begin prioritizing those drugs over
everything else.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So I was reading your story and I read this
part where you were you explained I think this was
in twenty nineteen. You were explaining this that you would
go out to this You would say you're going out
to the store and go to this terrible area and
go pick up drugs. And I was thinking to myself, Man,
you know, if that happened in my house and suddenly
(05:39):
my husband's just gone, and I imagine it's not a
quick trip to go pick up drugs disappear. What is
happening at home? Are there tensions? Is your wife catching on?
Does she not know what is happening?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah? Those are great questions, and the answer is, yeah,
she's catching on. But I'll also say that denial and
codependency are very powerful things for partners of people or
family members of people that are struggling with addiction. She
didn't want to believe it, right, She didn't want to
believe that her husband of twenty years and the father
of her kids was basically turning into a full blown
(06:15):
drug addict later on heroin addict and fentanyl addict. But
it just goes to show you that addiction itself does
not discriminate. It can get anybody rich, poor, black, white,
It doesn't matter. Addiction doesn't care. If you have that
predisposition or if there are circumstances in your life that
kind of leads you to self medicate, you can absolutely
become addicted and it will tear your life apart.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So in the first Trump administration, I will say I
also had surgery in twenty fifteen. Was yours in twenty fifteen?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Also, that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
So I had surgery in twenty fifteen. I had a
double messtectomy. Was I had breast cancer. So I had
the double mestectomy, and I came home with a massive
amount of drugs. I mean, I can not even tell you.
It was ridiculous. Never would have used them. I used
them for like three days, and then you have these
all of these medications that you may never use again,
(07:13):
or I do understand how you could get addicted to them,
because there were way more than I needed. I'll say
that for the pain that I had, it was a
three day event for me, and then I never needed
those again. I had to go back for a surgery
in twenty nineteen. So this is well into the Trump administration.
(07:35):
And the amount of medication that it came home with
was a few extra strength advil you know, get you
get like the eight hundred milligram advil. It was a
striking difference. Do you think My understanding is that within
that time, those first few years of the first Trump administration,
(07:55):
there was a real push to say, we're going to
limit the amount of opioids that go home people after
surgeries like this.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah. So look, this entire crisis, the fentanyl crisis, everything
that we're talking about now, all the groundwork for that,
I hate to say it, but it's true, was laid
out by big Pharma, Okay, and the over prescription of
OxyContin back in the nineteen nineties. You had pain clinics,
you had doctors writing prescriptions for hundreds of pills. I
(08:22):
interviewed a guy that's been clean now for about nine
or ten years. He used to go to pain clinics
and he would get one hundred and eighty eighty milligram
oxy conton tablets just on a whim because his back hurt.
Like that's the kind of foundation that was laid where
twenty million people got addicted to opioids across the country,
especially in the Rust Belt in the nineteen eighties and nineties,
(08:44):
and it's kind of just progressed now because of course,
our government is a few years behind on actually addressing
the drug policies in this country. So yes, we restricted
those opioids, which is good, but at the same time,
the cartels were figuring out how to synthesize or make
synthetic opioids ie fensanyl, and then they started making it
(09:05):
in mass quantities and pumping it into this country to
a population that was already very vulnerable as a result,
the big pharma laying that kind of foundation for the
addiction and opioid crisis in our country, and now you're
kind of seeing it play out. Last year we had
nearly ninety thousand drug overdose tests in this country and
it just gives you contacts. In the year two thousand,
(09:27):
we only had seventeen thousand overdose tests in this country.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So whoa the arrival crazy.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, it has completely changed the game, and it requires
us to change our response.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
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Now stick around, We've got more after this. What's your
reaction to what you're seeing right now with the Trump
administration going out and taking out these boats that are
headed for the United States with drugs. I mean, I
(11:04):
think that is it's very controversial, but it is sending
a very strong message to anybody who's trying to bring
deadly drugs into this country.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I have no issue because I'm sorry, I don't because look,
when I was on the street, I used to hold
drugs for the drug dealers out here. I was a
mule for them because they would pay me with heroin.
That's how I was able to support my addiction. So
I talked to these guys. I knew what they were.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
They're basically that's actually an interesting point that you're making
that I think we don't think about because you go,
oh my gosh, there's all these bad guys on the
streets selling drugs, but you get you were sucked into
being one of their lackeys because you're getting the product
and they get you addicted. And here's this upstanding citizen,
(11:49):
dad of two, great husband who in just a matter
of four years fell to this level.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yep, that's right, and that again, that speaks to the
power of addiction, the desperation of addiction. I mean, I
was on the street, I had been cut off from everything.
My family was practicing what they call separation with love.
So you know, they love me, they want me to
do okay, but they're not going to come out and
help me and give me money on the street to
just buy drugs. So I had to figure out my hustle,
and I want to be clear. In San Francisco, as
(12:17):
an example, we have five hundred to one thousand organized
drug dealers operating in plain site, in broad daylight in
the city, okay, And it's been that way for at
least a decade, if not longer. And they're fueled by
the Sinaloa cartel, right. And so there's that whole network
of cartel drug dealers up and down the West coast
of the United States, from San Diego all the way
(12:38):
to Anchorage, Alaska, and over into Salt Lake City and Denver, ETCA.
Selling drugs that are killing our kids, that are just
destabilizing our large urban centers, our big cities. It's destabilizing them.
If you ever read Michael Schellenberger's book San Francisco, he
really laid that out very clear as part of his
argument as to why these cities are falling apart. It's
(13:01):
being fueled by drugs. It's being fueled by organized drug dealers.
So for Trump to crack down on that, I think
it's long overdue, and I know it makes a lot
of people uncomfortable. And I'm probably going to get some
heat because I'm out here in San Francisco, so I'm
going to get some heat for saying that. But you
know what, interdiction, reducing the supply of drugs is just
as important as reducing the demand for drugs. We need
(13:23):
to make it harder for people to get high and
easier for people to access treatment and get off of
those drugs.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So how there was a particular police officer I believe
that kept kind of giving you a push to get
off the streets. Your wife. He had talked to your wife,
and there was kind of an almost I mean, from
my perspective, this is like a god thing. He talks
to your wife. He has this connection to you in
a more personal way, and I thought it was interesting
(13:50):
the way he described it. He was like, you know,
there's not that many people once they're at this point,
who's got who have a wife? Who's still going? I
miss him? I can't and that he's gone. We love
him and really still searching for that person to return,
and that struck him. So I feel like he was
almost like a guardian angel for a while from the
(14:11):
story I read, But tell us a little bit about
that process of him following you and you getting out
of that situation.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, that's so. First of all, my wife is a saint,
and I'm going to spend the rest of my life
making amends to her, and I'm very very happy to
do that. And I'm happy to also say that I'm
reconciled with my wife and kids. And that couldn't have
happened without recovery, without finding our faith as a family
and making a decision to move forward together. What Officer
Rob Gilson did for me was above and beyond the
(14:40):
call of duty. So my wife had actually called the
tender Long Police station in tears in a panic to
file a missing person's report on me because I had
been gone for the home from the home for eleven days,
and he took that phone call. And it's interesting I
was arrested six times after that on the streets for
various crimes I was commit as a result of my addiction,
(15:02):
which I own all of them completely, and I paid
my debt I had to go to jail, I had
to be on probation, I had to do all those things.
But he arrested me four out of those six times.
And the last time he arrested me is I was
being booked into jail. He just looked at me and
he said, dude, you're skinny, you're dirty. I know you
have a wife and kids at home that love you.
(15:25):
You need to get yourself clean and you need to
get back to your family. And for whatever reason, that
last time that he said that to me, it really
hit home because then I realized the damage that I
had caused, not just to myself, but to my wife
and to my kids. And it gave me. It gave
me an opportunity to start thinking. And then I had
to go sit in jail and think about it for
(15:46):
another three months after that before I really decided that
I was going to give recovery an honest try. And
I give a lot of credit to the Salvation Army.
I have to, because they're the ones that took me
in and gave me a chance to go through their
rehab program that was a six month residential program that
was free. They didn't have to do that, but they
took me in and gave me a chance. I found
(16:07):
recovery and I found my faith, and that's a big
thing for many of us in recovery, that spiritual awakening happens,
and that kind of led me back to my wife
and my kids and eventual reconciliation.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
You said that was free. I think that's one of
the biggest complaints that we hear about getting out of
this cycle of addictionists. How do you get to a rehab?
How do you afford it? I mean, I've had family
members who have invested tens of thousands of dollars in
rehab programs.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
They're so expensive, Yep, they are, but there's also a
ton of free programs. It just depends on what you're
looking for. Yeah, you can go to the rehab in
Malibu and spend fifty grand if you want, Or you
can go to the Salvation Army, which is a little
bit harder core, full of accountability and structure and also
find your pathway back. And so look, if you're holmost
on the street living in a tent, trust me going
(17:00):
to an environment where you have to wake up at
six in the morning and shave and tucking your shirt
and go to church twice a week and follow some
twelve step recovery beats the hell out of sleeping in
a tent on the street. It just does. And so
we need to have multiple options available for people. Private
insurance companies need to do a lot better job of
(17:22):
paying for drug rehab. That's another topic, really, but we
should be doing what we can to make rehabs widely available,
treatment on demand, and make it as affordable as possible,
if not free altogether. Because we have forty million people
in this country struggling with drug addiction right now. Ten
percent of the population of our country is addicted to drugs.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
So what do you think is the answer to homelessness?
I mean, I know that you feel like you've successfully
beat this, and you know that that's not the case
for many people. In San Francisco. You have a serious
homelessness problem out there, And I would say you have
some of the highest budgets for homelessness in the country,
(18:05):
between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the budgets are in
the hundreds of millions, and yet the homeless problem continues
to get worse. So what do you say to politicians
about what they can do to get people off the street.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Well, another great question, and there's no one easy answer
to it, but I will say this that accountability is
one of the cornerstones of recovery. So Trump's executive Order
on homelessness was actually the correct approach. That is what
we have to do. We're at a point now where
we have in San Francisco, we have eight thousand homeless,
at least half of them are living unsheltered on the street.
(18:42):
Eighty to ninety percent of them have what they call
a co occurring disorder, which is either addiction and or
mental illness or both of them playing out at the
same time. And the biggest mistake that we've made in
our homeless response as a state and as a nation
is that we decided to first of all, call it
homeless us because that's a euphemism, and to downplay the
(19:03):
fact that there's a drug problem, that we have a
huge drug problem amongst the homeless in this country, and
we've downplayed it on purpose because we don't want to
stigmatize drug users. We don't want to stigmatize the homeless.
All that harm reduction stuff coming from the radical left.
That's a huge mistake. It's a terrible mistake because we're
misdiagnosing the problem. And to give you an example of that,
(19:25):
in La on skid Row, they just finished building a
couple of towers to house chronically homeless and supportive housing.
Each one of those units in that apartment building costs
the city six hundred thousand dollars per door. Okay, to
house about four hundred people altogether. Well, guess what on
skid Row and a fifty block radius, there's ten thousand
(19:46):
homeless people. So are we how much is it going
to cost us to house all ten thousand of those
homeless people? And then on top of that, we don't
ask them to get off drugs. In fact, we tell
them it's okay, you can bring your drugs inside with you.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
How do you Yeah, I guess that's that's the question
that I think so many of us have, And it's
kind of the question that we don't really ask because
I think that nobody understands the answer. The problem is
not that you don't have a house. Somehow you got there.
I mean, you were not actually someone that didn't have
a house. You had a home, You weren't homeless, you
weren't in your home because you were choosing addiction, was
(20:22):
choosing for you to be living out on the streets.
So how many people are in that situation? I guess
you're really right, we're calling it homelessness, But is it
when was your experience that the majority out there of
people were actually addicted.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yes, So everybody that I knew on the street was
addicted to drugs. Everybody, and I'm not exaggerating anything. One
hundred percent of the people I knew on the street, old, young, white, black,
they were all addicted to drugs. Whether it was crack, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, whatever,
they were addicted, Okay, And I just want to be
very very clear about that. And so when you hear
all this data come out saying, oh, it's only forty
(21:03):
five percent or forty seven percent of the people that
are addicted. These are based on surveys that we've done.
And then you start asking about the surveys and it
turns out that they're self reported. So you're basically asking people, hey, man,
are you using drugs? When they would come up to
me on the street when I was homeless and they
would say, hey, I don't even want to stay homeless.
When I was on the street. They would say, hey, Tom,
(21:23):
are you okay? Are you struggling with drug use? Or
you need some help? And I'd be like, what are
you talking about. I'm just sitting here, mind in my business.
I'm fine. So are we really getting the truth from people?
Of course not, because when you're struggling with addiction, number one,
there's denial. Number two, there's fear, and number three, you
don't want to admit that you have a problem to
(21:44):
anyone because you still think that you have control over
your situation, even when it gets down to as little
as a piece of heroin in your hand.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I think that's the most shocking part about this for
someone who hasn't gone through this, And that's why I
am so grateful to you for sharing your story because
as I listened to this, how quickly it was that
this took hold of you and it was no longer
really a choice because that feeling of euphoria that you
talk about and wanting that back, I mean, that was
(22:13):
so powerful that it took you out of your home,
put you on the street. What was what was that experience?
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Are you sleeping on street corners?
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
What does that look like? Explain? Give us a little
bit of a picture of what that is and who
you met and how that was.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, excellent. Generally speaking, it was just very dark all
the time, even when it was the sun was shining
and it was warm, and everything was a very dark experience.
You're cold all the time, because more often than not,
I would sleep in the doorway kind of just kind
of crouched down in a doorway and I just had
a jacket and my jeans, and sleeping on the concrete
(22:53):
is very very cold, and so it just gets it
just gets to your bones and you feel cold on
the inside all the time. I you know, I would
eat maybe once a day. I knew where the soup
kitchen was. I could go get a meal if I
needed to. The rest of the time of my existence
on the street was spent trying to hustle to maintain
my drug addiction. And that's how the case was with
(23:16):
everybody I knew on the street and people I knew
people on the street in San Francisco that were from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio,
Las Vegas. I knew a guy that used to be
a graphic designer in Las Vegas, making six figures in
the salary, but he got addicted to oxy cotone, and
then he became a heroin addict and now was living
on the streets of San Francisco. It crosses all barriers
(23:40):
addiction does. And it's amazing that the people you'll meet
out there. There's people out there that have master's degrees.
I knew a guy that was an officer in the
Navy at one point that had been a heroin addict
for twenty five years on the street, and so many
of them now are gone because illicit fentanyl came to
the street.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
At a certain point, was it? I mean, you talked
about it at first being like this calming, warm blanket
took away all your troubles. Does it suddenly change, because
what I'm hearing is you're living in horrible conditions to
avoid that withdrawal because you know that's coming if you
don't keep it up. I mean, does that seem like
you're just kind of chasing the drug to stop the inevitable.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
You clearly just hit the nail on the head. So
at a certain point, this is the last big trick
of addiction, is that it's no longer about getting high.
It's about staying well, not going into withdrawal. So you're
doing everything you can just to maintain and if you
get high, that's a bonus. And there's this huge fear
(24:43):
of those withdrawal symptoms because the withdrawals, the physical withdrawals
from fensanel are horrible. They're absolutely horrible. It's imagine having
like the flu and a cold and anxiety and your
muscles are locking up. You're throwing up all the stuff
all at the same time, and it lasts for days
upon days upon days. It doesn't ever go away, and
(25:05):
you'll literally almost do anything to not fall into that
kind of trap, that feeling. So people cheat, they steal,
they'll lie, they'll rob their neighbors, they'll they'll sell themselves well,
do whatever they need to do to get drugs. That's
how powerful this addiction is. And so this is another
reason why we have to put such a focus on fentanyl,
(25:27):
because an addition to fentanyl killing everyone, I want to
just make this point really quick. The first time I
used that thirty milligrams and I felt that blanket over
my head. I never felt that feeling again until the
first time I tried fentanyl. That was the only drug
I ever used since then that actually made me feel
like the first time that I used and that's why
(25:47):
so many people love it. And then it traps you
in your addiction. FENTONYL metabolizes faster in your body, so
you have to use it every two hours, unlike heroin,
which was every sixty hours. Yeah. So you know, these
harm reduction people and the public health people are out
there saying, hey, you know we need to wait for
people to be ready here. You're never going to be
(26:08):
ready unless we intervene because you have to use fentanyl
every two hours in order to just stay well.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
And that's I might sound incredibly naive here, but I
have always I guess this the public story and the
media story has worked a number on me because I
always felt like fentanyl was an accident if you got it,
but you were seeking out fentanyl.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Oh no, it's completely replaced heroin. In San Francisco. You
can't find heroin on the street of streets of San
Francisco or opioids of any kind. The only thing that
they have are fentanyl in powdered form, or fentanyl fake
pills that look like oxycodone that'll kill you quick, and
it's cheap. It's five dollars for a little baggy for
a tenth of a gram of fentanyl. Now on the
(26:53):
streets of San Francisco. Gosh, you go to Portland, Oregon,
the fentanyl pills are a dollar fifty a pill on
the street right now. So this is why it's so pervasive.
It's cheap to manufacture, easy to smuggle because dogs can't
smell it when it comes across the border, and then
the distribution is just become nationwide, like widespread, and it's
completely saturated our country and created an overdose calamity of
(27:19):
epic proportions.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
So that is why when you see him saying we're
taking out these ships, you say, go for it, because
that's the drug that's being sold. I mean, I think
so many of us think that that's like, like I said,
you are accidentally getting that, but that's actually just the
cheap high quick stave off the withdrawal symptoms you've got this.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Yeah, I mean, look, the cartels made a business decision
right to replace heroin, which takes time to produce because
you have to grow the opium poppies and then you
have to harvest them and make it into heroin with
something that you can take three precursor chemicals that you
mostly get from China, mix them together to make fencanyl
(28:05):
into a powder, and then you package it and you
ship it off. And you can do that twenty four
hours a day, seven days a week. You don't have
to wait for seasons and planting and all that stuff
to happen at harvesting. You can just mass produce this stuff.
And that's been their cash cow. And now you know
the cartels were already making billions before, they're making billions
more now. And that also speaks to we need to
(28:27):
start asking what's going on in our country that that
forty to ten percent of our population is using drugs?
Why is it this way here and not that way
pretty much everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
That's what I was going to ask, is are we
the biggest market?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
We are the biggest market. So it goes that US
is number one, and then it's Canada then, and then
fencanyl hasn't arrived in Europe yet, So while they have
a huge drug problem in the UK, there's no fencanel
there yet. It hasn't jumped the pond for whatever reason,
and it hasn't really hit Australia either, as an example,
where that also has historic we'd high drug usage rates.
(29:01):
It's really just the United States and Canada. North America
has been deeply afflicted with fensanyl, but interestingly enough, Mexico
doesn't have that same kind of problem. So we have
to start asking why that is. And nobody really has
a clear answer. It's socioeconomics is part of it, but
nobody really has a clear understanding of why we love
drugs so much in the United States.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
I think it is definitely something that we think is
just sneaking into ei there's a drug market, and then
that sneaking in. When I was running for office, we
went to our Oakland County Sheriff's office and they have
a crime lab there and I mean, honestly, I would
have seen this in someone's house and not known what
it was. It's this giant block that was it looked
(29:46):
like chalk and it was pressed into the shape of
a jeep logo. And I'll never forget this. And he said,
that's how they brand it, the different whoever is selling it.
They have these brands and use logos and they had
a jeep logo in there and I thought, I've no,
he said, that's drugs. I said, what do you mean?
(30:08):
He said, yeah, And there's a woman in there, and
she was taking it apart very carefully. She had a
hood over top of her that was, you know, vacuuming
up all the air. She's full almost as matt suit.
Was fentanyl.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yep, that's right, and she has to wear that as
matt suit so she doesn't overdose herself. So in San Francisco,
our fentanyl is multicolored, and it is that chalk substance
that you're talking about, that powdered chalk substance, and they
color it. There's red fentanyl, blue, fentanyl, light blue, yellow,
and each one of them designates either a different strength
of the fentanyl or that it's mixed with something else,
(30:41):
like it's mixed with methamphetamine or mixed with benzo diazepines
like xanax to intensify the effect one way or the
other for people. And so it's like a buffet where people,
if you have the money, you can pretty much get
anything that you want. And the way the cartel dealers
view it here is that if you die, you die.
You made the decision to put that that drug in
(31:03):
your body. And what's even more frustrating is that the
police here are doing their job. They're arresting the drug dealers.
The DA, the DA in San Francisco. Now, our current
DA is doing her job, she's prosecuting drug dealers. But
we have a bunch of judges on our superior court
benches here that are former public defenders that believe that
(31:25):
still have this ideology that the war on drugs failed.
So they just continue to release these dealers over and
over back to the street, which is why you know
the door has been left open for Trump to threaten
federal intervention in San Francisco. That's really the reason why
it's not about undocumented immigration. It's about organized drug dealers
on the street that have persisted for more than a
(31:45):
decade that are killing six hundred and fifty people in
our city every single year.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. The crazy part about this, you
are talking about a few people having a lot of power,
and as I hear you saying, you're kind of like
a drug runner because you get them free, they are
just using their own clients to as employees without having
(32:12):
to pay them. I mean, it's insane. So if you
took the few bad guys off the street. Over time,
this would end. That's what we're hearing in Michigan. You
seem to believe that as well.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Oh eighty percent of the homeless drug problem in San
Francisco would literally go away if we removed all the
organized drug dealers from here. They're the ones that cause
the majority of the chaos. They all carry guns. There's
drug violence all the time, and we have to be
honest in San Francisco. Like, so, there's four thousand people
on the street using drugs, and then about and then
(32:43):
there's another several thousand that are actually housed in supportive
housing in San Francisco that come out of their house
in the day and hang out on the street with
the other homeless and use drugs. And then you have
another few thousand that are in housing themselves that we're
paying for with rent subsidies of the cost this city
four hundred and fifty million dollars a year to keep
(33:04):
them housed, and they're using drugs inside. And so now
we've created the scenario where seventy percent of all the
overdose tests in San Francisco happen at a fixed address.
So we've actually taken this problem, and we've also moved
it inside. It's not even like we took it off
the street and moved it inside. We have it on
the street and then we also have it inside at
the same time. And it's just a big mess.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
And they know who they are, but they're still out there.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Absolutely. Look, every drug dealer in San Francisco has been arrested.
In fact, last year SFPD arrested all the drug dealers
in San Francisco. Nine hundred felony drug dealing arrests were
made in San Francisco. That's pretty much all the dealers
that were here. Yet the drug market remains, So you
have to start asking why that is, and you have
to start looking at the mechanisms that we have in place,
(33:49):
and then are state policies that are in place that
allow these judges to make these decisions that just create
a revolving door for organized drug dealers to go back
to the street sell fentanol that again is killing six
hundred plus people a year inner city.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Oh my gosh. So what are you doing now and
what's your message to people? What's your closing message to
the folks today.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Well, I'm doing a variety of different things. I do
consulting work. I work for a great company called Sunflower Sober,
which is kind of the merger of AI and Recovery together.
It has an AI virtual sponsor that you can put
on your phone to give you support as you're trying
to stay sober and trying to stay in recovery. But
I also work on public policy. I work in that
field now as well, where I'm trying to push and
it's really an uphill battle because it's California, of course,
(34:34):
but to anyone who will listen nationwide, I'm trying to
push for more pragmatic changes to drug policy so that
we shift our focus away from radical harm reduction, free
crack pipes to actually focusing on getting people off the drugs,
getting them healthy, and getting them reintegrated back into society
so that they can return to work, pay their taxes,
(34:54):
reconnect with their families. Those are the kinds of ideals
that that we need to be fighting for in this country,
for this population before it gets so far out of
control that we just have this permanent class of people
that are always going to be out there on the
street using drugs, destroying themselves and harming the community.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
It's such common sense. I mean, it really is, but
it's very hard. After years of being told and this
seems crazy, people will go, Ahai, it's not hard. But
these communities have been told you've got to have free
crack pipes, you've got to have free syringes, You've got
we've got to get make this so that it's safe.
How can that possibly be safe? Now you have to
(35:35):
turn all of that thinking around, which seems like it
would be very easy. But I've watched people, I've listened
to people on social media. I see regular people who
have fallen for this. And that's why I'm so grateful
that you told your story and you were so open
with what you dealt with and what you saw out there,
because I think that without hearing it from someone who's
(35:56):
actually gone through it, we hear from pundits, we hear
from people all the time. You don't know it until
you've learned it from someone who's actually dealt with it. So, Tom,
thank you so much for coming on today.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
It has really been my pleasure. Thanks for giving me
the opportunity to share my story and to let people
know that accountability is a cornerstone of recovery. We need
to fight for it in this country.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Thank you absolutely, Tom Well, thank you so much for
coming on, and thank you all for joining us on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others, you
can go to Tutor diisonpodcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you
can watch the whole thing on Rumble or YouTube at
Tutor Dixon. Thank you so much, Join us next time
and have a blasted day.
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. I have Tom Wolf
with me today. I think his story is very interesting
considering what we're seeing across the country right now. If
you're not aware, we have a pretty severe homeless epidemic
in a lot of our big cities. This is a
serious problem in many of the cities in the state
of Michigan. But I know we see it in California,
(00:22):
we see it in DC, we see it in New York.
I think we have about a quarter of a million
people in the United States right now that are in
this situation that are homeless. Tom Wolf is formerly homeless,
also a recovering heroin and fannyl addict from San Francisco.
He's been clean and sober for seven years now. Your story,
(00:43):
Tom is pretty wild. I mean, I think it's the
same story that so many people know. You had surgery,
right and then ended up as an addict.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
That's right, and Tutor, it's great to be here. And
I don't mean to correct you right out of the gate,
but it's seven hundred and fifty thousand people experiencing homelessness.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Any seven and fifty thousand.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Yeah, it's a much bigger problem than people seem to understand.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And it's three quarters of a million.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, three quarter of a million, and it's really manifested
out here on the West Coast. But yeah, I have
a pretty wild story of falling into addiction and then
homelessness and then finding recovery. I first of all want
to preface it by saying, I'm a regular guy. I'm
just a regular middle class guy, married with two kids,
living in a suburb of San Francisco. And back in
(01:27):
early twenty fifteen, when I was working for the City
and County of San Francisco, I had to have surgery
on my foot to repair an old injury where they
had to break my foot and reset it and put
two titanium screws in my foot to kind of stabilize it.
And they sent me home with a thirty day supply
of oxycodone for the pain. And I didn't use those
pills as directed, so to speak, one pill every four
(01:50):
to six hours wasn't cutting it. So I started using
two pills. And I still remember the day where I
took three pills or thirty milligrams all at once, and
that's when I kind of crossed this threshold into the
I so to speak where all my problems melted away.
It wasn't just the pain, but any marital problems or
financial problems. I had small kids in the home. All
those stresses kind of went away for a few hours.
(02:12):
And I absolutely loved that feeling. I loved it. It
was like someone putting a warm blanket over you, where
you just felt kind of safe and happy. And that's
the hook. That's the hook with opioids. That's why so
many people fall prey to that addiction, is that they
want that feeling, and so over the next you know,
(02:33):
eighteen months, I continued to use. Obviously, when I couldn't
get more pills from my doctor, I went to the street.
I started purchasing pills on the street, and in twenty fifteen,
you could find a variety of different opioids on the
street in San Francisco. And my addiction increased or grew
until I was taking five hundred and sixty milligrams a day.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
But I mean, how does that happen? I really, I
feel like this is the part that if you haven't
had this happen, you don't understand. Had you ever had
you ever taken any drug before, had you ever had
alcohol problems. Were there any other addiction problems in your past.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Well, not in my past, but in my family. So
alcoholism runs in my family. I have two siblings that
are in recovery from alcoholism, and my dad was a drinker.
So I think it's kind of genetic, like I had
the predisposition for addiction. It's just a mind manifested with
opioids instead of alcohol. And you know, the big thing
here is that when I couldn't get more pills from
(03:30):
my doctor, I was going into what they call withdrawal.
I was getting dope sick, right, I wanted more. I
was having anxiety. I was feeling the physical effects of
starting to run out of these days?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Did you know that? I mean, at that point, do
you go, man, I think I have a real serious problem.
I mean, what is that transition like? Because you go
from being like a pillar of society. Really people think
of you as this amazing man. You were. You had,
you have a wife, you have two kids, You work
for the city. You're doing great work for the city,
(04:02):
like you're doing God's work for the city, you know,
and you are suddenly in a situation where I assume
you had no idea that this you would have that predisposition.
Even when you see your family members have a problem
with alcohol, you don't immediately connect that if I have
a surgery, I'm in danger. So how I mean this
(04:24):
seems like it happened pretty fast for you to suddenly
have this complete personality change.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, And that's the power of addiction, right, So it's
kind of like it's hard to explain. The only thing
I can tell you is that you know, there was
a moment where I admitted to myself that, you know what,
I'm just going to be addicted. I'm just I can
manage this. I can handle it. And I think that's
the other big trick in addiction for people is that
(04:51):
they think that they can manage their addiction. They think
that they can still function at a high level with
their addiction. They start nationalizing that it's okay if these
things fall by the wayside. It's okay. If I pay
that bill late, it's okay. If maybe I don't pay
my mortgage this month and use that money for drugs,
It's okay. If I missed that pickup of my kids
(05:12):
at school, or I'm late because I have to go
get my drugs first. You begin prioritizing those drugs over
everything else.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So I was reading your story and I read this
part where you were you explained I think this was
in twenty nineteen. You were explaining this that you would
go out to this You would say you're going out
to the store and go to this terrible area and
go pick up drugs. And I was thinking to myself, Man,
you know, if that happened in my house and suddenly
(05:39):
my husband's just gone, and I imagine it's not a
quick trip to go pick up drugs disappear. What is
happening at home? Are there tensions? Is your wife catching on?
Does she not know what is happening?
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah? Those are great questions, and the answer is, yeah,
she's catching on. But I'll also say that denial and
codependency are very powerful things for partners of people or
family members of people that are struggling with addiction. She
didn't want to believe it, right, She didn't want to
believe that her husband of twenty years and the father
of her kids was basically turning into a full blown
(06:15):
drug addict later on heroin addict and fentanyl addict. But
it just goes to show you that addiction itself does
not discriminate. It can get anybody rich, poor, black, white,
It doesn't matter. Addiction doesn't care. If you have that
predisposition or if there are circumstances in your life that
kind of leads you to self medicate, you can absolutely
become addicted and it will tear your life apart.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
So in the first Trump administration, I will say I
also had surgery in twenty fifteen. Was yours in twenty fifteen?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Also, that's right.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
So I had surgery in twenty fifteen. I had a
double messtectomy. Was I had breast cancer. So I had
the double mestectomy, and I came home with a massive
amount of drugs. I mean, I can not even tell you.
It was ridiculous. Never would have used them. I used
them for like three days, and then you have these
all of these medications that you may never use again,
(07:13):
or I do understand how you could get addicted to them,
because there were way more than I needed. I'll say
that for the pain that I had, it was a
three day event for me, and then I never needed
those again. I had to go back for a surgery
in twenty nineteen. So this is well into the Trump administration.
(07:35):
And the amount of medication that it came home with
was a few extra strength advil you know, get you
get like the eight hundred milligram advil. It was a
striking difference. Do you think My understanding is that within
that time, those first few years of the first Trump administration,
(07:55):
there was a real push to say, we're going to
limit the amount of opioids that go home people after
surgeries like this.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah. So look, this entire crisis, the fentanyl crisis, everything
that we're talking about now, all the groundwork for that,
I hate to say it, but it's true, was laid
out by big Pharma, Okay, and the over prescription of
OxyContin back in the nineteen nineties. You had pain clinics,
you had doctors writing prescriptions for hundreds of pills. I
(08:22):
interviewed a guy that's been clean now for about nine
or ten years. He used to go to pain clinics
and he would get one hundred and eighty eighty milligram
oxy conton tablets just on a whim because his back hurt.
Like that's the kind of foundation that was laid where
twenty million people got addicted to opioids across the country,
especially in the Rust Belt in the nineteen eighties and nineties,
(08:44):
and it's kind of just progressed now because of course,
our government is a few years behind on actually addressing
the drug policies in this country. So yes, we restricted
those opioids, which is good, but at the same time,
the cartels were figuring out how to synthesize or make
synthetic opioids ie fensanyl, and then they started making it
(09:05):
in mass quantities and pumping it into this country to
a population that was already very vulnerable as a result,
the big pharma laying that kind of foundation for the
addiction and opioid crisis in our country, and now you're
kind of seeing it play out. Last year we had
nearly ninety thousand drug overdose tests in this country and
it just gives you contacts. In the year two thousand,
(09:27):
we only had seventeen thousand overdose tests in this country.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So whoa the arrival crazy.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, it has completely changed the game, and it requires
us to change our response.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
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Now stick around, We've got more after this. What's your
reaction to what you're seeing right now with the Trump
administration going out and taking out these boats that are
headed for the United States with drugs. I mean, I
(11:04):
think that is it's very controversial, but it is sending
a very strong message to anybody who's trying to bring
deadly drugs into this country.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I have no issue because I'm sorry, I don't because look,
when I was on the street, I used to hold
drugs for the drug dealers out here. I was a
mule for them because they would pay me with heroin.
That's how I was able to support my addiction. So
I talked to these guys. I knew what they were.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
They're basically that's actually an interesting point that you're making
that I think we don't think about because you go,
oh my gosh, there's all these bad guys on the
streets selling drugs, but you get you were sucked into
being one of their lackeys because you're getting the product
and they get you addicted. And here's this upstanding citizen,
(11:49):
dad of two, great husband who in just a matter
of four years fell to this level.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yep, that's right, and that again, that speaks to the
power of addiction, the desperation of addiction. I mean, I
was on the street, I had been cut off from everything.
My family was practicing what they call separation with love.
So you know, they love me, they want me to
do okay, but they're not going to come out and
help me and give me money on the street to
just buy drugs. So I had to figure out my hustle,
and I want to be clear. In San Francisco, as
(12:17):
an example, we have five hundred to one thousand organized
drug dealers operating in plain site, in broad daylight in
the city, okay, And it's been that way for at
least a decade, if not longer. And they're fueled by
the Sinaloa cartel, right. And so there's that whole network
of cartel drug dealers up and down the West coast
of the United States, from San Diego all the way
(12:38):
to Anchorage, Alaska, and over into Salt Lake City and Denver, ETCA.
Selling drugs that are killing our kids, that are just
destabilizing our large urban centers, our big cities. It's destabilizing them.
If you ever read Michael Schellenberger's book San Francisco, he
really laid that out very clear as part of his
argument as to why these cities are falling apart. It's
(13:01):
being fueled by drugs. It's being fueled by organized drug dealers.
So for Trump to crack down on that, I think
it's long overdue, and I know it makes a lot
of people uncomfortable. And I'm probably going to get some
heat because I'm out here in San Francisco, so I'm
going to get some heat for saying that. But you
know what, interdiction, reducing the supply of drugs is just
as important as reducing the demand for drugs. We need
(13:23):
to make it harder for people to get high and
easier for people to access treatment and get off of
those drugs.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
So how there was a particular police officer I believe
that kept kind of giving you a push to get
off the streets. Your wife. He had talked to your wife,
and there was kind of an almost I mean, from
my perspective, this is like a god thing. He talks
to your wife. He has this connection to you in
a more personal way, and I thought it was interesting
(13:50):
the way he described it. He was like, you know,
there's not that many people once they're at this point,
who's got who have a wife? Who's still going? I
miss him? I can't and that he's gone. We love
him and really still searching for that person to return,
and that struck him. So I feel like he was
almost like a guardian angel for a while from the
(14:11):
story I read, But tell us a little bit about
that process of him following you and you getting out
of that situation.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, that's so. First of all, my wife is a saint,
and I'm going to spend the rest of my life
making amends to her, and I'm very very happy to
do that. And I'm happy to also say that I'm
reconciled with my wife and kids. And that couldn't have
happened without recovery, without finding our faith as a family
and making a decision to move forward together. What Officer
Rob Gilson did for me was above and beyond the
(14:40):
call of duty. So my wife had actually called the
tender Long Police station in tears in a panic to
file a missing person's report on me because I had
been gone for the home from the home for eleven days,
and he took that phone call. And it's interesting I
was arrested six times after that on the streets for
various crimes I was commit as a result of my addiction,
(15:02):
which I own all of them completely, and I paid
my debt I had to go to jail, I had
to be on probation, I had to do all those things.
But he arrested me four out of those six times.
And the last time he arrested me is I was
being booked into jail. He just looked at me and
he said, dude, you're skinny, you're dirty. I know you
have a wife and kids at home that love you.
(15:25):
You need to get yourself clean and you need to
get back to your family. And for whatever reason, that
last time that he said that to me, it really
hit home because then I realized the damage that I
had caused, not just to myself, but to my wife
and to my kids. And it gave me. It gave
me an opportunity to start thinking. And then I had
to go sit in jail and think about it for
(15:46):
another three months after that before I really decided that
I was going to give recovery an honest try. And
I give a lot of credit to the Salvation Army.
I have to, because they're the ones that took me
in and gave me a chance to go through their
rehab program that was a six month residential program that
was free. They didn't have to do that, but they
took me in and gave me a chance. I found
(16:07):
recovery and I found my faith, and that's a big
thing for many of us in recovery, that spiritual awakening happens,
and that kind of led me back to my wife
and my kids and eventual reconciliation.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
You said that was free. I think that's one of
the biggest complaints that we hear about getting out of
this cycle of addictionists. How do you get to a rehab?
How do you afford it? I mean, I've had family
members who have invested tens of thousands of dollars in
rehab programs.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
They're so expensive, Yep, they are, but there's also a
ton of free programs. It just depends on what you're
looking for. Yeah, you can go to the rehab in
Malibu and spend fifty grand if you want, Or you
can go to the Salvation Army, which is a little
bit harder core, full of accountability and structure and also
find your pathway back. And so look, if you're holmost
on the street living in a tent, trust me going
(17:00):
to an environment where you have to wake up at
six in the morning and shave and tucking your shirt
and go to church twice a week and follow some
twelve step recovery beats the hell out of sleeping in
a tent on the street. It just does. And so
we need to have multiple options available for people. Private
insurance companies need to do a lot better job of
(17:22):
paying for drug rehab. That's another topic, really, but we
should be doing what we can to make rehabs widely available,
treatment on demand, and make it as affordable as possible,
if not free altogether. Because we have forty million people
in this country struggling with drug addiction right now. Ten
percent of the population of our country is addicted to drugs.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
So what do you think is the answer to homelessness?
I mean, I know that you feel like you've successfully
beat this, and you know that that's not the case
for many people. In San Francisco. You have a serious
homelessness problem out there, And I would say you have
some of the highest budgets for homelessness in the country,
(18:05):
between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the budgets are in
the hundreds of millions, and yet the homeless problem continues
to get worse. So what do you say to politicians
about what they can do to get people off the street.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Well, another great question, and there's no one easy answer
to it, but I will say this that accountability is
one of the cornerstones of recovery. So Trump's executive Order
on homelessness was actually the correct approach. That is what
we have to do. We're at a point now where
we have in San Francisco, we have eight thousand homeless,
at least half of them are living unsheltered on the street.
(18:42):
Eighty to ninety percent of them have what they call
a co occurring disorder, which is either addiction and or
mental illness or both of them playing out at the
same time. And the biggest mistake that we've made in
our homeless response as a state and as a nation
is that we decided to first of all, call it
homeless us because that's a euphemism, and to downplay the
(19:03):
fact that there's a drug problem, that we have a
huge drug problem amongst the homeless in this country, and
we've downplayed it on purpose because we don't want to
stigmatize drug users. We don't want to stigmatize the homeless.
All that harm reduction stuff coming from the radical left.
That's a huge mistake. It's a terrible mistake because we're
misdiagnosing the problem. And to give you an example of that,
(19:25):
in La on skid Row, they just finished building a
couple of towers to house chronically homeless and supportive housing.
Each one of those units in that apartment building costs
the city six hundred thousand dollars per door. Okay, to
house about four hundred people altogether. Well, guess what on
skid Row and a fifty block radius, there's ten thousand
(19:46):
homeless people. So are we how much is it going
to cost us to house all ten thousand of those
homeless people? And then on top of that, we don't
ask them to get off drugs. In fact, we tell
them it's okay, you can bring your drugs inside with you.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
How do you Yeah, I guess that's that's the question
that I think so many of us have, And it's
kind of the question that we don't really ask because
I think that nobody understands the answer. The problem is
not that you don't have a house. Somehow you got there.
I mean, you were not actually someone that didn't have
a house. You had a home, You weren't homeless, you
weren't in your home because you were choosing addiction, was
(20:22):
choosing for you to be living out on the streets.
So how many people are in that situation? I guess
you're really right, we're calling it homelessness, But is it
when was your experience that the majority out there of
people were actually addicted.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yes, So everybody that I knew on the street was
addicted to drugs. Everybody, and I'm not exaggerating anything. One
hundred percent of the people I knew on the street, old, young, white, black,
they were all addicted to drugs. Whether it was crack, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, whatever,
they were addicted, Okay, And I just want to be
very very clear about that. And so when you hear
all this data come out saying, oh, it's only forty
(21:03):
five percent or forty seven percent of the people that
are addicted. These are based on surveys that we've done.
And then you start asking about the surveys and it
turns out that they're self reported. So you're basically asking people, hey, man,
are you using drugs? When they would come up to
me on the street when I was homeless and they
would say, hey, I don't even want to stay homeless.
When I was on the street. They would say, hey, Tom,
(21:23):
are you okay? Are you struggling with drug use? Or
you need some help? And I'd be like, what are
you talking about. I'm just sitting here, mind in my business.
I'm fine. So are we really getting the truth from people?
Of course not, because when you're struggling with addiction, number one,
there's denial. Number two, there's fear, and number three, you
don't want to admit that you have a problem to
(21:44):
anyone because you still think that you have control over
your situation, even when it gets down to as little
as a piece of heroin in your hand.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
I think that's the most shocking part about this for
someone who hasn't gone through this, And that's why I
am so grateful to you for sharing your story because
as I listened to this, how quickly it was that
this took hold of you and it was no longer
really a choice because that feeling of euphoria that you
talk about and wanting that back, I mean, that was
(22:13):
so powerful that it took you out of your home,
put you on the street. What was what was that experience?
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Are you sleeping on street corners?
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
What does that look like? Explain? Give us a little
bit of a picture of what that is and who
you met and how that was.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, excellent. Generally speaking, it was just very dark all
the time, even when it was the sun was shining
and it was warm, and everything was a very dark experience.
You're cold all the time, because more often than not,
I would sleep in the doorway kind of just kind
of crouched down in a doorway and I just had
a jacket and my jeans, and sleeping on the concrete
(22:53):
is very very cold, and so it just gets it
just gets to your bones and you feel cold on
the inside all the time. I you know, I would
eat maybe once a day. I knew where the soup
kitchen was. I could go get a meal if I
needed to. The rest of the time of my existence
on the street was spent trying to hustle to maintain
my drug addiction. And that's how the case was with
(23:16):
everybody I knew on the street and people I knew
people on the street in San Francisco that were from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio,
Las Vegas. I knew a guy that used to be
a graphic designer in Las Vegas, making six figures in
the salary, but he got addicted to oxy cotone, and
then he became a heroin addict and now was living
on the streets of San Francisco. It crosses all barriers
(23:40):
addiction does. And it's amazing that the people you'll meet
out there. There's people out there that have master's degrees.
I knew a guy that was an officer in the
Navy at one point that had been a heroin addict
for twenty five years on the street, and so many
of them now are gone because illicit fentanyl came to
the street.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
At a certain point, was it? I mean, you talked
about it at first being like this calming, warm blanket
took away all your troubles. Does it suddenly change, because
what I'm hearing is you're living in horrible conditions to
avoid that withdrawal because you know that's coming if you
don't keep it up. I mean, does that seem like
you're just kind of chasing the drug to stop the inevitable.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
You clearly just hit the nail on the head. So
at a certain point, this is the last big trick
of addiction, is that it's no longer about getting high.
It's about staying well, not going into withdrawal. So you're
doing everything you can just to maintain and if you
get high, that's a bonus. And there's this huge fear
(24:43):
of those withdrawal symptoms because the withdrawals, the physical withdrawals
from fensanel are horrible. They're absolutely horrible. It's imagine having
like the flu and a cold and anxiety and your
muscles are locking up. You're throwing up all the stuff
all at the same time, and it lasts for days
upon days upon days. It doesn't ever go away, and
(25:05):
you'll literally almost do anything to not fall into that
kind of trap, that feeling. So people cheat, they steal,
they'll lie, they'll rob their neighbors, they'll they'll sell themselves well,
do whatever they need to do to get drugs. That's
how powerful this addiction is. And so this is another
reason why we have to put such a focus on fentanyl,
(25:27):
because an addition to fentanyl killing everyone, I want to
just make this point really quick. The first time I
used that thirty milligrams and I felt that blanket over
my head. I never felt that feeling again until the
first time I tried fentanyl. That was the only drug
I ever used since then that actually made me feel
like the first time that I used and that's why
(25:47):
so many people love it. And then it traps you
in your addiction. FENTONYL metabolizes faster in your body, so
you have to use it every two hours, unlike heroin,
which was every sixty hours. Yeah. So you know, these
harm reduction people and the public health people are out
there saying, hey, you know we need to wait for
people to be ready here. You're never going to be
(26:08):
ready unless we intervene because you have to use fentanyl
every two hours in order to just stay well.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
And that's I might sound incredibly naive here, but I
have always I guess this the public story and the
media story has worked a number on me because I
always felt like fentanyl was an accident if you got it,
but you were seeking out fentanyl.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Oh no, it's completely replaced heroin. In San Francisco. You
can't find heroin on the street of streets of San
Francisco or opioids of any kind. The only thing that
they have are fentanyl in powdered form, or fentanyl fake
pills that look like oxycodone that'll kill you quick, and
it's cheap. It's five dollars for a little baggy for
a tenth of a gram of fentanyl. Now on the
(26:53):
streets of San Francisco. Gosh, you go to Portland, Oregon,
the fentanyl pills are a dollar fifty a pill on
the street right now. So this is why it's so pervasive.
It's cheap to manufacture, easy to smuggle because dogs can't
smell it when it comes across the border, and then
the distribution is just become nationwide, like widespread, and it's
completely saturated our country and created an overdose calamity of
(27:19):
epic proportions.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
So that is why when you see him saying we're
taking out these ships, you say, go for it, because
that's the drug that's being sold. I mean, I think
so many of us think that that's like, like I said,
you are accidentally getting that, but that's actually just the
cheap high quick stave off the withdrawal symptoms you've got this.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Yeah, I mean, look, the cartels made a business decision
right to replace heroin, which takes time to produce because
you have to grow the opium poppies and then you
have to harvest them and make it into heroin with
something that you can take three precursor chemicals that you
mostly get from China, mix them together to make fencanyl
(28:05):
into a powder, and then you package it and you
ship it off. And you can do that twenty four
hours a day, seven days a week. You don't have
to wait for seasons and planting and all that stuff
to happen at harvesting. You can just mass produce this stuff.
And that's been their cash cow. And now you know
the cartels were already making billions before, they're making billions
more now. And that also speaks to we need to
(28:27):
start asking what's going on in our country that that
forty to ten percent of our population is using drugs?
Why is it this way here and not that way
pretty much everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
That's what I was going to ask, is are we
the biggest market?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
We are the biggest market. So it goes that US
is number one, and then it's Canada then, and then
fencanyl hasn't arrived in Europe yet, So while they have
a huge drug problem in the UK, there's no fencanel
there yet. It hasn't jumped the pond for whatever reason,
and it hasn't really hit Australia either, as an example,
where that also has historic we'd high drug usage rates.
(29:01):
It's really just the United States and Canada. North America
has been deeply afflicted with fensanyl, but interestingly enough, Mexico
doesn't have that same kind of problem. So we have
to start asking why that is. And nobody really has
a clear answer. It's socioeconomics is part of it, but
nobody really has a clear understanding of why we love
drugs so much in the United States.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
I think it is definitely something that we think is
just sneaking into ei there's a drug market, and then
that sneaking in. When I was running for office, we
went to our Oakland County Sheriff's office and they have
a crime lab there and I mean, honestly, I would
have seen this in someone's house and not known what
it was. It's this giant block that was it looked
(29:46):
like chalk and it was pressed into the shape of
a jeep logo. And I'll never forget this. And he said,
that's how they brand it, the different whoever is selling it.
They have these brands and use logos and they had
a jeep logo in there and I thought, I've no,
he said, that's drugs. I said, what do you mean?
(30:08):
He said, yeah, And there's a woman in there, and
she was taking it apart very carefully. She had a
hood over top of her that was, you know, vacuuming
up all the air. She's full almost as matt suit.
Was fentanyl.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yep, that's right, and she has to wear that as
matt suit so she doesn't overdose herself. So in San Francisco,
our fentanyl is multicolored, and it is that chalk substance
that you're talking about, that powdered chalk substance, and they
color it. There's red fentanyl, blue, fentanyl, light blue, yellow,
and each one of them designates either a different strength
of the fentanyl or that it's mixed with something else,
(30:41):
like it's mixed with methamphetamine or mixed with benzo diazepines
like xanax to intensify the effect one way or the
other for people. And so it's like a buffet where people,
if you have the money, you can pretty much get
anything that you want. And the way the cartel dealers
view it here is that if you die, you die.
You made the decision to put that that drug in
(31:03):
your body. And what's even more frustrating is that the
police here are doing their job. They're arresting the drug dealers.
The DA, the DA in San Francisco. Now, our current
DA is doing her job, she's prosecuting drug dealers. But
we have a bunch of judges on our superior court
benches here that are former public defenders that believe that
(31:25):
still have this ideology that the war on drugs failed.
So they just continue to release these dealers over and
over back to the street, which is why you know
the door has been left open for Trump to threaten
federal intervention in San Francisco. That's really the reason why
it's not about undocumented immigration. It's about organized drug dealers
on the street that have persisted for more than a
(31:45):
decade that are killing six hundred and fifty people in
our city every single year.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. The crazy part about this, you
are talking about a few people having a lot of power,
and as I hear you saying, you're kind of like
a drug runner because you get them free, they are
just using their own clients to as employees without having
(32:12):
to pay them. I mean, it's insane. So if you
took the few bad guys off the street. Over time,
this would end. That's what we're hearing in Michigan. You
seem to believe that as well.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Oh eighty percent of the homeless drug problem in San
Francisco would literally go away if we removed all the
organized drug dealers from here. They're the ones that cause
the majority of the chaos. They all carry guns. There's
drug violence all the time, and we have to be
honest in San Francisco. Like, so, there's four thousand people
on the street using drugs, and then about and then
(32:43):
there's another several thousand that are actually housed in supportive
housing in San Francisco that come out of their house
in the day and hang out on the street with
the other homeless and use drugs. And then you have
another few thousand that are in housing themselves that we're
paying for with rent subsidies of the cost this city
four hundred and fifty million dollars a year to keep
(33:04):
them housed, and they're using drugs inside. And so now
we've created the scenario where seventy percent of all the
overdose tests in San Francisco happen at a fixed address.
So we've actually taken this problem, and we've also moved
it inside. It's not even like we took it off
the street and moved it inside. We have it on
the street and then we also have it inside at
the same time. And it's just a big mess.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
And they know who they are, but they're still out there.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Absolutely. Look, every drug dealer in San Francisco has been arrested.
In fact, last year SFPD arrested all the drug dealers
in San Francisco. Nine hundred felony drug dealing arrests were
made in San Francisco. That's pretty much all the dealers
that were here. Yet the drug market remains, So you
have to start asking why that is, and you have
to start looking at the mechanisms that we have in place,
(33:49):
and then are state policies that are in place that
allow these judges to make these decisions that just create
a revolving door for organized drug dealers to go back
to the street sell fentanol that again is killing six
hundred plus people a year inner city.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Oh my gosh. So what are you doing now and
what's your message to people? What's your closing message to
the folks today.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Well, I'm doing a variety of different things. I do
consulting work. I work for a great company called Sunflower Sober,
which is kind of the merger of AI and Recovery together.
It has an AI virtual sponsor that you can put
on your phone to give you support as you're trying
to stay sober and trying to stay in recovery. But
I also work on public policy. I work in that
field now as well, where I'm trying to push and
it's really an uphill battle because it's California, of course,
(34:34):
but to anyone who will listen nationwide, I'm trying to
push for more pragmatic changes to drug policy so that
we shift our focus away from radical harm reduction, free
crack pipes to actually focusing on getting people off the drugs,
getting them healthy, and getting them reintegrated back into society
so that they can return to work, pay their taxes,
(34:54):
reconnect with their families. Those are the kinds of ideals
that that we need to be fighting for in this country,
for this population before it gets so far out of
control that we just have this permanent class of people
that are always going to be out there on the
street using drugs, destroying themselves and harming the community.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
It's such common sense. I mean, it really is, but
it's very hard. After years of being told and this
seems crazy, people will go, Ahai, it's not hard. But
these communities have been told you've got to have free
crack pipes, you've got to have free syringes, You've got
we've got to get make this so that it's safe.
How can that possibly be safe? Now you have to
(35:35):
turn all of that thinking around, which seems like it
would be very easy. But I've watched people, I've listened
to people on social media. I see regular people who
have fallen for this. And that's why I'm so grateful
that you told your story and you were so open
with what you dealt with and what you saw out there,
because I think that without hearing it from someone who's
(35:56):
actually gone through it, we hear from pundits, we hear
from people all the time. You don't know it until
you've learned it from someone who's actually dealt with it. So, Tom,
thank you so much for coming on today.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
It has really been my pleasure. Thanks for giving me
the opportunity to share my story and to let people
know that accountability is a cornerstone of recovery. We need
to fight for it in this country.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Thank you absolutely, Tom Well, thank you so much for
coming on, and thank you all for joining us on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others, you
can go to Tutor diisonpodcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you
can watch the whole thing on Rumble or YouTube at
Tutor Dixon. Thank you so much, Join us next time
and have a blasted day.
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