"I just want to clean up the mess" -- Pleasure Island -- The experiment was a success but the patients died -- The war on the war on drugs -- "We can't end overdoses until we end poverty and racism" -- Let's go Dutch -- The crisis of untreated mental illness -- Madness for decivilization -- Medication first -- Not everyone's a victim -- The heroism of recovery -- Homicide and legitimacy -- When the law's against the laws -- "Legalize crime" -- It's not about the money -- Love bombing -- "It's a leadership problem" -- Responsibility first -- Civilization's end

"San Francisco was once widely viewed as the prettiest city in America. Today it is best known as the epicenter of the homeless zombie apocalypse. What went wrong? Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years, during which time he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, and for alternatives to jail and prison. But as massive open-air drug markets spread across the state, Shellenberger decided to take a deep dive into the roots of the crisis. What he discovered shocked him. Crime, poverty, inequality--all the things decades of Democratic rule were supposed to solve. The homelessness crisis is really an addiction and mental illness crisis. And the City of San Francisco and other Left Coast cities - Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle - not only tolerate hard drug use, often by severely mentally ill people, they subsidize it, directly and indirectly, attracting vagrants from across the United States. Why? In San Fransicko, Shellenberger reveals that the underlying problem isn't a lack of housing, or a lack of money for social programs. The real problem is the dominance of left-wing ideology that subsidizes lawlessness and encourages the breakdown of the foundational values that made what we call civilization possible"--