“San Francisco is much more about organized crime, both cartel-backed organized drug dealing, and then the organized retail-theft industry, which is driven by the addicts who are supplied by those cartel-supply drug dealers. Oakland is different. Oakland is much more opportunistic, more entrepreneurial, if you will. I think it’s mostly just kind of self-organized crews of thieves who just drive around doing crimes: dipping, which is car break-ins, armed carjackings, home invasions …”

Leighton Woodhouse is an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and a native of Berkeley, California. He has been documenting the “street addiction crisis” engulfing the Bay Area, and the political culture and policies fueling it.

“We don’t arrest people, and we certainly don’t send them to mandatory treatment. And what it means is that we’re just allowing the addiction to continue to consume them, because we haven’t forced them into sort-of that moment where they have to choose: Am I going to fight this addiction, or am I going to spend the next 10 years in prison? It takes that kind of a choice to break through the fog of addiction, and we’re not giving people that opportunity anymore,” says Mr. Woodhouse.

Mr. Woodhouse is also the co-founder of the “Public” publication on Substack with Michael Shellenberger, and a key investigator of the Twitter Files. In this episode, we discuss the limits of free speech and dive into the Bay Area ideology of left-wing libertarianism.

“Harm reduction has evolved into something much more—in my view—monstrous, where literally encouraging people to quit using drugs is seen as oppressive. It seems somehow, like ‘how dare you judge a drug user?’” says Mr. Woodhouse.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.