It's the Drugs: Sam Quinones on Street Homelessness

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2026

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Meghan talks with investigative journalist and bestselling author Sam Quinones (Dreamland, The Least of Us) about the piece of the homelessness crisis we're often encouraged to treat as secondary: synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, and its connection to the rapid rise of street psychosis and encampment life.

Sam explains how today's meth is fundamentally different from the "tweaker" era of the 1990s and early 2000s: cheaper, purer, more abundant, and more destabilizing. Known as P2P meth, this new form was perfectly suited to mass industrial production and reshaped street homelessness across the country, including places that historically had little visible homelessness at all.

They also talk about the limitations of a single-cause narrative ("it's all housing costs"), the realities of Housing First, and why many recovery stories begin not with compassion-as-policy, but with the unpopular intervention that removes access to drugs: arrest and incarceration.

And then for something completely different . . . Sam talks about his delightfully unexpected new book, The Perfect Tuba, and why band, discipline, and collective effort may offer a strange but persuasive antidote to a culture increasingly engineered for addiction.

Guest Bio:
Sam Quinones is an investigative journalist and bestselling author whose work focuses on addiction, drug trafficking, and social breakdown in the United States. He is the author of Dreamland, which examined the origins of the opioid epidemic, and The Least of Us, about fentanyl, methamphetamine, and the transformation of American street life. His latest book, The Perfect Tuba, explores community, discipline, and fulfillment through the unlikely world of band and brass instruments. He writes the Dreamland newsletter on Substack and hosts a podcast on addiction, recovery, and public policy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Affordable housing may well have something to do with why people are homeless.
0:04.8	I don't think it has a lot to do with why people end up on urine-soaked streets in a tent.
0:19.1	Welcome to the unspeak easy podcast.
0:23.8	The podcast, formerly known as the unspeakable, for conversations that are surprising and thought-provoking without being rage-baitie.
0:32.7	Our motto for 2026, less culture war, more culture.
0:40.7	We're going to try anyway. I am your host, Megan Downe. My guest is Sam Kannonis, an investigative journalist and bestselling author,
0:46.5	whose work focuses on drugs, addiction, and social breakdown in the U.S., among many other things.
0:53.3	Welcome, Sam.
0:55.3	It's great to have you here.
0:57.3	Well, thank you very much for having me, Megan.
1:01.0	The scope of your work is impressive and broad.
1:06.3	Your book, Dreamland, about the opiate crisis, came out in 2015.
1:09.0	I didn't realize it was that long ago now.
1:14.7	You followed that up with The Least of Us in 2021, which is about fentanyl and meth,
1:21.8	and really the emergence of fentanyl is one of the key factors anyway in the homelessness epidemic.
1:26.9	So homelessness, as a lot of my listeners know, is a subject that I want to cover a lot more here. And while you're not
1:28.5	writing about housing policy, much of your work is about the relationship now between these
1:34.2	drugs and the new iteration of street homelessness. So encampments, visible psychosis,
1:41.7	Los Angeles is the epicenter of that kind of scene. It's a city you're familiar with.
1:46.0	You were at the LA Times for a long time.
1:49.0	What about this issue did you not understand until you started reporting about this stuff specifically?
1:57.0	I mean, I know you've lived here a long time, and obviously you have seen,
	...

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