Dr. Drew Pinsky’s nomination to LA County’s homeless commission sparks pushback

Dr. Drew Pinsky — Southern California pop culture’s ubiquitous “Dr. Drew” — has been nominated by Supervisor Kathryn Supervisor to sit on the commission that oversees the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The nomination was applauded by fans, but also sparked a torrent of social-media opposition, spurring critics to renew their criticism of the celebrity doctor’s sometimes polarizing comments on homelessness, law enforcement and the pandemic.

If the full Board of Supervisors approves the nomination at Tuesday’s meeting, Pinsky would sit on a 10-member commission that governs budgets, funding, planning and policy for the lead agency that coordinates housing and services for the unhoused across L.A. County.

Pinsky, 62, has roots in Pasadena and still practices general medicine in the area. In the past two decades, he has become a fixture in the media, leveraging his experience as a physician who treats people struggling with addiction. The radio show  “Loveline” — on which he and outspoken comedian/podcaster Adam Carolla proffered relationship advice — debuted in 1984 and ran for 32 years in one form or another. He also hosted “Dr. Drew on Call” and produced and starred on VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” shot at the Pasadena Recovery Center. He’s also a frequent guest and commentator on countless radio, TV and internet shows, usually queried on myriad health topics.

Pinsky has been know to raise eyebrows with brash comments, including a year ago, when he likened the novel coronavirus to the seasonal flu and brushed off the pandemic as a media-propelled “panic.” He has since apologized for those remarks. “I wished I gotten it right, but I got it wrong,” he said.

Barger said Pinsky’s experience would bring a unique perspective to the commission.

The lone Republican among the county’s all-woman Board of Supervisors, Barger vowed Pinsky would “bring a fresh perspective along with vast medical experience … to ensure that funding, programs and services are effectively and compassionately provided in the community to help people experiencing homelessness,” Barger said.

Dr. Drew Pinsky listens to the speakers during Unhoused: Addressing Homelessness in California at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA on Thursday, February 13, 2020. The program was at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy and USC Price Center for Social Innovation. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Barger said she shared Pinsky’s approach to homelessness, which puts a strong emphasis on mental health treatment and addiction recovery — the flip side, critics say, of those calling for bulking up the housing inventory and adding new layers of affordable dwellings — as a remedy for the crisis of the unhoused. Pinsky has angered advocates for the homeless by urging law enforcement to more assertively enforce drug laws as an incentive to get people with addiction issues into mandated treatment programs and on to recovery.

Pinsky said Friday that if appointed he’s not in it to mandate his point of view. He added that he does indeed believe that expanding housing is part of the solution for the homeless crisis but that treatment for mental health needs to be better integrated into public policy.

“I come to this with an open heart and an open mind, and hope to learn as much as possible,” he said.

But he also noted that his experience has given him insight and a sense of how to manage and treat addiction and emotional health issues that plague many experiencing homelessness.

Reports estimate that in L.A. County those who are mentally ill or who are experiencing symptoms of a mental disorder comprise  30-50% of people experiencing homelessness.

Amid such numbers, Pinsky himself was blunt about it in a 2019 Sacramento Bee column.

“This is not a housing or homelessness crisis; this is a mental-health crisis,” he wrote. “It is a deplorable insult to continue to see this glossed over in the press as somehow the result of expensive housing.”

Still, many advocates believe large numbers of unhoused, or those on the cusp of homelessness, are caught in a cycle of housing costs that grow beyond their reach. They live and work in a county where rents  have skyrocketed amid a dwindling supply of places to live and where the building of affordable units can’t keep pace with demand or affordability. More investment in housing represents the path to easing the crisis, they say.

Voters agreed back in March 2017, when they approved Measure H, the quarter-percent increase to the county’s sales tax that aimed to provide an estimated $355 million per year for homeless outreach services, rental subsidies and housing programs. A year earlier, L.A. city voters passed Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond that sought to more than triple the annual production of supportive housing.

Opposing Pinsky’s nomination are such folks as Thomas Booth, a West Hills Neighborhood Councilman, who called the choice “the most bizarre move I’ve ever seen.”

Booth took issue with an approach — which Pinsky has supported — that would allow local local jurisdictions more authority and discretion in removing people from encampments and other street living.

Proponents see such tweaks in the law — which expand the definition of “gravely disabled” — as a way to get mentally ill residents off local streets. Opponents see it as granting too much leeway for authorities to involuntarily detain people, putting them in confined or restrictive environments under the rationale of treatment.

“It’s looking at poverty on the street and reframing it as only as mental health and substance abuse problems,” Booth said, emphasizing that he was not speaking on behalf of the neighborhood council. “Those are the most stigmatized disorders we have,” he said. “Stigma is one of the biggest barriers to treatment … .”

“I think it’s poverty that is driving (homelessness),” said Booth, who is also a social worker who focuses on homeless issues. “I think ultimately housing is the answer,” he said. “We haven’t done enough on the housing front.”

Pinsky acknowledged that he wants to grow his understanding of the “nuances and complexities” of the issue. But he also stood firm in his belief that expanded housing alone cannot deal with people who are hooked on opioids or methamphetamines, or who face such conditions as paranoid schizophrenia.

“You have to put people somewhere,” he said. “But if you don’t provide the services, that’s not going to go very well.”

Mental health issues frame much of the county’s current detention puzzle.

The county’s archaic Men’s Central Jail is case in point.  A Rand Corp. study in January 2020 found that nearly 4,000 detainees would could be diverted for mental health treatment rather than being jailed. Many observers say it’s the result of 60-plus years of insufficient public mental-illness strategies — mirroring past policies that nationwide shut down asylums and hospitals with hopes they’d be replaced by community-based health centers that were never fully realized.

Couple that with the past waves of fiercer sentencing for drug offenses and other crime — and with cuts to subsidize housing and mental health programs — and the problem of mental health mushroomed in prisons and jails. The confluence of factors often left the frontline job of dealing with mentally ill homeless people to police.

That history has catalyzed supervisors’ efforts to establish a “Care First, Jails Last” model to deal with cycles of poverty, mental illness and homelessness. Much work remains, however, to finalize and implement those strategies.

The board’s decision on Tuesday will come amid the current pushback on Pinsky in social media, which has spurred a “Dump Dr. Drew” hashtag on Twitter.

And it follows backlash earlier this month, when he faced an angry Twitter-sphere over comments he made arguing that coronavirus vaccine passports “segregate people and strip them of their freedom to travel internationally.”

While such media sparring has come to be expected from radio-TV influencers, the board will tackle the question of whether it’s appropriate for an expert serving on a panel helping to shape public policy.

Pinksy, meanwhile, said he’s stunned by the pushback and is eager to join the commission. He’s here to serve, he said, and found it “astonishing” that people wouldn’t want someone with his experience and perspective on the board.

“Maybe,” he said, “I have something to offer.”

Reporter Elizabeth Chou contributed to this report.