I have a relative who is mentally ill, was using drugs and on the street. I know many others in this situation. When they do something that violates the peace, they are picked up by the police and taken to a psychiatric hospital that costs about $20,000 for 2 weeks, paid by us, our state medi-cal, that’s usually the longest they can stay. They are given some medication and a written plan they are supposed to stay on and sent back out. My relative would only stay on the plan a few days and I know many others who have done and are doing the same, 40 times of repeating this cycle, which means $800,000 of our tax dollars for just one person were thrown away to something that did not work at all. Maybe someone is benefiting from this money, but it is not the patient.

We were finally able to conserve our relative and she has also been court ordered to a long term rehab which is working much better. What these people need is not a two week extremely expensive band-aid but a long term rehab program that could be court ordered and only cost about ½ of the $20,000 and last for a whole year. Someone needs to look into this gross misappropriation of funds and the homeless problem would finally begin to be solved.

We need to ask our representatives to look into this urgent matter. To partner with the private sector who already has some of these programs in place, open new ones and stop throwing away our hard earned tax dollars on solutions that don’t work. I guarantee this would greatly reduce homelessness and actually help people to become contributing citizens!