"Dr. Drew After Dark" host Dr. Drew Pinsky blasted Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom Wednesday on "The Brian Kilmeade Show" for the state's policies around drug addiction and homelessness. The former host of "Celebrity Rehab" said many addicts living on the streets can be easily treated and it drives him "crazy" to see how bad the situation has gotten.
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DR. DREW PINSKY: It's so bizarre. You don't know how bad it is in California. You can't imagine. People are fleeing. … You've never seen anything like it. And these [addicts] are people that could be treated easily. I know how to treat this. It's what drives me so crazy about it. This is a population that I dealt with for 35 years. Drugs and major serious mental illness. No problem to treat these people and many of them return them to a flourishing life. But you let them go too far. They will die and they will be irretrievable. And there we go every year we go up by another person per day dying on our streets. Now we're like at seven, eight per day dying. And when the meth deaths kick in, it's you're going to see an exponential increase in deaths on the street.
With fentanyl, everyone understands that you get exposed to fentanyl eventually, you're going to die. It's just opioid addiction is a progressive illness that ends in death, and particularly with fentanyl, now, you can't judge what you're getting. You overdose accidentally, you die. That's the natural history of opioid addiction. But meth addiction is different. You can go for long periods of time with meth and then late in the game you start getting medical problems and die suddenly.
