LA business owner warns city's drug crisis is being 'normalized' instead of deterred: 'Unsustainable'

A California business owner is slamming the latest effort to curb opiod-related deaths in Los Angeles by deploying mobile teams with oxygen cylinders to help homeless addicts on Skid Row.

Paul Scrivano, who owns Blue Dog Beer Tavern in the area, said the undertaking by Homeless Health Care Los Angeles is "less than a Band-Aid approach," telling Fox News' Carley Shimkus on Tuesday that he thinks combating the drug crisis warrants a different approach.

"They're going around in a little cart. It looks like a little hotdog cart, and they're handing out crack pipes. That's not how you stop a drug problem," he said of the non-profit's efforts.

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People are flagging down the carts for naloxone – otherwise known as Narcan –  syringes and condoms in addition to pipes and other harm reduction supplies, the Daily Mail reported.

While workers carry Narcan to reverse opioid overdoses, oxygen cylinders are touted as more beneficial in circumstances involving other types of overdose, particularly non-opioids, that do not respond to the medicine.

"To help stabilize people faster, address a range of drug threats and spare the brain from worse damage, people trying to halt overdoses have also turned to oxygen. The simplest method is mouth-to-mouth breathing, but the Homeless Health Care teams use masks hooked up to oxygen cylinders, a tool more commonly seen on ambulances and in hospitals," The Los Angeles Times explained Sunday. 

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The L.A. County Department of Health Services has provided much of the $500,000 in funding invested by county agencies to help launch the overdose response, the Times added.

"If you dig deep enough is very simply normalizing depravity. Just get it normalized on the streets,"  Scrivano said. "Another reason I think they're doing this is targeting people like me, business owners with strong voices. Having this condition on the streets drives people off the streets."

He used Ventura Boulevard as an example of the chaos unfolding in the city, telling of graffiti on storefronts, closed businesses and swaths of homeless people lingering on the streets and doing drugs.

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He criticized local elites for failing to take action, alleging their shortcomings are politically motivated.

"The only thing I can say is they don't want the middle. They want very, very rich – the people that they [the homeless] depend on. And they [the rich] want very, very poor – the people that depend on them. That way they can maintain complete control."

Shimkus asked Scrivano if he plans to leave the city as many other business owners have done. He said with consequential elections coming up both locally and nationally in 2024, he intends to wait and see what happens.

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"This is getting to be an unsustainable situation out here in Los Angeles. Our emergency services can't handle this anymore. The Los Angeles Police Department fell below 9,000 officers very recently. Three years ago, they had 10,000 officers. That very same [city council member] Nithya Raman tweeted out, ‘Defund the Police.’ Well, here we are three years later, and she's got a thousand less police."

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