The Radical Harm Reduction World with Jared Klickstein

**Dr. Drew** (0:10)
Hey, everybody, welcome to The Dr. Drew Podcast. Appreciate you all being here, and do click through and help the people that support us here. We appreciate it. Don't forget, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, at 3 o'clock, ask Dr. Drew to subscribe at the Rumble channel or drdrew.tv. Today, I've got Jared Klickstein. Jared has a book. Jared has a story. And I thought it'd be very important for him to tell it here. So Jared, welcome.

**Jared Klickstein** (0:31)
Thanks so much, Dr. Drew, for having me on.

**Dr. Drew** (0:33)
First, tell us about the book.

**Jared Klickstein** (0:35)
Yeah, the book is called Crooked Smile, What It Took to Escape a Decade of Homelessness, Addiction, and Crime. As you can tell from the title, the book is about my time being homeless as a result of drug addiction and growing up in a home with two parents that were addicted to heroin. And I just kind of cover my time. I ended up on Skid Row in Los Angeles and I ended up living a life of criminality. And I sort of critiqued the policies that I felt sort of kept me on the streets. And then there were some policies that also helped me get off the streets. But it's sort of my-

**Dr. Drew** (1:12)
What helped you get off? Let's talk about those for good things first.

**Jared Klickstein** (1:16)
Well, this is just very specific to me. I eventually got arrested and I went to jail. And that allowed me to finally detox from heroin. And it did not cure me of addiction. It cured me of the physical addiction. But the dependency.
Yeah, but I needed to get to that point to actually begin the process of becoming like willing to put in work to relieve myself from the mental addiction.

**Dr. Drew** (1:42)
So, let's stop right there. So, when people are strung out, or meth speed, both, you can't be, nobody can do anything. Your brain's not working right. So, you have to get to a place where you at least are clear enough that somebody can sort of go, hey, look what's happening. Do you want to do something about it? Right?

**Jared Klickstein** (2:00)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you will, every decision you make is essentially suicidal to pursue the getting more heroin, getting more meth. You will literally, I mean, many people obviously die in the pursuit of such things. Another policy that I think helped me a lot was in Los Angeles, specifically, there's four rehabs that started to accept Medi-Cal, which is sort of like, you know, insurance for poor people or homeless people. And because of SB 1380, there was a lot of tricky things that happened with shelters that were requiring sobriety. So these rehabs were willing to, they were able to accept insurance to take people that were off the streets. And that changed my life. Long term treatment really changed me.

**Dr. Drew** (2:46)
So by long term?

**Jared Klickstein** (2:49)
I stayed there for about four months, which I wouldn't even really consider long term, but it's a lot longer than, you know, 28 days and specifically they let me get a job before I left. So I was set up with a paycheck, with like a nest egg, a few grand and then they fed me into like a sober living system right up the street. Probably six months. Yeah.

**Dr. Drew** (3:10)
So short actually for somebody with your history.

**Jared Klickstein** (3:13)
It was. Yeah. And I'll be honest, I've been in sober living longer at prior attempts, but I just wasn't mentally there yet. I mean, I just wasn't, I was too young and I'm a big proponent of consequences. Like consequences really help me change my behavior.

**Dr. Drew** (3:30)
Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, we have taken the position that it's not the state of California in particular, taking position. You can't ask a drug addict to do anything, which means you're going to leave them to die. Period. End of story. It's incredible. It's just unbelievable to me. You just, you have to go. You have to start. People, the denial and the anasognosia gets broken through loss. People lose things. They lose their family. They lose their health. They lose their financial status. They lose their place of living. And eventually, they lose their freedom. And somewhere in there, it gets through. And loss of freedom is a very common place that people get to break through their denial. That's what happened to you.

**Jared Klickstein** (4:16)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I lost everything. I lost my family. I lost friends. I lost the ability to maintain employment. And that didn't matter. I mean, that was not enough. I had to lose more.