From the department of Orwellian language we get batches of words like “harm reduction” and “Skid Row Care Campus.”

These terms describe government policies that hand addicts the tools to get high –– again and again, every day. (Then taxpayers pay to stash the addicts in hotel rooms, among other non-solutions.)

This is, of course, sheer lunacy.

It’s also the official policy of the governments of Los Angeles, LA County and California.

As revealed in The California Post, anyone can walk into LA’s Skid Row and obtain a range of taxpayer-funded drug paraphernalia –– no questions asked.

Over several days, journalists received syringes, crack pipes, containers to mix injectables and more, reporters for City Journal found.

That’s not care, and it’s not reducing harm.

It’s perpetuating, enabling –– and deepening –– addiction.

At taxpayer expense. Over and over and over again, as the city’s homeless crisis grows. 

Funny, isn’t it, how we never see “Your tax dollars at work” signs outside Skid Row?

Los Angeles, LA County and California should all retreat from policies so absurd as to invite parody.

And if local governments and their nonprofit cronies are so addicted to the sinister status quo (pun intended), the Trump administration should step in and put the entire sordid enterprise to an end: cold turkey.

Government has no business bankrolling illegal, destructive conduct that degrades public safety, causes collateral damage to innocents and hands taxpayers a bill for chronic dysfunction.

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The California Post reported this year that the LAPD responds to an astonishing 40 calls per hour related to homelessness issues. This, at a time when the force is short-staffed by thousands of officers, per the police chief himself.

It’s an insane use of limited resources.

And this is on top of the $3 billion a year the city and county spend, largely in vain, on homelessness programs.

For some, though, the mess provides a jackpot.

Nonprofit groups rake in taxpayer funding to deliver “services” like handing paraphernalia to drug addicts living in squalor on the streets. 

It’s part of LA’s homeless industrial complex: Government and nonprofit groups have an incentive to entrench misery, chaos and homelessness ––as a way to keep the tax-funded largesse coming. 
As the crises deepen, calls for new taxes roll out.

The entire cycle is offensive and deeply cynical. Instead of getting people help, LA hands them the means to stay homeless, addicted, dependent and dysfunctional.

That is not compassion. That is cruelty writ large, dressed up as something benign.

It’s not benign.

It’s malign.

And the government needs to stop doing it, in Orwellian fashion, with our money and in our name.