Who Are the Homeless?

JOHN, a well-paid technician at a South Bay chemical plant, has literally smoked himself out of house and home.

“I make $500 a week,” said John, whose real name has been withheld at his request. “Then I go smoke it all up in cocaine.”

John spends his nights with other homeless men in a wooded area alongside the San Diego Freeway. Cocaine, he says, consumes all the income he could use to pay rent.

John says he quit using cocaine six months before moving to California last year to start his present job. But he resumed smoking the drug after arriving--and soon had to abandon the apartment he was renting.

At work, he says, he hides his addiction--and his homelessness--for fear of being fired before his probationary period ends. Workers who make it through their probationary period can get company-paid drug treatment without being in danger of losing their jobs.

John, citing the long waiting lists at public drug treatment centers, says most of the addicts he knows are not so lucky. “There’s just nowhere to go.”