By Lavender Cloud, Columnist
I grew up across the street from the Little Sisters of the Poor Jeanne Jugan residence, where the intended location of the Fred Brown residential recovery complex would be. I lived here for close to 20 years, and I am deeply troubled by the outrage displayed in South Shores. The recent protests of this project highlight a relentless barrier for people living with addiction to accessing treatment: fear-mongering through sensationalist political organizing that blocks the establishment of recovery program sites.
People who are substance dependent represent a significant segment of our society. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 9.8% of our country’s population over twelve currently live with a substance use disorder. In comparison, only 20% of people who need access to treatment and drug addiction recovery services receive support (2025). And yet, whenever there are projects planned to systemically address addiction, initiatives are met with the same argument: “Not in my backyard!”
The proposed establishment of the Fred Brown addiction treatment center in South Shores, San Pedro, is no different. A recovery facility that can support up to 122 inpatients and 1,000 outpatients has the potential to make a profoundly positive public health impact on the San Pedro community. For example, research shows that participation in residential addiction recovery treatment programs leads to lower rates of substance use (Gray & Argaez, 2019), better mental health outcomes (Tran & McGill, 2021), less community financial strain due to less expenditure on criminalization (Fardone et al., 2023), and better life chances for participating patients (Jason et al., 2021). This is clearly a benefit to our community. So, why wouldn’t we want this center for healing in our backyard?
The Fred Brown recovery complex protest included people displaying stigmatizing flyers with slogans that stated “protect our port town,” along with harmful protest signs that read “safety at risk” and “no skid row in San Pedro”. While there is no evidence to suggest that patients of recovery centers would pose a danger to our community, there is research that demonstrates drug treatment facilities are safe establishments that serve a much-needed public good (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2016).
Political efforts to block addiction treatment centers from being founded are often brought together under the cry, “not in my backyard” or “NIMBY” for short. The premise of NIMBY organizing is the fabricated need to protect neighborhood spaces and certain people within them from building projects and the individuals they serve, deemed as undesirable, dangerous, and unwanted.
The formation of these fear-based ideas, along with the attempts to use them to halt the foundation of recovery centers, is a part of a cycle of discrimination, stereotyping, and exclusion. Discrimination against people living with addiction in the form of denying their right to access care is rationalized through stereotyping those with substance use dependence as threatening, which results in social, economic, and political exclusion. An effective way to disrupt this cycle is to resist the slandering of our fellow neighbors, in this case, people who are recovering through two public health crises: addiction, along with the organized abandonment of people living with addiction.
We need this recovery center, and we need it in our backyard because it is part of our social responsibility as members of this community to care for each other. If we can move away from anxiety-laden reactionary politics to the transformative possibilities that this project is offering us, it will allow for not only the foundation of this recovery center, but the opening of our collective imagination to the efficacy of compassion towards building a better community.