California's High Costs and Fentanyl Crisis Outpace Switzerland

California: High prices, fentanyl, and camps surpassing Switzerland

What does someone returning to Los Angeles and San Francisco after ten years encounter? A landscape summarizing three layers: beer at $9 and hamburgers at $30, homeless camps extending beyond neighborhoods where they were already chronic, and a majority Latino population that, in their view, exceeds that of New Mexico or Florida. The image that struck them most was another: a man lying on the sidewalk looking dead and hundreds of people walking past. No one checked if he was breathing. Only he was.

The account, without a single official statistic behind it, has evolved into a broader conversation about prices, drugs, and the economic model.

How much does it cost to eat and drink in California?

It depends on the place, and that nuance splits the diagnosis in two. The traveler places the price level 30% above Switzerland: beer at $9 and a hamburger at $30. In contrast, the menu of a fast-food chain is cited, the double-double combo with fries and unlimited drink for less than $7. Some flatly deny it: in the United States, you don't pay that even at the White House, and the country is cheaper than any Spanish city.

The other half of the argument is the paycheck. It is maintained in conversation that a bricklayer can earn $6,000 a month laying blocks and that a couple of professionals with an annual income of $130-140K live comfortably in a suburb. With those salaries, the debate is not whether the price is high, but for whom.

Why are there drug user camps in San Francisco?

Because the country's most expensive housing has been joined by opioid consumption, and the result is a census of people on the streets that no longer concentrates in the usual neighborhoods. The Tenderloin had been out of any reasonable tourist route for years. The new thing is that the scene has spilled into affluent areas. Staying in the center, a visitor was advised not to walk back to the hotel from the restaurant: 300 meters.

The account adds an operational detail: social services taking inventory of people with mental disorders, removing those considered dangerous, and leaving the rest. A taxi driver, according to that testimony, summarized the method: they are taken in a police car to a specific point and dropped off there, like emptying a container. That the state with the most pogre government in the country is the one that has ended up with this photo is, for the author of the account, anything but coincidence.

Fentanyl has already reached Spain

The leap across the continent is no longer a laboratory hypothesis: police arrested a cocaine seller in La Línea de la Concepción and seized eight fentanyl tablets. The substance is described as one hundred times more potent than morphine and very compact for transport, which lowers smuggling costs and multiplies harm per gram.

The documented precedent is no less significant: as early as 2021, an analysis was published on fentanyl mixed with cocaine as a trend that kills by overdose, with the added risk that a few doses can knock out habitual consumers. Forecasts circulating point to Barcelona, Naples, Marseille, Paris, Frankfurt, and Athens as next stops within a five-year horizon.

The excess of technological capitalism

The most economic diagnosis does not speak of drugs, but of salaries. The concentration of technological employment has raised the spending power of a part of the population so much that it pulls up the prices of everything else: housing, consumer goods, food. Someone earning a six-figure sum does not discuss the price of a menu; someone who cleans their office does.

Hence, it is maintained that California gathers eleven of the twelve cities with the highest per capita income in the United States and, at the same time, shelters entire neighborhoods of camping and informal economy. The usual rebuttal: Los Angeles County is gigantic, Skid Row is a drop in the map, and there are areas of millionaires where the problem does not exist. Conspiracy readings about real estate purchases taking advantage of the deterioration also circulate, with no evidence to support them.

The Spanish mirror: Madrid's Sierra

The parallel with the most traction is domestic. Several voices describe a growing sense of insecurity in municipalities in the Madrid Sierra —Colmenar, Villalba, Fresnedillas, El Guanol, Las Navas del Marqués— and attribute it to the concentration of migrant population in squares and parks, with the consequent abandonment of those spaces by the usual neighbors. The response is that these are exaggerated perceptions, that the majority of the towns remain safe, and that the phenomenon is limited to specific points. The disagreement is not in the data, which no one provides, but in what is considered normal.

The most ecological state that does not ban plastic

For those who still believe in labels: the greenest state in the country does not restrict straws, bags, or single-use plastics, prohibitions that have been in force in Europe for years. And the vehicle fleet remains dominated by large-displacement vehicles, with electric vehicles coexisting in the same picture. The posturing ecology, the account says, looks better in the showcase than in the ordinance.

The final recommendation remains, which summarizes the entire text: if anyone goes, let them go to the forest with Yogi Bear. Far from civilization. Which is, after all, what we have all been trying to do since beer costs nine dollars.