The Tudor Dixon Podcast: From Family Man to Homeless: Tom Wolf’s Fight Against America’s Opioid Crisis

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Tudor Dixon Podcast

Episode: From Family Man to Homeless: Tom Wolf’s Fight Against America’s Opioid Crisis
Date: November 12, 2025
Host: Tudor Dixon
Guest: Tom Wolf (formerly homeless, recovering heroin and fentanyl addict, advocate)

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Episode Overview

This episode features a candid interview with Tom Wolf, a formerly homeless individual from San Francisco and a recovering heroin and fentanyl addict. Tom shares his journey from being a suburban family man to living on the streets due to opioid addiction, and his eventual path to recovery. The discussion reveals hard truths about America’s opioid and homelessness crises, examining the failures of existing policies, the realities of addiction, and what real solutions might look like.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Homelessness & Opioid Crisis

• Tudor Dixon introduces Tom Wolf and contextualizes the crisis:
  • There are approximately 750,000 people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. on any given day, with the problem being particularly acute in big cities.
  • Tom has been clean for seven years after battling heroin and fentanyl addiction.

Tom Wolf (04:11): “It's a much bigger problem than people seem to understand. It's really manifested out here on the West Coast... I have a pretty wild story of falling into addiction and then homelessness and then finding recovery. I want to preface by saying I'm a regular guy... married, two kids, living in a suburb of San Francisco.”

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2. The Descent into Addiction

Tom Wolf’s Story:

• Origin: Started with surgery in 2015, prescribed oxycodone for pain.
• Progression:
  • Initially took more pills than prescribed for the euphoric effect: “It was like someone putting a warm blanket over you.” (05:08)
  • Developed dependence, turned to street pills, leading up to 560mg per day.
  • Family history of addiction, but no prior personal issues.

Tom Wolf (06:15): "It's kind of genetic... I had the predisposition for addiction. It's just that mine manifested with opioids instead of alcohol.”

• Denial: Believed he could “manage” his addiction, rationalized irresponsible behaviors, and prioritized drugs over everything else.
  • (08:28): “You begin prioritizing those drugs over everything else.”

Family Impact:

• Wife became aware but struggled with denial and codependency.
• (09:00): “She didn't want to believe that her husband... was basically turning into a full blown drug addict.”

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3. Systemic Problems: Overprescription & Policy Lags

• Early 2000s/2010s: Massive over-prescription of opioids.

  • Lax pain clinics; doctors handing out large quantities ("180, 80mg oxycontin tablets") (11:11)
  • Big Pharma and government failed to act quickly.

• Shift during Trump administration: Post-surgery opioid prescriptions dramatically scaled back.

  • Tudor Dixon (10:53): “It was a striking difference... there was a real push to limit the amount of opioids…”

• Rise of fentanyl:

  • When pills became harder to obtain, cartels flooded the market with synthetic opioids.
  • Overdose deaths skyrocketed, from 17,000 (2000) to nearly 90,000 (2024).

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4. The Streets: Life as an Addict & "Drug Mule"

• Becoming a Mule:
  • Tom supported his addiction by holding drugs for street dealers in exchange for heroin.
  • Cartels fuel a well-organized drug trade from San Diego to Anchorage.

Tom Wolf (18:05): “I was on the street, I had been cut off from everything... I had to figure out my hustle... we have 500 to 1,000 organized drug dealers operating in plain sight in San Francisco... fueled by the Sinaloa cartel.”

• On Trump’s Crackdown:
  • Supports aggressive interdiction of drug shipments and cartels.
  • Emphasizes need to “reduce supply AND demand” (19:38).

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5. Intervention, Recovery, and Redemption

Turning Point:

• A police officer, Rob Gilson, repeatedly arrested Tom but ultimately delivered a wake-up call.

  • (20:26): “He just looked at me... ‘Dude, you’re skinny. You’re dirty. I know you have a wife and kids at home that love you. You need to get yourself clean and get back to your family.’ And for whatever reason... it really hit home.”

• Salvation Army rehab, a 6-month residential program, was free, strict, and a critical pathway to recovery.

  • On Affordability: Many free or affordable programs exist, not just expensive Malibu rehabs.

Tom Wolf (22:48): “Trust me, going to an environment where you have to wake up at six in the morning and shave and tuck in your shirt and go to church... beats the hell out of sleeping in a tent.”

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6. Housing & Homelessness: Misdiagnosis & Accountability

• Argues that "homelessness" is a euphemism—most are battling addiction or mental illness (or both).
  • Harm reduction (free syringes, tolerance of drug use in state-subsidized housing) has backfired.
  • Example: $600,000 per apartment to house a few hundred people on Skid Row while 10,000 remain unsheltered.

Tom Wolf (24:29): “Accountability is one of the cornerstones of recovery. Trump’s executive order on homelessness was actually the correct approach.”

• Key Data:
  • 100% of people Tom knew on the street were addicted to drugs, not simply victims of economic misfortune.
  • Self-report surveys understate addiction due to denial and stigma.

Tom Wolf (26:49): “Everybody that I knew on the street was addicted to drugs. Everybody. And I'm not exaggerating...”

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7. Life on the Street & The Power of Withdrawal

• Daily Reality:

  • Cold, hungry, sleeping in doorways, days spent hustling for drugs.
  • All social classes represented among the homeless addicted.

• Withdrawal: Becomes the dominant driver, not euphoria.

  • Eventually, drug use is about staving off withdrawal (“staying well”), not getting high.
  • Fentanyl’s grip is especially vicious—requires dosing every 2 hours.

Tom Wolf (30:32): “At a certain point... it’s no longer about getting high. It’s about staying well, not going into withdrawal... you’ll do almost anything to not fall into that trap.”

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8. The Fentanyl Shift & Market Forces

• Fentanyl now completely dominates the opioid street scene.

  • (32:41): “You can't find heroin on the streets of San Francisco... The only thing they have are fentanyl in powder form or fake pills that look like oxycodone that'll kill you quick.”

• Fentanyl floods the U.S. and Canada, but not yet Europe/Australia.

  • Massive profits, easy to make from Chinese precursor chemicals.
  • Branding: Cartels press logos (e.g., Jeep) into blocks for distribution.

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9. Policy, Law Enforcement, & Recidivism

• Organized drug dealers remain on the streets due to a revolving-door judicial system.
  • Despite 900 arrests (42:09), the market persists because judges repeatedly release offenders.
  • Harm now shifted both to streets and inside supportive housing—70% of ODs occur at a fixed address.

Tom Wolf (41:02): “80% of the homeless drug problem in San Francisco would literally go away if we removed all the organized drug dealers from here.”

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10. Current Work & Closing Thoughts

• Tom’s Advocacy:
  • Works in public policy and with Sunflower Sober (AI virtual sponsor app).
  • Pushes for pragmatic, accountability-based recovery over radical harm reduction.
  • Emphasizes reintegration—work, taxes, families—not permanent subsidized dependency.
• Message: “Accountability is a cornerstone of recovery. We need to fight for it in this country.”
• Tudor Dixon: Thanks Tom for his honesty and for challenging the harm reduction orthodoxy with lived experience.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• “Addiction doesn’t care if you have that predisposition or if there are circumstances in your life that kind of lead you to self medicate. You can absolutely become addicted and it will tear your life apart.”
  – Tom Wolf (09:00)

• “Accountability is one of the cornerstones of recovery. Trump’s executive order on homelessness was actually the correct approach.”
  – Tom Wolf (24:29)

• “Everybody that I knew on the street was addicted to drugs. Everybody... 100%.”
  – Tom Wolf (26:49)

• “At a certain point... it’s no longer about getting high. It’s about staying well, not going into withdrawal... you’ll do almost anything to not fall into that trap.”
  – Tom Wolf (30:32)

• “80% of the homeless drug problem in San Francisco would literally go away if we removed all the organized drug dealers from here.”
  – Tom Wolf (41:02)

• “Accountability is a cornerstone of recovery. We need to fight for it in this country.”
  – Tom Wolf (44:48)

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Important Timestamps

• Tom Wolf’s introduction/story: 04:01–06:01
• Family & denial: 08:28–09:48
• Policy changes (opioid restriction): 10:53–11:46
• Tom as a drug mule/cartel insights: 17:22–19:38
• Officer Gilson and turning point: 19:38–22:28
• Accountability & harm reduction critique: 24:29–26:08
• Addiction on the street—100% drug use: 26:49–28:01
• Fentanyl specifics: 32:41–33:53
• Drug market structure & recidivism: 41:02–42:45
• Tom's current work & message: 42:52–44:48

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Tone & Style

• Honest, raw, and direct, blending personal narrative with policy critique.
• Empathy for those suffering with addiction, frustration with current policy failures.
• Unapologetic support for accountability-based and supply-reduction strategies.

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Conclusion

Tom Wolf’s journey illuminates the intersection of America’s addiction and homelessness crises. His experiences challenge prevailing harm reduction dogmas and highlight the critical roles of accountability, intervention, and pragmatic policy. The episode is a sobering look at the realities of opioid addiction, the failure of certain compassionate policies, and the urgent need for reforms that prioritize genuine recovery and community safety.

Transcript

[Tudor Dixon]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Rodney Williams]

B R I K I'm Rodney Williams.

[Tom Wolfe]

And I'm Travis Holloway. Welcome to the wealthbreak Podcast, a real conversation about finance.

[Rodney Williams]

Let's Be honest, building wealth doesn't look the same for everyone.

[Tudor Dixon]

I feel like sometimes being broke is a cycle and that we might have.

[Tom Wolfe]

To revisit that and we're not stopping at success stories.

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What happens when it doesn't go right?

[Tom Wolfe]

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[Rodney Williams]

Because wealth isn't just about money. It's about creating a life where you thrive and help others do the same.

[Tom Wolfe]

Listen to the Wealth Break podcast on the iHeartRadio app.

[Tudor Dixon]

Welcome to the Tudor Dixon Podcast. I have Tom Wolfe with me today. I think his story is very interesting considering what we're seeing across the country right now. If you're not aware, we have a pretty severe homeless epidemic in a lot of our big cities. This is a serious problem in many of the cities in the state of Michigan. But I know we see it in California, we see it in D.C. we see it in New York. I think we have about a quarter of a million million people in the United States right now that are in this situation that are homeless. Tom Wolfe is formerly homeless, also a recovering heroin and fentanyl addict from San Francisco. He's been clean and sober for seven years now. Your story, Tom, is pretty wild. I mean, I think it's the same story that so many people know you had surgery, right. And then ended up as an addiction.

[Tom Wolfe]

That's right. And Tudor, it's great to be here, and I don't mean to correct you right out of the gate, but it's 750,000 people experiencing homelessness on any day.

[Tudor Dixon]

750,000.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yeah, it's a much bigger problem than people seem to understand. And it's three quarters of a million. Yeah, three quarters of a million. And it's really manifested out here on the West Coast. But yeah, I have a pretty wild story of falling into addiction and then homelessness and then finding recovery. I first of all want to preface it by saying I'm a regular guy. I'm just a regular middle class guy, married, with two kids, living in a suburb of San Francisco. And back in early 2015, when I was working for the city and county of San Francisco, I had to have surgery on my foot to repair an old injury where they had to break my foot and reset it and put two titanium screws in my foot to kind of stabilize it. And they sent me home with a 30 day supply of oxycodone for the pain. And I didn't use those pills as directed, so to speak. One pill every four to six hours wasn't cutting it. So I started using two pills And I still remember the day where I took three pills or 30 milligrams all at once. And that's when I kind of crossed this threshold into being I, so to speak, where all my problems melted away. It wasn't just the pain, but any marital problems or financial problems. I had small kids in the home. All those stresses kind of went away for a few hours. And I absolutely loved that feeling. I loved it. It was like someone putting a warm blanket over you where you just felt kind of safe and happy. And that's the hook. That's the hook with opioids. That's why so many people fall prey to that addiction, is they. They want that feeling. And so over the next, you know, 18 months, I continued to use. Obviously, when I couldn't get more pills from my doctor, I went to the street. I started purchasing pills on the street. And in 2015, you could find a variety of different opioids on the street in San Francisco. And my addiction increased or grew until I was taking 560 milligrams a day.

[Tudor Dixon]

But, I mean, how does that ha. I. I feel like this is the part that if you haven't had this happen, you don't understand. Had you ever taken any drug before? Had you ever had alcohol problems? Were there any other addiction problems in your past?

[Tom Wolfe]

Well, not in my past, but in my family. So alcoholism runs in my family. I have two siblings that are in recovery from alcoholism, and my dad was a drinker. So I think it's kind of genetic. Like, I had the predisposition for addiction. It's just that mine manifested with opioids instead of alcohol. And, you know, the big thing here is that that when I couldn't get more pills from my doctor, I was going into what they call withdrawal. I was getting dope sick, right? I wanted more. I was having anxiety. I was feeling the physical effects of starting to run out of these pills.

[Tudor Dixon]

Did you know that? I mean, at that point, do you go, man, I think I have a real serious problem. I mean, what is that transition like? Because you go from being an. Like a pillar of society, really. People think of you as this amazing man. You were. You had. You have a wife, you have two kids, you work for the city. You're doing great work for the city. Like, you're doing God's work for the city, you know, And. And you are suddenly in a situation where I assume you had no idea that this. You would have that predisposition. Even when you see your family members have a problem with alcohol, you don't immediately connect, that if I have a surgery, I'm in danger.

[Tom Wolfe]

Right.

[Tudor Dixon]

So how. I mean, this seems like it happened pretty fast for you to, to suddenly have this complete personality change.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yeah. And that, that's the power of addiction. Right. So it's, it's kind of like, it's hard to explain. The only thing I can tell you is that, you know, there was a moment where I admitted to myself that, you know what, I'm just going to be addicted. I'm just, I can manage this, I can handle it. And I think that's the big, the other big trick in addiction for people is that they think that they can manage their addiction. They think that they can still function at a high level with their addiction. They start rationalizing that it's okay if these things fall by the wayside. It's okay if I pay that bill late. It's okay if maybe I don't pay my mortgage this month and use that money for drugs. It's okay if I miss that pickup of my kids at school or I'm late because I have to go get my drugs. First you begin prioritizing those drugs over everything else.

[Tudor Dixon]

So I was reading your story and I read this part where you were, you explained, I think this was in 2019, you were explaining this, that you would go out to this, you would say you're going out to the store and go to this terrible area and go pick up drugs. And I was thinking to myself, man, you know, if that happened in my house and suddenly my husband's just gone and I imagine it's not a quick trip to go pick up drugs, disappear. What is happening at home? Are there tensions? Is your wife catching on? Does she not know what is happening?

[Tom Wolfe]

Yeah, those are great questions. And the answer is, yeah, she's catching on. But I'll also say that denial and codependency are very powerful things for partners of people or family members of people that are struggling with addiction. She didn't want to believe it, right? She didn't want to believe that, that her husband of 20 years and. And the father of her kids was basically turning into a full blown drug addict later on. Heroin addict and fentanyl addict. But it just goes to show you that addiction itself does not discriminate. It can get anybody, rich, poor, black, white, it doesn't matter. Addiction doesn't care if you have that predisposition or if there are circumstances in your life that kind of lead you to self medicate. You can absolutely become addicted and it will tear your Life apart.

[Tudor Dixon]

So in the first Trump administration, I will say I had, I also had surgery in 2015. Was yours in 2015 also?

[Tom Wolfe]

That's right.

[Tudor Dixon]

So I had surgery in 2015. I had a double mastectomy. I was, I had breast cancer. So I had the double mastectomy and I came home with a massive amount of drugs. I mean, I cannot even tell you. It was ridiculous. Never would have used them. I, I used them for like three days. And then you have these, all of these medications that you're, that you may never use again. Or, or I do understand how you could get addicted to them, because there were way more needed. I'll say that. First for the pain that I had. It was a three day event for me. And then I never needed those again. I had to go back for a surgery in 2019. So this is well into the Trump administration. And the, the amount of medication that he came home with was a few extra strength Advil. You know, I get. You get like the 800 milligram Advil.

[Tom Wolfe]

Right.

[Tudor Dixon]

It was a striking difference. Do you think? And, and my understanding is that within that time, those first few years of the first Trump administration, there was a real push to say we're going to limit the amount of opioids that go home with people after surgeries like this.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yeah. So look, this entire crisis, the fentanyl crisis, everything that we're talking about now, all the groundwork for that, look, I hate to say it, but it's true. Was laid out by Big Pharma. Okay. And the over prescription of OxyContin. Back in the 1990s, you had pain clinics, you had doctors writing prescriptions for hundreds of p. I interviewed a guy that's been clean now for about nine or 10 years. He used to go to pain clinics and he would get 180, 80 milligram oxycontin tablets just on a whim because his back hurt. Like, that's the kind of foundation that was laid where 20 million people got addicted to opioids across the country, especially in the Rust belt in the 1980s and 90s. And it's kind of just progressed now because of course, our government is a few years behind on actually addressing the drug policies in this country. So, yes, we restrict those, those opioids, which is good. But at the same time, the cartels were figuring out how to synthesize or make synthetic opioids, I. E. Fentanyl. And then they started making it in mass quantities and pumping it into this country to a, to a population that was already very vulnerable as a result of Big Pharma laying that kind of foundation for the addiction and opioid crisis in our country. And now you're kind of seeing it play out. Last year we had nearly 90,000 drug overdose deaths in this country. And to just give you context, in the year 2000 we only had 17,000 overdose deaths in this country. So whoa. The arrival of COVID Yeah, it has completely changed the game and it requires us to change our response.

[Tudor Dixon]

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[Tudor Dixon]

What's your reaction to what you're seeing right now with the Trump administration going out and taking out these boats that are headed for the United States with drug. I think that is. It's very controversial, but it is sending a very strong message to anybody who's trying to bring deadly drugs into this country.

[Tom Wolfe]

I have no issue because I'm sorry, I don't. Because look When I was on the street, I used to hold drugs for the drug dealers out here. I was a mule for them because they would pay me with heroin. That's how I was able to support my addiction. So I talked to these guys. I knew what they were.

[Tudor Dixon]

That's actually an interesting point that you're making that I think we don't think about, because you go, oh, my gosh, there's all these bad guys on the street selling drugs, but you get. You were sucked into being one of their lackeys because you're getting the product and they get you addicted. And here's this upstanding citizen, dad of two, great husband, who in just a matter of four years, fell to this level.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yep, that's right. And again, that speaks to the power of addiction, the desperation of addiction. I mean, I was on the street, I had been cut off from everything my family was practicing what they call separation with. So, you know, they love me, they want me to do okay, but they're not going to come out and help me and give me money on the street to just buy drugs. So I had to figure out my hustle. And I want to be clear, in San Francisco as an example, we have 500 to 1,000 organized drug dealers operating in plain sight, in broad daylight in the city, okay? And it's been that way for at least a decade, if not longer. And they're fueled by the Sinaloa cartel, right? And so there's that whole network of cartel drug dealers up and down the west coast of the United States, from San Diego all the way to Anchorage, Alaska, and over into Salt Lake City and Denver, etc, selling drugs that are killing our kids, that are destabilizing our large urban centers, our big cities. It's destabilizing them. If you ever read Michael Shellenberger's book San Francisco, he really laid that out very clear as part of his argument as to why these cities are falling apart. Heart. It's being fueled by drugs. It's being fueled by organized drug dealers. So for. For Trump to crack down on that, I think it's long overdue. And I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And I'm probably gonna get some heat because I'm out here in San Francisco, so I'm gonna get some heat for saying that. But you know what? Interdiction, reducing the supply of drugs is just as important as reducing the demand for drugs. We need to make it harder for people to get high and easier for people to access treatment and get off of those drugs.

[Tudor Dixon]

So how is you? There was a safety. This particular police officer, I believe, that kept kind of giving you a push to get off the streets. Your wife. He had talked to your wife, and there was kind of a.

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Almost.

[Tudor Dixon]

I. I mean, from my perspective, this is like a God thing. He talks to your wife. He has this connection to you in a more personal way. And. And I thought it was interesting, the way he described it. He was like, you know, there's not that many people, once they're at this point, who's got a. Who have a wife who's still going. I miss him. I can't stand that he's gone. We love him, and really still searching for that person to return. And that struck him. So I feel like he was almost like a guardian angel for a while, from the story I read. But tell us a little bit about that process of him following you and you getting out of that situation.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yeah. So, first of all, my wife is a saint, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life making amends to her. And I'm very, very happy to do that. And I'm happy to also say that I'm reconciled with my wife and kids. And that couldn't have happened without recovery, without finding our faith as a family and making a decision to move forward together. What Officer Rob Gilson did for me was above and beyond the call of duty. So my wife had actually called the Tenderloin police station in tears, in a panic, to file a missing persons report on me because I had gone from the home for 11 days. He took that phone call, and it's interesting, I was arrested six times after that that. On the streets for various crimes I was committing as a result of my addiction, which I own, all of them completely. And I paid my debt. I had to go to jail. I had to be on probation. I had to do all those things. But he arrested me four out of those six times. And the last time he arrested me, as I was being booked into jail, he just looked at me and he said, dude, you're skinny. You're dirty. I know you have a wife and kids, kids at home that love you. You need to get yourself clean, and you need to get back to your family. And for whatever reason, that last time that he said that to me, it really hit home, because then I realized the damage that I had caused, not just to myself, but to my wife and to my kids. And it gave me. It gave me, like, an opportunity to start thinking. And then I had to go sit in jail and think about it for another three months after that before I really decided that I was going to give recovery an honest try. And I give a lot of credit to the Salvation Army. I have to because the ones that took me in and gave me a chance to go through their rehab program, that was a six month residential program that was free, they didn't have to do that, but they took me in and gave me a chance and I found recovery and I found my faith. And that's a big thing for many of us in recovery. That spiritual awakening happens. And that kind of led me back to my wife and my kids and eventual reconciliation.

[Tudor Dixon]

You said that was free. I think that's one of the biggest complaints that we hear about getting out of this cycle of addiction is how do you, how do you get to a rehab, how do you afford it? I mean, I've had family members who have invested thousands, tens of thousands of dollars in rehab programs. They're so expensive.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yep, they are. But there's also a ton of free programs. It just depends on, on what you're looking for. Yeah, you can go to the rehab in malibu and spend 50 grand if you want, or you can go to the Salvation army, which is a little bit harder core, full of accountability and structure and also find your pathway back. And so look, if you're homeless on the street, living in a tent, trust me, going to an environment where you have to wake up at six in the morning and shave and tuck in your shirt and go to church twice a week and follow some 12 step recovery beats the hell out of sleeping in a tent on the street. It just does. And so we need to have multiple options available for people. Private insurance companies need to do a lot better job of paying for drug rehab. That's another topic really. But we should be doing what we can to make rehabs widely available treatment on demand and make it as affordable as possible, if not free altogether. Because we have 40 million people in this country struggling with drug addiction right now. 10% of the population of our country is addicted to drugs.

[Tudor Dixon]

So what do you think is the answer to homelessness? I mean, I know that you, you feel like you've successfully beat this and you know that that's not the case for many people in San Francisco. You have a serious homelessness problem out there. And I would say you have some of the, the highest budgets for homelessness in the country. Between San Francisco and, and Los Angeles, the budgets are in the hundreds of millions. And yet the homeless problem continues to get worse. So what politicians about what they can do to get people off the street?

[Tom Wolfe]

Well, another great question, and there's no one easy answer to it. But I will say this, that accountability is one of the cornerstones of recovery. So Trump's executive order on homelessness was actually the correct approach. That is what we have to do. We're at a, we're at a point now where we have, in San Francisco, we have 8,000 homeless. At least half of them are living unsheltered on the street. 80 to 90% of them have what they call a co occurring disorder, which is either addiction or mental illness, or both of them playing out at the same time. And the biggest mistake that we've made in our homeless response as a state and as a nation is that we decided to first of all call it homeless, because that's a euphemism, and to downplay the fact that there's a drug problem, that we have a huge drug problem amongst the homeless in this country, and we've downplayed it on purpose because we don't want to stigmatize drug users, we don't want to stigmatize the homeless. All that harm reduction stuff coming from the radical left, that's a huge mistake. It's a terrible mistake because we're misdiagnosing the problem. And to give you an example of that, in LA on Skid Row, they just finished building a couple of towers to house chronically homeless in supportive housing. Each one of those units in that apartment building cost the city $600,000 per door. Okay. To house about 400 people altogether. Well, guess what? What? On Skid row, in a 50 block radius, there's 10,000 homeless people. So how are we, how much is it going to cost us to house all 10,000 of those homeless people? And then on top of that, we don't ask them to get off drugs. In fact, we tell them it's okay, you can bring your drugs inside with you. How do you.

[Tudor Dixon]

Yeah, I guess that's the question that I think so many of us have. And it's kind of the question that we don't really ask because I think that nobody understands the answer. The problem is not that you don't have a house. Somehow you got there. I mean, you were not actually someone that didn't have a house. You had a home. You weren't homeless, you weren't in your home because you were choosing. Addiction, was choosing for you to be living out on the streets. So how many people are in that situation? I guess you're really right. We're calling it Homelessness. But is it the. When was your experience that the majority out there of people were actually addicted?

[Tom Wolfe]

Yes. So everybody that I knew on the street was addicted to drugs. Everybody. And I'm not exaggerating or anything, 100% of the people I knew on the street, old, young, white, black, they were all addicted to drugs. Whether it was crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, whatever, they were addicted. Okay? And I just want to be very, very clear about that. And so when you hear all this data come out saying, oh, it's only 45% or 47% of the people that are addicted, these are based on surveys that we've done. And then you start asking about the surveys, and it turns out that they're self reporting. So you're basically asking people, hey, man, are you using drugs?

[iHeart Advertising Representative]

When you.

[Tom Wolfe]

When they would come up to me on the street when I was homeless, and they would say, hey, I don't even want to say homeless. When I was on the street, they would say, hey, Tom, are you okay? Are you struggling with drug. Drug use or you need some help? And I'd be like, what are you talking about? I'm just sitting here minding my business. I'm fine. So are we really getting the truth from people? Of course not. Because when you're struggling with addiction, number one, there's denial. Number two, there's fear. And number three, you don't want to admit that you have a problem to anyone because you still think that you have control over your situation, even when it gets down to as little as a piece of heroin in your hand.

[Tudor Dixon]

I think that's the most shocking part about this for someone who hasn't gone through this. And that's why I am so grateful to you for sharing your story. Because as I listened to this, how quickly it was that this took hold of you, and it was no longer really a choice. Because this. This. That feeling of euphoria that you talk about and wanting that back, I mean, that was so powerful that it took you out of your home, put you on the street. What was. What was that experience like? Are you sleeping on street corners? Like, what does that look like? Explain. Give us a little bit of a picture of what that is and who you met and how that was out there.

[Tom Wolfe]

Generally speaking, it was just very dark all the time. Even when it was sun. The sun was shining and it was warm. Everything was a very dark experience. You're cold all the time. Because more often than not, I would sleep in a doorway, kind of just kind of crouch down In a doorway, and I just had a jacket and my jeans. And sleeping on the concrete is very, very cold. And so it just gets. It just gets to your bones, and you feel cold on the inside all the time. You know, I would eat maybe once a day. I knew where the soup kitchen was. I could go get a meal if I needed to. The rest of the time of my existence on the street was spent trying to hustle to maintain my drug addiction. And that's the. That's how the case was with everybody I knew on the street and people. I knew people on the street in San Francisco that were from Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, Las Vegas. I knew a guy that used to be a graphic designer in Las Vegas, making six figures in the salary. But he got addicted to oxycodone, and then he became a heroin addict and now was living on the streets of San Francisco. It. It crosses all barriers. Addiction does. And it's amazing that the people you'll meet out there. There's people out there that have master's degrees. I knew a guy that was an officer in the Navy at one point that was. Had been a Heroin Addict for 25 years on the street. And so many of them now are gone because illicit fentanyl came to the street.

[Tudor Dixon]

So at a certain point, was it. I mean, you talked about it at first being like this calming, warm blanket took away all your troubles. Does it suddenly change? Because what I'm hear, you're living in horrible conditions to avoid that withdrawal, because you know that's coming if you don't keep it up. I mean, does that seem like you're just kind of chasing the drug to stop the inevitable?

[Tom Wolfe]

You clearly just hit the nail on the head. So at a certain point, this is the last big trick of addiction, is that it's no longer about getting high. It's about staying well, not going into withdrawal. So you're doing everything you can just to maintain. And if you get high, that's a bonus. And there's this huge fear of those withdrawal symptoms because the withdrawals. The physical withdrawals from fentanyl are horrible. They're absolutely horrible. It's. Imagine having, like, the flu and a cold and anxiety and. And your muscles are locking up. You're throwing up all this stuff all at the same time. And it lasts for days upon days upon days. It doesn't ever go away. And you'll literally, almost, almost do anything to not fall into that kind of trap, that feeling. So people cheat, they steal, they'll lie, they'll rob their neighbors. They'll sell themselves. They'll do whatever they need to do to get drugs. That's how powerful this addiction is. And so this is another reason why we have to put such a focus on fentanyl, because in addition to fentanyl killing everyone. I want to just make this point really quick. The first time I used to used that 30 milligrams, and I felt that blanket over my head. I never felt that feeling again until the first time I tried fentanyl. That was the only drug I ever used. Since then that actually made me feel like the first time that I used. And that's why so many people love it. And then it traps you in your addiction. Fentanyl metabolizes faster in your body, so you have to use it every two hours, unlike heroin, which was every six to eight hours. Yeah, so. So, you know, these harm reduction people and the public health people are out there saying, hey, you know, we need to wait for people to be ready here. You're never gonna be ready unless we intervene, because you have to use fentanyl every two hours in order to just stay well. And that's.

[Tudor Dixon]

I might sound incredibly naive here, but I have always. I guess this, the public story and the media story has worked a number on me because I always felt like fentanyl was an accident if you got it. But you were seeking out fentanyl.

[Tom Wolfe]

Oh, no, it's completely replaced heroin in San Francisco. You can't find heroin on the street of San streets of San Francisco or opioids of any kind. The only thing that they have are fentanyl in powder form or fentanyl fake pills that look like oxycodone that'll kill you quick. And it's cheap. It's $5 for a little baggie for a tenth of a gram of fentanyl. Now, on the streets of San Francisco, you go to Portland, Oregon, the fentanyl pills are $1.50 a pill on the street right now. So this is why it's so pervasive. It's che manufacturer, easy to smuggle because dogs can't smell it when they. When it comes across the border. And then the distribution has just become nationwide, like, widespread. And it's completely saturated our country and created an overdose calamity of epic proportions.

[Tudor Dixon]

So that is why when you see him saying, we're taking out these ships, you say, go for it, because that's the drug that's being sold. I mean, I think so many of us think that that's like. Like I said, you are Accidentally getting that. But that's actually just the cheap high. Quick stave off the withdrawal symptoms. You've got this.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yeah, I mean, look, the. The cartels made a business decision, right, To. To replace heroin, which takes time to produce because you have to grow the opium poppies and then you have to harvest them and make it into heroin with something that you can take. Three precursors are chemicals that you mostly get from China. Mix them together to make fentanyl into a powder, and then you package it and you ship it off. And you can do that 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You don't have to wait for seasons and planting and all that stuff to happen at harvesting. You can just mass produce this stuff. And that's been their cash cow. And now, you know, the cartels were already making billions before, they're making billions more now. And that also speaks to. We need to start asking what's going on in our country. That 40 million, that 10% of our population is using drugs. Why is it this way here and not that way pretty much everywhere else?

[Tudor Dixon]

That's what I was going to ask is, are we the biggest market?

[Tom Wolfe]

We are the biggest market. So it goes. US is number one. And then it's Canada. And then fentanyl hasn't arrived in Europe yet. So while they have a huge drug problem in the uk, there's no fentanyl there yet. It hasn't jumped the pond for whatever reason. And it hasn't really hit Australia either, as an example, where that also has historically high drug usage rates. It's really just the United States and Canada. North America has been deeply afflicted with fentanyl, but interestingly enough, Mexico doesn't have that same kind of problem. So we have to start asking why that is. And nobody really has a clear answer. It's socioeconomics is part of it, but nobody really has a clear understanding of why we love drugs so much in the United States.

[Tudor Dixon]

I think it is definitely something that we think is just sneaking into. There's a drug market and then that's sneaking in. When I was running for office, we went to our Oakland county sheriff's office and they have a crime lab there. And I mean, honestly, I would have seen this in someone's house and not known what it was. It's this giant block that was. It looked like chalk and it had. It was pressed into the shape of a Jeep logo. I'll never forget this. And he said, that's how they brand it. The different. Whoever is selling it, they have These brands and they use use logos and they had a Jeep logo in there. And I thought, I have no idea. He said, that's drugs. I said, what do you mean? He said, yeah. And there's a woman in there and she was taking it apart very carefully. She had a hood over top of her that was, you know, vacuuming up all the air. She's full almost. Hazmat suit. It was fentanyl.

[Tom Wolfe]

Yep, that's right. And she has to wear that hazmat suit so she doesn't overdose herself. So in San Francisco, our fentanyl is all is multicolored and it is that chalk substance that you're talking about, that powdered chalk substance. And color it, there's red fentanyl blue, fentanyl light blue, yellow. And each one of them designates either a different strength of the fentanyl or that it's mixed with something else. Like it's mixed with methamphetamine or mixed with benzodiazepines like Xanax to intensify the effect one way or the other for people. And so it's like a buffet where people, if you have the money, you can pretty much get anything that you want. And the way the cartel dealers view it here is that if you die, you die. You made the decision to put, put that, that drug in your body. And what's even more frustrating is that the police here are doing their job. They're arresting the drug dealers. The da, the DA in San Francisco. Now our current DA is doing her job. She's prosecuting drug dealers. But we have a bunch of judges on our superior court benches here that are former public defenders that believe that still have this ideology that the war on drugs failed. So they just continue to release these dealers over and over back to the street. Which is why, you know, the door has been left open for Trump to threaten federal intervention in San Francisco. That's really the reason why it's not about undocumented immigration. It's about organized drug dealers on the street that have persisted for more than a decade that are killing 650 people in our city every single year.

[Tudor Dixon]

Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on the Tudor Dixon Podcast.

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[Tudor Dixon]

The crazy part about this, you are talking about a few people having a lot of power and as I hear you saying you're you're kind of like a drug runner because you are just using their own clients to as employees without having to pay them. I mean it's insane. So if you took the few bad guys off the street over Time this would end. That's what we're hearing in Michigan. You seem to believe that as well.

[Tom Wolfe]

Oh, 80% of the homeless drug problem in San Francisco would literally go away if we removed all the organized drug dealers from here. They're the ones that cause the majority of the chaos. They all carry guns. Guns. There's drug violence all the time. And we have to be honest in San Francisco, like, so there's 4,000 people on the street using drugs and then about. And then. And then there's another several thousand that are actually housed in supportive housing in San Francisco that come out of their house in the day and hang out on the street with the other homeless and use drugs. And then you have another few thousand that are in housing themselves that we're paying for with rent subsidies that cost this city $450 million a year to keep them housed and they're using drugs inside. And so now we've created the scenario where 70% of all the overdose deaths in San Francisco happen at a fixed address. So we've actually taken this problem and we've also moved it inside. It's not even like we took it off the street and moved it inside. We have it on the street, and then we also have it inside at the same time. And it's just a big mess.

[Tudor Dixon]

And they know who they are, but they're still out there.

[Tom Wolfe]

Absolutely. Look, every drug dealer in San Francisco has been arrested. In fact, last year, SFPD arrested all the drug dealers in San Francisco. 900 felony drug dealing arrests were made in San Francisco. That's pretty much all the dealers that were here. Yet the drug market remains. So you have to start asking why that is, and you have to start looking at the mechanisms that we have in place and that are still state policies that are in place that allow these judges to make these decisions that just create a revolving door for organized drug dealers to go back to the street, sell Fentanyl. That again, is killing 600 plus people a year in our city.

[Tudor Dixon]

Oh, my gosh. So what are you doing now? And what do you. What's your message to people? What's your closing message to the folks today?

[Tom Wolfe]

Well, I'm doing a variety of different things. I do consulting work. I work for a great company called Sunflower Sober, which is kind of the merger of AI and Recovery together. It has an AI virtual sponsor that you can put on your phone to give you support. Support as you're trying to stay sober and trying to stay in recovery. But I also work on public policy. I work in that field now as well, where I'm trying to push. And it's really an uphill battle because it's California, of course. But to anyone who will listen nationwide, I'm trying to push for more pragmatic changes to drug policy so that we shift our focus away from radical harm reduction, free crack pipes, to actually focusing on getting people off the drugs, getting them healthy and getting them reintegrated back into society so that they can return to work, pay their taxes, reconnect with their families. Those are the kinds of ideals that we, that we need to be fighting for in this country, for this population before it gets so far out of control that we just have this permanent class of people that are always going to be out there on the street using drugs, destroying themselves and harming the community.

[Tudor Dixon]

It's such common sense. I mean, it really is. But it's very hard. After years of being told and this seems crazy, people will go, it's not hard. But these communities have been told, you've got to have free crack pipes, you've got to have free syringes, you've got, we've got to get, make this so that it's safe. How can that possibly be safe? Now? You have to turn all of that thinking around, which seems like it would be very easy. But I've watched people, I've listened to people on social media. I see regular people who have fallen for this. And I. And that's why I'm so grateful that you told your story and you were so open with what you dealt with and what you saw out there. Because I think that without hearing it from someone who's actually gone through it, we hear from pundits, we hear from people all the time. You don't, you don't know it until you've learned it from someone who's actually dealt with it. So, Tom, thank you so much for coming on today.

[Tom Wolfe]

It has really been my pleasure. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share my story and to let people know that accountability is a cornerstone of recovery. We need to fight for it in this country. Thank you.

[Tudor Dixon]

Absolutely. Tom Wolf, thank you so much for coming on and thank you all for joining us. Thank you. And on the Tutor Dixon podcast for this episode and others, you can go to tutor dixon podcast.com, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts and you can watch the whole thing on rumble or YouTube. Uterdixon. Thank you so much. Join us next time and have a blessed day.

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[Rodney Williams]

I'm Rodney Williams.

[Tom Wolfe]

And I'm Travis Holloway. Welcome to the wealthbreak podcast, a real conversation about finance.

[Rodney Williams]

Let's be honest, building wealth doesn't look the same for everyone.

[Tudor Dixon]

I feel like sometimes being brought is a cycle and that we might have.

[Tom Wolfe]

To revisit that and we're not stopping at success stories.

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What happens when it doesn't go right?

[Tom Wolfe]

How do you cope with it?

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Because wealth isn't just about money. It's about creating a life where you thrive and help others do the same.

[Tom Wolfe]

Listen to the Wealth Break podcast on the iHeartRadio app.

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[Tudor Dixon]

This is an iHeart podcast.