Media drug scares are age old, but I have an easier time believing this one having seen the tent cities in LA myself. I make regular trips there, but didn't visit for a mere 20 months due to covid, I swear you couldn't recognize the place. Every highway overpass has tents. Every vacant space. Everywhere. It's insane.
Homelessness in LA isn't driven by drug abuse. Visible homelessness in LA is clearly abuse-adjacent but the fundamental problem is the capacitance of Los Angeles for the unhoused. It's expensive to live in LA. So a lot of people end up homeless. They are otherwise functional so they can park a van adjacent to Beverly Hills, move it twice a day and make it to their jobs. This means that the people with no jobs can't find anywhere to park their vans adjacent to Beverly Hills so they move out to Burbank because while it's not as safe as BH-adjacent, it's safer than Panorama City. So now the marginals in Burbank are in Panorama City, and the fails in Panorama City end up in Echo Park. Then the fails in Echo Park end up around a burning trash bin at 9th and Western. You see guys in tents under overpasses because they have been outcompeted by guys in tents in the back corner of Elysian Park. The guys in the back corner of Elysian Park have been outcompeted by the guys in a nice corner of Descanso Gardens. etc etc etc. So the more full it gets at the top, the more full it gets at the bottom. Los Angeles does this lovely thing where they bust up homeless encampments on the reg. Often because they've gotten unwieldy, have filled the place up with poop, are scaring the normies etc. but often because LA likes to crack skulls. This serves the purpose of making sure nobody can really get their footing and blend in - at the core of every unwieldy homeless encampment is a few people who are good at staying hidden and they all get swept, too. When I started riding the LA river bike path there was a guy on one of the islands down in there who called himself "The River Punk." He'd been profiled in LA Weekly in 1998. When Orange County rousted Santa Ana, though, the LAPD took the opportunity of a distracted-press weekend to sweep the LA river, too. River Punk was gone after 20 years of squatting/homesteading - I mean, the dude had DirecTV at one point. And lo and behold, the guys who came in were hella worse. When I started riding that path there were homeless folx who I waved to. We knew each other. By the time I left there were guys threatening me with tasers. I witnessed three roustings, two fires and personally stopped arson once. I passed a tent with a family of four gathered around a 40" LCD watching cable and I rode over an extension cord tied into a streetlamp running 150 feet down to an encampment in the middle of the river. Drugs? Drugs definitely play a part. But what you're seeing, you're seeing because it's too crowded to hide anymore. Seattle swept a couple homeless camps yesterday. Today? Three fresh crazy people on my walk, shouting at garbage. It's not like telling them to leave gives them anywhere else to go.
I'd totally buy that it's not meth, but there's gotta be something other than housing prices, right? I mean, housing is up since the pandemic but the homeless camps are waaaay up. I don't have deep knowledge of LA like you; just visit a couple times a year. But my friends who live there say it's gotten to a place of intolerability in the last 18 months or so. There were rumors of other cities sending their homeless there, but I have no idea if they're just rumors.
In fact, LA has only 16 mobile toilet stations for its 36,000 homeless people. To make matters worse, the city hauls away the mobile toilets at night, leaving the homeless no choice but to go on the streets. As you might imagine, COVID made things worse. My adventures in Los Angeles started in the late '90s. The Soylent Green atmosphere was striking even back then; Los Angeles basically allows the homeless to accumulate cruft and detritus for two or three months, then comes through and sweeps out all their shit unannounced. It's part of their public custodial approach. It's very much the way Los Angeles handles all its civic sanitation: move your car twice a week or we'll ticket it $80 because of "street sweeping." Will the street sweeper actually come through? Yeah maybe once every couple of months. Will the cops come through to ticket? without fail. One word describes Los Angeles' relationship with the homeless: adversarial. I have never spent time in a city that hates its homeless as much as LA. I'm very happy to report I have no first-hand experience here but I'll bet the added stress of the pandemic has not improved that relationship. Seattle's gotten pretty bad. We put spikes where the homeless sleep, blast pink noise where they congregate. Our homeless have gotten salty as a consequence. But I mean, we'll let it get pretty bad before we do anything. Los Angeles? LA cracks skulls because it's fun. "Place of intolerability" has been Los Angeles for as long as I can remember. The city is openly hostile towards its unhoused, and the unhoused are openly hostile in response. It surprises me not a lick that things have gotten awful during the pandemic. 
In one act caught on camera, a homeless man is seen waking up on South Hope Street. He unbuckles his belt, walks over to the front door of a business, pulls down his pants, and defecates right on the door mat in broad daylight.
A measured response: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/opinion/homeless-drugs-meth.html Interesting that WV has simultaneously one of the highest OD death rates and lowest homelessness rates. Makes sense, but I've never heard it put that way.
That editorial was a thousand words of waffling followed by It's NYT hand-wringing distilled to its purest form - paraphrase the article, add nothing, and whatabout to questions no one has asked. your point was "clearly meth is driving the shitty homelessness crisis in LA." My point is "LA's shittiness is driving LA's homeless crisis, meth or no meth." Quinones' point is "there is anecdotal evidence that biker meth is mean because homeless meth users are mean" while Kang's point seems to be "as a journalist for the New York Times, I am duty bound to cast aspersions on all other journalism while simultaneously refusing to take a stand about anything." Quinones' whole schtick is anecdotal evidence. He's an ethnographer. Kang's whole schtick appears to be "I'm going to pretend my readers asked me if they should pay attention to an Atlantic article because I'm too cowardly to opine on my own. Here's my lack of opinion." Sorry. My hatred of the New York Times grows stronger every day.So, my answer to the reader’s questions: Quinones’s concerns over mental health and meth should not be ignored: If you spend a lot of time in or even near a homeless encampment, you’ll find people who seem to be experiencing the psychosis Quinones describes, but you’ll also see families who have been priced out of their apartments or who have had their lives derailed by the pandemic.