them damn right wing hammer attacks!
The camper van parked in the driveway of the home belonging to David DePape’s ex-wife. The “Natural addiction treatment” that it’s advertising is of the psychedelic ibogaine, which neighbors say the DePape family has been bringing back to the United States from Mexico. The bumper stickers on the back of the camper are left-wing and conspiratorial.
DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree. A closer look reveals the characteristics of a homeless encampment, or what Europeans call “an open drug scene.” In the driveway, there is a broken-down camper van. On the street is a yellow school bus, which neighbors said DePape occasionally stayed in. Both are filled with garbage typical of such structures in homeless encampments. People come and go from the house and the vehicles, neighbors say, in part to partake in the use of a potent psychedelic drug, ibogaine.
Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior. “What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists,” said one of DePape’s neighbors, a woman who only gave her first name, Trish. “They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride. But they’re very detached from reality. They have called the cops on several of the neighbors, including us, claiming that we are plotting against them. It’s really weird to see that they are willing to be so aggressive toward somebody else who is also a lefty.”
Not all of the news media missed DePape’s history of drug use, psychosis, and homelessness.
CNN reported that a woman named Laura Hayes, who said she worked with DePape 10 years ago making hemp bracelets, said he had been living in a storage shed. “He talks to angels,” she said, and told her that “there will be a hard time coming.” Another woman, Linda Schneider, told CNN that she got to know DePape around 2014 and that he was still homeless, living in a storage unit, and using hard drugs.
www.rollingstone.com
