California is in chaos. An intervention is required. I am that intervention. As a journalist and author, during the past several years I have literally gone to the streets of our cities  – to San Francisco’s Tenderloin to Los Angeles’ Skid Row – to truly understand why we are failing as a civilization to maintain order and care for people.

What I discovered shocked me. California is in chaos. And we will not return to normal until the rampant homelessness and crime are cured, and order is restored.

For my book “San Fransicko,” I researched and assembled extensive evidence showing that “homelessness” results primarily from mental illness and addiction, not poverty. My reporting and interviews helped change the national conversation.

In an effort to do more than chronicle the problems in a book, I approached Governor Newsom last fall about the idea of creating a statewide agency called Cal-Psych, to meet the needs of the state’s addicted and mentally ill populations; he seemed interested, but his people never responded. Since then, Newsom has doubled down on the policies that created the crisis in the first place. Why? Because he is more focused on becoming president than governing California.

The chaos isn’t just a San Francisco problem; homelessness and crime are rampant statewide. Half of all fires in California’s cities are in encampments. First responders continually revive fentanyl addicts who overdose — and then put the poor souls back on the street. Violent crime is rising because the police are understaffed and demoralized. California spends more than any other state on homelessness and mental illness, but homelessness grew 31 percent here in a decade while it declined in the rest of the country.

To be clear: They’re not homeless encampments. They’re open drug markets where dealers are taking advantage of human beings who need mental health and addiction treatment. These camps we all drive by daily are dens of human trafficking, rape and murder.  And with it all comes the crime of desperate addicts seeking their next fix.

We must provide shelter and then enforce anti-camping laws. I believe that, in a civilized society, people have a right to clean, basic and safe shelter. They do not have a right to their own apartment unit in Venice Beach or San Francisco. That’s absurd. But, yet, the official policy in California is that we’re going to give all 150,000 or so unsheltered homeless people their own apartment unit. That is literally the ideology right now. Instead, housing must be earned by succeeding in treatment and taking other steps required by their caseworkers. If they don’t, then we need to hold them accountable. For their own sake, and for our society’s.

But to do our part, we must provide critical mental health and addiction services statewide. The current 58-county-driven system is a failure. Which is why I proposed Cal Psych, a centralized statewide system to provide mental health and addiction care. I am convinced that the crisis will not end without providing reliable treatment and care. We must have the courage to call for new institutions after the old ones become corrupted and fail.

Gavin Newsom has failed to do any of this. In fact, he’s done the opposite, spending billions while the chaos intensifies. The politicians have failed us.

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I’m running for governor to fix this crisis and rebuke the elite political class that is failing to lead California. When I am governor, California will model for the rest of the United States, how to deal with this drug, crime, and homeless crisis.

Newsom doesn’t talk about our schools’ abysmal outcomes for African-American and Latino students. He doesn’t mention California’s sky-high taxes, electricity prices and unemployment rate. And he doesn’t mention his own budget cuts to wildfire prevention programs, or his push to close Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, our largest source of clean, reliable and safe power.

I’m leading a movement unlike any other. We can take control of California. I’m going to intervene in this chaos in ways that will restore our humanity, restore our cities, and restore our democratic broadminded civilization. We must take California back from political elites and reinstate commonsense. We can restore order. We can reinstate schools where kids come first. We can regain California’s promise. But we must have the Courage to Care for California. I have that courage.

Michael Shellenberger is a candidate for governor.