And so you had a situation that was untenable. So that whole thing was brewing. But there was also a political element. And the history of LPS is really interesting, so LPS refers to Lanterman Petris Short, that's the name of the three California legislators who drafted civil commitment law that was passed in 1967, implemented in 1969.And LPS law basically what we refer to mostly as 51-50 law, and if you've heard the term 51-50, that stands for the California Welfare and Institutions legal code 51-50, and basically that's the legal code that has jurisdiction over whether someone can be held against their will in a psychiatric setting for an evaluation for up to 72 hours, and the three criteria are: danger to self, which basically means being suicidal; danger to others, which means being potentially violent or homicidal; and gravely disabled. And gravely disabled means being unable to care for your basic needs: food, clothing and shelter, on the basis of a severe psychiatric illness. So these were the three criteria. Forty-three years later these are still the same three criteria, and there were other things that happened around late '60s, early 1970s. Another thing that happened then was Frank Lanterman, who drafted the law, was a conservative legislator from Pasadena, and he had ties to John Birch Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, very, very conservative organisations. And he said and those around him said that psychiatric hospitals were Marxist tools, that basically that the people in hospitals were political prisoners and so there was under a cry of libertarianism, and what I would call political cover of libertarianism said, 'Let these poor people go.' So. But really what the fiscal - the fiscal side was driving it as well, that essentially that there is a lot of money to be saved by closing the state hospitals. 1960 there's half a million people in state hospitals in the United States, 1980 there's 100,000. So basically this was under the cover of libertarianism, there was a fiscal drive to actually empty out the state hospitals as well. So you have really an arch-conservative/libertarian from Southern California. His co-author, Nicholas Petris from Oakland, describing the literature as 'ultra liberal', and he was more of the school of thought that grew up under The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, RD Laing The Divided Self, that there is a whole groundswell on the left saying that mental illness was a myth and that these are just kind of misunderstood, eccentric, poor characters and we should just let them go. And so you had far right, far left, and then Short was just sort of thrown in at the end, I can't tell you much about him except his first name was Alan. So Lanterman, Petris, Short, they had this sort of unholy, political alliance, and so this law was crafted.
"With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer." Engels http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/