Hasn’t the failed war on drugs shown the narrative that drugs cause the homelessness and crime and are not just another symptom of the underlying problems is a lie?
They wouldn’t have to shoot up in the streets if SF still had the safe injection sites up. People who shoot up in the streets do so mostly because they want to get found if they OD.
Making it illegal to be high won’t make addicts want to stop getting high, it will just push them into dark corners where they die when they OD. Imo that’s way more unacceptable.
Not disagreeing, just curious. How can they safely inject the kind of fentanyl that’s out there now? When milligrams can kill you? What if they prefer to smoke it? Do the safe injection sites provide the drugs or do the users just bring their own stuff there and do it under supervision?
Pretty easy to Google that kind of thing since that’s quite a lot of questions and is better answered by an article or website from one of these places that breaks it down
I did Google it and I didn’t find anything specific to Fentanyl, which is what kills in the majority of the ODs in San Francisco. That’s why I wanted to ask here as there are people who seem to have more knowledge on the subject.
First, no they don’t give out free drugs. Even tho having clean drugs would help a lot in reducing the harms of addiction, I don’t know any government that would pass that.
Obviously fentanyl is fucking dangerous and toxic, no matter how you take it. Overdoses at those sites happen. That’s why they are equipped with Narcan, and also have a line to medical services. So users that would OD somewhere in private and not make it to the ER have a chance.
The second important part is all the stuff that goes with taking the drugs themselves. Usually addicts don’t have a ready supply of syringes and other paraphernalia to use their drugs. This leads to them sharing needles, using dirty gear and other behaviors that spread diseases like hepatitis c. By handing out clean needles and other things, a lot of those diseases can be avoided. They also hand out other medical supplies to treat the damage from the drugs and living in the streets.
Finally, they always offer addicts that want to quit support and help them find treatment. This is the most important part. Addicts trust the people at those sites, because they treat them like people, not junkies. So there is a higher chance that they feel safe enough to ask for help when it’s time for them.
I hope that answers some of your questions. If you want to learn more, Channel 5 with Andrew Callahan has a great series on drugs and homelessness on YouTube. There’s one Episode where they go to a safe injection site, but the other episodes in Philadelphia and SF are definitely also worth a watch. You will see some absolutely harrowing and terrible shit tho. If you have the stomach I highly recommend them.
Edit: Reading some of your other questions in this thread I definitely recommend you watch those Andrew Callahan documentaries. They will answer a lot of your questions and hopefully clear up some misconceptions. Start with San Francisco Streets, then watch harm reduction facility and finally Philly streets.
Thank you for actually answering this. This answered a lot of questions for me. I actually work in a nasty part of the SOMA district of SF and have seen stuff there that I will never forget. 3 ODs have happened outside of my work while I was there so far. I’ve opened the door to leave and had somebody unconscious just fall in. A 16 year old girl’s corpse was defiled after she died from an OD down the alley. People screaming covered in feces and peeling off their own skin. Some of my smaller coworkers have been harassed and chased when trying to enter the building. I’ve talked to some of the addicts there of course, and many of them have told me they don’t care if they die. Most of them are not bad people, just mentally ill and disabled. Some of them definitely get the free needles but they all use outside. There is a needle disposal box around the corner and I’ve actually seen people breaking it open to steal the needles multiple times…
It just seems like none of this stuff works and we are all bending over backwards to cater to them, and then they end up dying anyway. Many of them are severely mentally ill or damaged from the drugs and it’s pretty obvious that they are never going to be anything near functional ever again. It’s like letting a 4 year old kid in an adult body addicted to opiates just go out on to the street to fend for themselves. They are not going to make choices that are beneficial to them in the long run, they’ve literally lost that ability.
After years of putting up with this stuff, I think your average person in the city just gets to the point where they’ve had enough, and people end up voting to try something else.
Sounds absolutely horrible, and I definitely understand that residents don’t wanna live or work in these environments.
I don’t think there is an easy fix for this problem tbh. Or at least not on a local level. From what I see SF is doing a lot of social stuff right, or at least better than the rest of the country. On the other hand you have crazy inequality pushing people into desperation and addiction. This somehow needs to be solved, but it might get worse before it gets better. Idk man, it’s tough.
Where I think people can make a difference is on a personal level. A little kindness goes a long way, and those people are yearning for empathy. You said they are like 4 year olds, and I think they are probably just as vulnerable. Addicts don’t have the luxury of thinking about consequences, they just survive until the next fix. So the right thing to do is be as kind and understanding as possible, even though they might make it difficult.
If you don’t have it already, might I suggest you get some Narcan for your workplace? Sounds like you could literally save a life with it someday.
You’re right, definitely couldn’t hurt to have some Narcan around. I’ve called 911 when I see people that look like they’re in danger, and the emergency services have come pretty quick each time. Many of them tend to use in tents, or place covers over themselves though. This makes it pretty difficult to tell if they’re ok. Its very common to see people completely passed out but not dead. You can usually tell if they’re actually danger by their skintone. Purple/blueish = bad.
Yeah I wish more cities in this country could devote the same amount of resources that SF devotes to these issues. Many of the addicted people I’ve talked to are actually from out of state, particularly red states. It shouldn’t be up to certain cities to take most of the burden of this national problem, but it seems like that’s what is happening. Income inequality is definitely out of control and I agree it seems to be a huge factor in pushing people into these situationss. Multi billionaires just should not exist when we have shit like this happening to to our people.
Yeah, that thing about red states sending their homeless to you guys is absolutely fucked. Makes policies that would actually help seem like they don’t, because more desolate people keep showing up, even though you guys are doing your best.
Also agree about the billionaires obviously, and I think the whole silicon valley tech culture also doesn’t help. FAANG employees with their big salaries can just afford way higher rents and costs of living than the average american, driving up the prices. But I’m sure as a resident you know all of those issues better than I do.
I hope it gets better for you guys, it’s an incredibly sad situation, especially in such a beautiful city like SF.
If you don’t want people injecting in the streets then kicking drug addicts out of shelters and taking away their rent subsidies seems pretty counterintuitive.
The ordinance specifically does not have a sobriety requirement for continued shelter and assistance. It just requires treatment. Even if you’re still using, you don’t lose assistance. You just also need drug treatment.
I know, but there are going to be some people who refuse treatment and are forced out of there living situations and onto the streets, thus exasperating the problem the guy above mentioned.
I’m just saying If your main concern is seeing people doing drugs on the street your main priority should be giving them somewhere else to do them, either a safe injection site or shelter, and anything getting in the way of that is counterproductive. You can try and get them off drugs but coercing people into treatment like this rarely works.
Where do they end up in that system? Is the idea to just keep them safely on drugs for the rest of their lives since treatment rarely works? Safely locked away in a shelter, dependent on opiates?
Hopefully one day they seek treatment, and any system should make that option as open as possible at any point, because treatment can work if the person is truly committed to it. It almost never works when you coerce someone into it though, especially if whatever’s forcing you into it is as alienated from you as the city government. Maybe if the addict truly loved a person or group of people could an ultimatum like it’s me or the drugs work, and even that fails sometimes. But the city government, a government that you may blame for the shitty circumstances your in, telling you that is more likely to turn someone away in spite then awaken some actual desire in a person to seek sobriety.
So it sounds like that’s a yes then. Keep them on drugs and just hope. Hope that they change, all while their minds and bodies are actively being destroyed and whittled down by the drugs, and the Honduran gangs in SF gain money and power… This just doesn’t seem to be sustainable. There is a seemingly endless supply of people coming here from all over the country who are addicted to this stuff, and it really fees like it’s turning parts of the city into a zombie land. Many people in this city, especially those that live and work in these areas are just fed up. And the votes reflect that.
I’m not saying it sustainable or good, just that these propositions are short sighted and not the way to do it, and most addiction specialists would agree. Fixing this problem doesn’t require more law and order and discipline which we’ve been doing to no effect, but to solve the underlying socioeconomic issues causing addiction. No one is going to quit drugs if it’s the one thing making their life on the streets bearable. To get people to quit, or even not abuse drugs in the first place, they need a stable living situation, a purpose and a regular job and a support structure, these propositions provide none of that. Turning people away from the welfare programs that can provide these will only push them deeper into addiction.
If the more progressive policies are helping, that impact is getting drowned out by other factors pushing parts of town in the other direction.
As someone who lives in the SF / Oakland area, I can attest to people constantly talking about drugs, crime and homelessness going in the wrong direction. People bring it up without being prompted.
My theory is that more progressive addiction policies work, but that’s just one variable. And there are other things impacting day to day vibe in the city that are overshadowing the stuff that’s working.
When people go to the ballot box, nuance often goes out the door. When things aren’t great, they vote for whatever is different.
Of course they’re going to talk about crime, what else are they going to talk about, the weather that never changes?
In all seriousness though I do think it’s the lack of other issues that’s driving this. Most other issues liberals care about have come to a secure consensus in the city, abortion and LGBT rights are as secure as they can get, marijuana and even mushrooms are basically legal, the last gun store has closed, the city has a good recycling and composting system and a green energy option, the parks and schools get decent funding etc. The only thing left is affordable housing and crime. Since the minutia of housing policy is boring that just leaves crime for the media and people to talk about, so even if crime itself is stable or even declining, people’s awareness of it increases.
You can see this during the pandemic where homelesness and crime were just as bad if not worse, but people were focusing on other things.
The lack of other issues also demobilizes the average liberal voter who already has everything they want and doesn’t see a need to vote, so the election becomes dominated by people who care about that one remaining issue.
If you look at something like car break ins in SF, the data did show that it dropped a ton during the pandemic, then rebounded to the 2019 craziness.
It wasn’t something that was in people’s heads. The SF Chronicle has been pretty good about charting this stuff, and if you search for things like car break in graphs, Google images will get ya past some paywalls.
IMHO, those of us who have been living in the area for decades have some legitimate observations and experiences that are supported by data. I’m not saying the solution has to be super conservative policies. I’m just saying that the problems are real.
Car break ins did go up during/after the pandemic, just as crime went up across the entire country, but that early 20s crime wave seems to be subsiding. This election took place in a context where car break ins are declining and crime in general is decreasing. If these propositions were truly a reaction to real crime then they would have happened in 2022 when crime was peaking and looked like it was going up.
I’m not saying the problem isn’t real, there is crime. But I don’t think the idea it’s getting worse is true. I’ve only been here for 5 years but my understanding is that SF, like most cities, was far worse in the 80s and 90s . Maybe there was some golden era in the 2000s , early 2010s where it was slightly better but just comparing to what I’ve seen since I’ve been here I haven’t noticed any changes that warrant this recent tough in crime bend that local politics is going.
Here is the broader data set going back to 2009. I wish it went back further do capture life before the great recession. Cutting things off at 2018 doesn’t really tell the full story and doesn’t really show you why people who’ve been here for 10, 20, 30+ years are unhappy.
The concern is the post pandemic uptick it was the overall trend going back a decade. Things have gotten a LOT better over the past 6 months. Whether that’s because of the aggressive 2023 crack down efforts, or because of something else, I don’t know. All I know if that people in the region are not reacting to the past couple years, they’re reacting to the past decade or more.
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
From what I understand, drug screening usually ends up costing more than it saves because, unlike what the propagandists would have you believe, the vast majority of people on welfare aren’t on drugs.
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That’s unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
The costs for locking up homeless people is greater than the cost of providing housing. The following quote is from a slapdash search; I haven’t read the document because my original source is a book, The End of Policing, and that book had multiple citations that I’m not listing here.
As identified in the chart above, the total cost of incarceration is estimated to be 25% higher than the total cost of providing equivalent supportive services to prevent recidivism.
There’s a question of induced demand. We don’t have really good data, but anecdotally there’s a common belief that a lot of SFs homeless either migrated here from other parts of the country or were bussed here, because of SFs lenience.
During most surveys, most homeless people report being born here. Which is a useless fact, because if they report being from somewhere else, they’ll likely get sent back there.
In any case, San Francisco does not incarcerate the homeless. It allows them to live on the streets.
Ah so the real estate developers are finally ready to finish their gentrification efforts. They must’ve forced out the last remaining owners in the area so now they can crack down and turn it into overpriced bullshit
And to be clear, they vote authoritarian because they are the authoritarians. In a capitalistic society money is authority. Those with money rule.
People assume rich people are voting against their self interests somehow, but they’re not. Money serves them and allows them to be exempt from most of the laws and rules.
They vote on laws that let them keep and make more money, at the expense of you not making as much. Then they use that wealth and influence to do it more.
Drug treatment is important, yes, but making it a precondition for benefits will absolutely hurt the most vulnerable. If there was actually enough affordable housing available for everyone that needs it, there would be far less of a need for this kind of policy. It is well documented that providing housing before anything else sets people up for success. If someone has been living on the streets and suddenly has housing available, their life will improve so drastically thanks to the job and social opportunities that will become available, also making it less likely that drug abuse will continue.
This seems like a cop out to me. Just build houses for fuck’s sake.
Breed has been on the wrong side of so many issues. Most recently she made an incredibly tone-deaf statement denouncing the city council’s vote against the genocide in Gaza. I’m done with her.
For one thing, it’s extremely difficult to force someone out of an addiction. You usually have to want to quit in order for that to be an option. Otherwise you have to do something like torture them by making them go through a possibly extremely painful cold turkey withdrawal.
So I’d say torturing the most vulnerable would hurt them.
But what makes you think that’s what they’ll do? Would helping someone with an addiction towards treatment really ‘torture’ them?
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Ok, fair enough. But I don’t think many treatment programs still make them go cold turkey though. Of course it’s always ‘less fun’ than just continuing shooting fentanyl, even for those who freely make the change
What? You think fentanyl addicts use it for fun? They probably didn’t even start using opioids for fun. They probably started because they were in pain.
Also, if they stop using opioids they will be in a lot more pain and they will still be living in America, where a for-profit medical system to treat that pain is beyond their reach.
It’s not about fun at all. What an incredibly insensitive thing to say.
If they don’t get help to stop, they eventually progress to a point where they are definitely not using for fun. They have no choice anymore. They have one goal and that is to be high at any cost. I work in a part of SF where there are a lot of them and the things I see them go through are horrendous. It feels like watching state sanctioned torture. They are literally being left to rot. I know two people that have lost a loved one to fentanyl and it really is heartbreaking.
Again- many fentanyl addicts are people in actual physical pain. The whole reason there is an opioid epidemic in the first place is that opioids used to be handed out by doctors like candy and tons of people got addicted.
Claiming they’re doing it for fun is simply insensitive and you should ask those two people why they lost those loved ones- what got them addicted in the first place.
I’ve had fentanyl in a hospital. It’s not something pleasurable.
Are you saying no-one is using opiates recreationally? Or that people get addicted because it makes them feel so incredibly bad? People I know that dose some special K at a festival don’t really do so to ease their back pain…
I’m saying that the current opioid crisis was caused by people in legitimate physical pain being oversupplied opioids by doctors due to companies like Purdue Pharma pushing them on doctors. So a large number of fentanyl addicts are taking it because they have legitimate pain issues which also need to be addressed.
Jeez yeah thankfully I’ve never had to experience fent myself. I did get some Molly one time that was cut with meth, and that was a huge eye opener for me… different drug but still.
I do know the back story to one of the victims. He was just a dude that got caught up in the party scene too much. Was always using more and more as time went on. People even told him he was going to die someday. Sure enough, he had another party at his place, and in the early morning, people found him lying on the floor of his room, partially in a closet, dead. Fentanyl OD.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, some of the people came back and took shit from his house after they learned he died. Ugh
I have spoken to some on the street though that did indeed get hooked originally from a pain script. It’s definitely a thing.
beyond that forced treatment is ethically questionable, conditioning other forms of help on sobriety puts people in a bind. it’s hard for people to get and stay sober when they’re suffering, physically and mentally.
housing/food/health care (to include mental health and psychiatric care) first means it’s more likely that efforts toward sobriety will even work.
Forced addiction treatment isn’t what’s happening. They drug test the poor and then cut them off from benefits if they fail. It is a punishment.
The only way to be eligible for benefits again is to join a treatment program, many of which in the US are just religious ministries that care more about proselytizing than human outcomes. Even cults like the Church of Scientology runs drug treatment programs, with obvious motivations…
These people are exploited by pretty much everyone, including those who are tasked to help them. If your solution is to force them into anything, recovery or otherwise, you’re just exploiting them further.
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Given that neither her nor the council have anything to do with policy in Gaza and that both are going to be making statements purely to aim to appeal to chunks of the electorate, does it make sense to condition your vote on that?
If you were choosing a dentist, would you use their stated positions on the Levant to do so?
If I had a dentist who told me that they were okay with tens of thousands of children being murdered? Yeah, I might worry about their compassion as a healthcare provider.
I’m not a San Francisco resident, so I don’t get a vote, I just have lots of connections to the region. She didn’t have to denounce the city council’s resolution against the genocide, she chose to, and that felt like a gut punch to me at the time. As for the relevance of it all, it was a non-binding (obviously) resolution taking a moral stand on an issue directly impacting hundreds if not thousands of residents in a pretty small city, so it matters.
I take your point, but if I asked my dentist if they thought it was okay to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of children because they were born on the wrong side of a border, and they said yes? I’d absolutely find a different doctor.
Thanks for the heads up. Yeah, I’m cautiously hopeful, but still quite skeptical they’ll get it right. These measures often sound good, but implementation is key.
Yeah I feel the same, cautiously hopeful. It seems like the implementation always gets bogged down with corruption, red tape and fingerpointing in this city…
One of the worst parts of this, and one that will get people killed, is they loosened the restrictions on police chases. Now police can chase cars for crimes where there’s no longer a threat of violence like robbery through the second densest city in the country. People are so indoctrinated by copaganda that they think police chases always end up with the cop catching the bad guy instead of how they usually end, with a fatal crash.
The way I always hear it is that they are only ever chasing murderers and violent offenders and you should want them to catch those grandma-killers before they get you, too.
That’s how it was before, for the police to chase their had to be a reasonable suspicion that the criminal was in there way to commit another violent crime. So if a robbery happened and the police arrive and the criminal takes off the reasonable assumption is theyre heading back home, not off to commit another violent crime, so the police would not pursue them. Now they can pursue them and endanger all the people on the road just to protect the property of the store owner.
Cop shows and movies distort our perception of them but the reality is that most police chases end in a crash and serious injury if not death. This chance goes up even higher with dense cities with a lot of pedestrians around like San Francisco. So they should only be used if they’re preventing someone from murdering or seriously injuring someone else. A car at high speeds is just as , if not more dangerous than a gun and should be used as such.
That same measure also allows the use of drones and other technology to follow and track the suspects, so may not necessarily mean more automobile persuits. We’ll have to wait and see I guesa.
I occasionally get in the police dash cam rabbit hole. It’s crazy how most states have realized how dangerous car chases are and don’t chase at all. BOLO the car and go arrest them the next day.
Then there Arkansas and Georgia where all the cops are just itching to get into a 130mph chase through neighborhoods willing to pit at any speed risking their life, the suspects life, and the hundreds sometimes thousands of people they go screaming past during a chase.
I used to work for a local TV station and every year they did this thing called “Crimestoppers” where we’d ride along with a cop all night just in case something happened. This is not a huge city, but there’s enough crime that something ended up on camera. I didn’t hate doing it. I’m no cop-lover, but the guy they paired me with was a good enough conversationalist to talk to all night at least… but I was terrified of ending up in a car chase situation. Cars make me anxious as it is. Thankfully, that never happened.
This kind of opportunistic journalism really makes me skeptical of the value of a lot of our local TV news stations. You’re describing the local news using the same production tactics as COPS, a reality TV show…
Was there anything that the crimestoppers program covered that was of sigificant newsworthiness to the community that you remember?
Oh there was no value to the local TV station. It was either boring lifestyle stories or sensationalist bullshit. Also, the lead anchor said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard anyone say. The ISS was passing overhead and we all went out into the parking lot to see it and she looked up and said, “can they see the Earth from up there?” This was who they hired to give what they decided were the important stories of the day.
The pay was also shit.
Oh… there was one notable thing that happened during Crimestoppers. Mainly that the website news guy found out one of his friends had a warrant and warned them by putting out that he was wanted on the website before the cops went after him that night. But that was not on TV. He just got fired.
That is a pretty sad turnout. The votes reflect the choices of about 92K registered democrats, vs. roughly 13K registered rebublicans though, so it’s not like this is some right wing takeover.
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