Slow-Motion Suicide in San Francisco
In Portugal, someone caught using heroin in public is arrested, brought to the police station, and either prosecuted for drug dealing or forced to appear before something called a Commission for the Dissuasion of Addiction comprised of a combination of social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and family members who confront addicts in a formal intervention.
Something very different is happening in San Francisco. The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment whereby addicts are given everything they need to maintain their addiction cash, hot meals, shelter in exchange for . . . almost nothing. Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth and crack use on public property.
You can go and witness all of this if you simply walk down Market Street and peek your head over a newly erected fence in the southwest corner of United Nations Plaza. You will see that the city is permitting people to openly use and even deal drugs in a cordoned-off area of the public square.
The city denies that they are operating a supervised drug consumption site. This site is about getting people connected with immediate support, as well as long-term services and treatment, a spokesperson for the city s Department of Emergency Management told the Chronicle.
The official line is that they are running what they call a Linkage Center in a building next to the open drug market in the plaza. The idea is that the center is supposed to link addicts to services, including housing and rehab. When Mayor London Breed announced it, she promised it would get people into treatment so they could stop using drugs, not simply hide their use.
But city officials have told me that in the 19 days that the site has been open, just two people total went to detox so far. And they serve some 220 people per day.
In that tent on Market Street everyone is shooting dope, complained a senior employee of a major city service provider, speaking of the scene at the plaza. It s insane. All the staff standing around watching them. It s fucking ridiculous. I don t know how anybody thinks that helping a drug addict use drugs is helping them.
Maybe the idea is that if all the addicts kill themselves, that will solve the homeless problem. But realistically, the cartels are probably the big winners in this deal. Who’s paying them off? Well, I guess we are, with our tax dollars.