“A Disaster In Plain Sight” – Why San Francisco Is Doing Nothing To Curb Brutal Fentanyl Crisis
The San Francisco Chronicle just published a lengthy multimedia report about the most devastating public-health crisis currently afflicting the city. And no, it’s not COVID-19. It’s the rash of super-potent synthetic opioids like fentanyl that are causing a surge in deaths among the city’s vast homeless community, as well as among others.
Nearly 3/4ths of the thousands of drug overdoses that have been reported in the City by the Bay have involved fentanyl; for the last two years, Fentanyl has been killing far more people in San Francisco than COVID. It’s not even close, really.
In San Francisco, roughly 1,310 people died from drug overdoses in 2020 and 2021. That’s more than double the roughly 710 people who have died from the virus in the city since the start of the pandemic.
The city’s fentanyl death toll would be higher if it wasn’t for narcan, the antidote now used more than 500 times a month to yank people back from the brink of death.
Overdose deaths happen all over the city, but by far the biggest concentrations are found within a few square blocks on Tenderloin and South of Market, a part of the city that has long plagued law enforcement.
A large percentage of the older addicts are blacks who have been living on the city’s streets for years, if not decades. What’s more, the scourge of fentanyl has transformed the Tenderloin into an open-air drug market.
Despite budgeting more than $70M for resources for the indigent last year alone, the city of San Francisco has barely managed to make any kind of positive difference in the lives of the city’s homeless. Overdose prevention programs in the last fiscal year alone have accomplished little. And police have been stymied by the progressive DA’s insistence that city cops not arrest people. – READ MORE
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