‘Soft-touch’ San Francisco leaders now call for ‘IDEAS’ to end open-air drug markets

San Francisco officials on Tuesday unveiled what they said was a deliberately ‘soft touch’ scheme to deal with the city’s relentless drug crisis – insisting that under their plan ‘nobody’s going to jail,’ but remaining vague on how to end the problem.

With nearly 1,700 fatal overdoses since the start of 2020, San Francisco’s drug crisis has resulted in almost double the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In June, the city’s mayor, London Breed, announced that their notorious taxpayer-funded open-air drugs market will close at the end of the year.

Tuesday’s plan, named ‘San Francisco Recovers,’ appeared to be a return to the open-air market system, however.

Their plan promoted ‘supervised consumption sites where drug users can safely use substances under medical supervision to prevent accidental overdose deaths.’

They featured a range of other requests for handling the crisis, but instead of mapping a way to achieve them instead requested the 21 city departments and six city commissions come up with ideas for them within 90 days.

Matt Dorsey, a supervisor, said that the goals were deliberately ‘soft touch’.

They include electronically-tagging users and having police officers track them down and confiscate their drugs if they wander into known drug-dealing areas.

San Francisco’s supervisors want job placement and training instead of imprisonment for those who agree to stop drug dealing, and ‘right to recovery’ zones near treatment centers, with zero tolerance for possession or dealing.

In addition, they call for the supervised drug consumption sites.

‘This is a way that nobody’s going to jail but we’re doing an effective job of interrupting the drug market and drug scenes,’ Dorsey said, according to The San Francisco Standard. 

Tenderloin Supervisor Dean Preston has called for a hearing to address drug overdose deaths to be held on September 29.

‘We are determined to make sure health experts, not politicians, lead the creation and implementation of a long overdue overdose prevention plan,’ Preston said.

Their outline came three months after the current scheme, known as the Linkage Center, was denied further funding.

It emerged in June that the facility, said to have cost $19m in taxpayer cash, treated just one in every 1,000 users and failed to cut fatal overdose numbers.

The Linkage Center in the Tenderloin, at the heart of San Francisco’s civic center, opened in January and was intended to help the city’s large population of homeless people and drug addicts to find help.

But critics say the site, rented at a cost of $75,000 a month, has failed to curtail the problem in the crime-ridden city, which recently recalled its woke DA Chesa Boudin amid a spike in crimes blamed for a sharp decline in locals’ quality of life. 

They note that only 0.1 percent of those using the site were directed to treatment in the first five months, despite the estimated $19 million spent in running costs. 

Between January and April, just 18 of the 23,367 drug users who visited the site were referred for treatment.  

Furthermore, the rate of fatal overdoses has not declined in a meaningful way: in January the office of the chief medical examiner reported 49 deaths, and last month there were 45.

And the center even went on to quietly drop the word ‘linkage’ from its title, because so few of the drug abusers who visited were being linked to any meaningful form of help.  

Gina McDonald, a co-founder of Mothers Against Drug Deaths (MADD), told DailyMail.com they welcomed the closure of the site, saying that many contractors had made huge profits from its operations.

‘We were all in favor of this Linkage Center, as we were told it was going to link people to services,’ she said.

‘But it turned into this drug den, with people who were trying to get clean and sober besides those openly using.

‘We’re thrilled they are shutting it down.

‘It was supposed to be a place that people could get help and treatment.

‘And it basically turned into an opium den.’

McDonald said that the San Francisco department of health was misguided in failing to push people to seek treatment. She said a more robust policy was needed to encourage vulnerable people to seek help, and tolerance was not the answer.

‘The department of health has taken on this radical harm reduction model,’ she explained.

‘They say they are ‘meeting people where they are at’. But they’re leaving them there.’

McDonald, who was herself homeless with meth-induced psychosis, and whose daughter became addicted to fentanyl, added: ‘I think it’s the fault of the San Francisco department of public health that has hired these contractors who make a lot of money when people stay sick.’

She added: ‘I believe that if you’re laying on the street shooting up, smoking fentanyl, and stealing – you can’t live there on the street.’

McDonald said the main problem was the drug dealers, noting ‘there are 30 people out there any time of day.’

‘The police do arrest dealers when they can,’ she said.

‘The street-level dealer keeps on his person the amount that is only a misdemeanor. The homeless person sitting nearby has the rest of the stash.

‘And the police do not arrest the homeless, because people in San Francisco people won’t support that – they see it as harming them.

‘My daughter’s dealer was arrested three times and released, for selling fentanyl. Then they’d send him off to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

‘I had to go and pay him off for her safety.’

McDonald said her organization backed the approach taken by the San Francisco department of adult probation, which has opened two drug-free sites for people to access services and housing. 

‘They don’t let you stay if you are using,’ she said.

‘If you are caught, you aren’t kicked out onto the streets but you are sent out for treatment, and then welcomed back.’

Parisa Safarzadeh, spokeswoman for London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, said the Linkage Center had been a valuable experiment, which served 400 people a day with hot meals and showers.

She said the site was an ‘immediate intervention to stabilize the community in the short term while the city developed its longer term plans for the Tenderloin.’

But it is unclear what the longer term plan comprises.

Breed has talked about opening up a ‘safe consumption site’, and proposed spending $4 million on projects in the Tenderloin next year such as street or park improvements.

And McDonald said the city needed a radical rethink of its policies. 

‘San Francisco has become Gotham,’ she said.

‘It has to change.’