San Francisco Promotes Illegal Drug Use, Overdose Deaths ‘Skyrocket’

San Francisco launched a “bizarre medical experiment” in which the city helps the homeless use illegal drugs. Environmental and urbanization writer Michael Shellenberger notes that since the pandemic began, the city has lost twice as many residents to drug overdoses than to COVID.

“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,” Shellenberger reports in a Substack column.

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 local mother of a 24-year-old homeless woman compares the city’s essentially pro-drug policy to “handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.”

Despite promises in January from “progressive” Mayor London Breed to “put an end to all the bullshit destroying our city,” her own government is running “a supervised drug consumption site in United Nations Plaza.”

That’s a nice part of town, too. Or was.

The drug sale-and-use site is touted by local officials as a “Linkage Center” where homeless addicts can find treatment and housing. The Linkage Center has been open for nearly two weeks, “treating” over 200 people each day. Shellenberger was told that out of the many addicts who have gone through the site, a total of two have gone through detox.

The rest, apparently, are opening, using, or even selling drugs like meth, heroin, and fentanyl.

Someone with “firsthand knowledge” of what’s going on at Linkage texted Shellenberger to describe the scene: “What’s happening is that everyone that comes in gets a meal, can use the bathroom, gets drug supplies (needles, foil, pipes), and signs up for a ‘housing assessment.’ But there’s no housing. So nothing happens. They just get added to a list.”

The city is handing out everything but the drugs themselves. You really should read Shellenberger’s whole report.

In 2020, when #DefundThePolice was all the rage, Breed was pleased to announce that she’d cut $120 million from the budgets of the city’s police and sheriff’s department. That move was lauded by the Biden White House as recently as December of 2021.