San Francisco Officials Enabling “Slow Motion Suicide” By Not Offering Coercive Intervention

The people in charge of homelessness and addiction want to bully people into giving up public streets and parks. They want to take your tax money and let your suffering neighbors die gentle, stoned deaths while they watch and call it justice. They think the mothers who want to get their sons out of the jaws of death are suspect. (It’s conservative to want your kid to live, don’t you know?) The city would like a little privacy please. Fentanyl use is an intimate moment between our officials and our addicts.

Do not listen to the propaganda. Skip Golden Gate Park. Bring your friends downtown instead. Stand in UN Plaza and just watch. Use your eyes, those great weapons. 

— Nellie Bowles

Printed in:

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/slow-motion-suicide-in-san-francisco

More from the Bari Weiss article:

In my new book, San Fransicko, I praise Portugal, which has decriminalized drug use, and the Netherlands, where there are 28 drug consumption rooms. (In some, addicts are even given heroin.)

But both of those countries condemn hard drug use and intervene when addicts break laws, including laws against public drug use and public camping. “There’s a clear sign of disapproval in our society to the use of drugs,” the head of Portugal’s drug program, João Goulão, told me. 

They are also not opposed to coercion. 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.  

But in San Francisco:

“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.”

“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,” a person with firsthand information about the operation told me over text message. “But there’s no housing. So nothing happens. They just get added to a list.” 

The parents whose children live on the streets are adamant that the status quo is broken. “I agree with the Linkage Center,” Gina McDonald told me. Her 24-year-old daughter Samantha is a heroin and fentanyl addict who has been on and off the streets for the last two years. “But allowing open drug use does not help. It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.”

The Bari Weiss article is worth reading. It was written by Michael Shellenberger.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/slow-motion-suicide-in-san-francisco

Thoughts of mine:

1. Are city officials wanting people to die? Street justice, save taxpayers in the long run? People “getting what they deserve?”

2. Are harm reduction advocates without a sense of divine justice? Do they see themselves as not beholden to legal, ethical, moral liabilities, whether in a court of man’s law, or a higher supreme being divine justice thing? Point is, how can enabling drug addicts to slowly die be called “harm reduction?”

3. Is San Francisco going to be the model for “harm reduction?” If it is, nobody in the Midwest would support such lunacy. Is this some weird way of destroying the valid science behind harm reduction policies?

4. Why the opposition to forceful intervention by advocates? Did they not read that detail about Portugal’s success? Decriminalizing drugs does not at all equal societal approval. Quite the opposite — it means condemnation of drugs is so severe, society has looked deeper than the surface, and as a result of that deep dive, decided the Christian values of forgiveness, compassion and reconciliation are superior to the prohibitionist our way or the highway authoritarianism of previous drug policy strategies which science and basic data show have clearly not been the way.

5. Is our society so spiritually disconnected and sick, that the inhabitants are increasingly taking deadly drugs to escape it? Talk about a cancer being treated for the symptoms and not the root.