Drug overdose deaths in San Francisco are snowballing, and the city still hasn’t ruled out its strategy of enabling users.
San Francisco saw 806 people die from accidental drug overdoses in 2023, the most on record and a sharp increase after a brief decline. The previous record was 726 in 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns. That dropped to 642 in 2021 and ticked up slightly to 649 in 2022 before the surge in overdose deaths last year.
Still, the idea of encouraging “safe” drug use is prevalent throughout the city. Organizations give out what are euphemistically called “harm reduction” kits, which include clean needles, tin cans used to cook up drugs in, pipes, and straws, among other things. These kits are distributed primarily to prevent the spread of diseases between drug users. But that strategy also enables and encourages users to keep using drugs, with many of these organizations not even bothering to have information ready for users on rehab or intervention programs.
San Francisco embraced this as policy as well, opening “safe injection sites” such as the Tenderloin Center, which predictably devolved into a haven for drug addicts and dramatically reduced the quality of life in the neighborhood. Neighbors began carrying baseball bats and tasers to protect themselves in case they were attacked while trying to avoid the urine and feces in the streets. San Francisco Democrats have even tried fighting Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) to continue to push these “safe injection sites.”
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But there is nothing “safe” about encouraging addicts to shoot up whenever they want and providing them the resources to do so, especially when they are not being encouraged to seek treatment for their addictions. And yet this has been the policy pursued by liberal West Coast cities including San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, even as overdose deaths continued at unacceptably high numbers.
The goal in San Francisco and elsewhere must be to get as many drug addicts off of drugs and into treatment programs as possible, not to give them supplies to help them kill themselves just so they can avoid diseases. Enabling drug overdose deaths is not the right answer to any question. Nearly 3,000 deaths over the last four years should have shown San Francisco that by now.