According to sobering numbers provided by the city’s Medical Examiner’s office, San Francisco is experiencing a tidal wave of overdoses, with deadly fentanyl accounting for 62 of the 71 drug overdose deaths that occurred in the past month.
The results were made public on the same day as a new report concluding that City hall is failing its residents in the liberal city in Northern California, which is experiencing a crime, homelessness, and drug epidemic.
The overdose statistics also put San Francisco on track to top its record set in 2020, when 712 people died as a result of overdoses, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
After the contentious $22 million Tenderloin Linkage Center was closed last December, Colfax claimed his department planned to build ten more wellness hubs where drug addicts might receive treatment. However, this approach has come under fire.
Critics claimed that because drug addicts openly used narcotics there, the institution merely increased issues and criminality. Officials from the city claim that it has never been technically permissible to consume drugs openly in these places.
Health officials in San Francisco are frantically looking for solutions to the rise in overdose fatalities and are attempting to expand access to drugs like methadone and Narcan throughout the city.
San Francisco’s Ongoing Struggle: Open Drug Use, Homelessness, and Community Decline
In the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, open drug use goes on around-the-clock, with addicts who are homeless passing out on the streets at night and only moving during the day when teams from nearby non-profits attempt to clean the streets in the early morning.
According to research by TogetherSF and the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, citizens of San Francisco claim that the city’s drug and homelessness problems, as well as the migration of businesses, have led to the decline of the once-thriving Downtown district.
According to Brown, progressive policies that permit harm-reduction initiatives and wellness hubs merely act as breeding grounds for drug traffickers.
Flurofentanyl is another substance that has entered the pipeline; it is a synthetic drug that looks like a white crystalline solid but has been mixed with other narcotics by traffickers.
The medical examiner’s office reports that flurofentanyl was discovered in hundreds of overdoses in San Francisco last year. Flurofentanyl slows a user’s heart rate and causes erratic breathing as a side effect.
In order to combat trafficking and other drug-related crimes, San Francisco Mayor London Breed enlisted the National Guard and California Highway Patrol officers. However, detractors claimed that the absence of arrests and prosecutions would not dissuade users and drug traffickers.
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Source: New York Post
