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Long Read of the Day: Slow-Motion Suicide in San Francisco

At this point all I can say is: go and see it.

Over the past two years, more than 1,360 people have died from drug overdoses in San Francisco. That is more than double the number who have died from Covid.

But you don’t need more stats. You don’t need more numbers about how the tent encampments are exploding. Or about the amount of money that the city is paying for each person doing drugs on the sidewalks. You need to see it.

I’m serious. Everyone in San Francisco should make a trip downtown. Walk around. And do not avert your eyes to the people dying slowly on the streets.

The politicians that run my hometown are relying on you not noticing what’s going on because it’s been bad for so long and who cares if it gets a little worse. Don’t let them. Go see it.

The city is using intimidation. They used it on me when I went to see what was going on at a new addict-services facility, which they’d set up in a public plaza. And they tried to intimidate my friend Michael Shellenberger, as you’ll read below.

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

Something very different is happening in San Francisco. 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. Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth, and crack use on public property.

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 city denies that they are operating a supervised drug consumption site. “This site is about getting people connected with immediate support, as well as long-term services and treatment,” a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Emergency Management told the Chronicle.

The official line is that they are running what they call a “Linkage Center” in a building next to the open drug market in the plaza. The idea is that the center is supposed to link addicts to services, including housing and rehab. When Mayor London Breed announced it, she promised it would get people into treatment so they could stop using drugs, not simply hide their use.

But city officials have told me that in the 19 days that the site has been open, just two people total went to detox so far. And they serve some 220 people per day.

“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 in a text message. “But there’s no housing. So nothing happens. They just get added to a list.”

RTWT AT Slow-Motion Suicide in San Francisco

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • julie February 7, 2022, 6:16 PM

    I’m reminded of the last time I took my kids to one of the best parks in our area, their favorite playground in Redlands. Back in 2020, post-quarantine. There was a private school/ daycare center across the street, and when we pulled up a police officer was busy posting signs all over the property making sure everybody knew it was closed for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, directly across the sleepy neighborhood street in the park, literally right behind the officer’s back, people were dealing and using drugs in one of the picnic shelters right next to our favorite playground. Never been back since.

    • Mike Austin February 9, 2022, 5:19 AM

      Even at this small level, one sees “anarcho-tyranny”.

      “Anarcho-tyranny is a concept, where the state is argued to be more interested in controlling citizens so that they do not oppose the managerial class (tyranny) rather than controlling real criminals (causing anarchy). Laws are argued to be enforced only selectively, depending on what is perceived to be beneficial for the ruling elite.”

      Here in two sentences is the sum total of current American governance.

  • ghostsniper February 7, 2022, 6:28 PM

    San Fran is a long term experiment of what happens when children are appointed jobs by irresponsible people. It all falls down.

    • Mike Austin February 9, 2022, 5:23 AM

      It goes far deeper. To irresponsibility must be added extreme sexual degeneracy, ignorance, corruption, narcissism, hatred of the God of Abraham, arrogance and condescension. The same maladies affect Washington DC and every “elite” in America.

  • Kerry February 7, 2022, 6:32 PM

    This reported outcome is by design. The wrong people die off sooner rather than later, the right people have jobs providing these “services” to the wrong people. No mistakes, no unforeseen outcomes in this arrangement.

  • moi February 7, 2022, 7:09 PM

    As Kerry alluded to, this is about money. The people who run all this have found it very lucrative. They are the last ones who want to see any resolution of this problem.
    The city I am sure benefits, taxes, fees etc that it touts are for the “homeless” a portion disappears into the cities general fund for others uses, an indirect tax i guess.
    In short, it has become a racket.

  • Terry February 7, 2022, 7:28 PM

    North end of SF Peninsula. Death camp run by insane leaches, paid for with money seized by legalized robbery from fools.

    Sad ending to what was the west coasts most beautiful city and most prosperous city. Destination point of the most fantastic water conduit in world history; Hetch Hetchy Project. Engineering marvel with zero “Environmental Impact” studies demanded by imbeciles wearing shower clogs and butt plugs.

  • Sisu February 7, 2022, 8:01 PM

    It is clearly all part of the demonrat / NWO, genocidal plan. Must “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” (Georgia Stones, “Goal No. 1”) And, reduce the USA population to less than 100 million (world less than 6.9 billion) by 2025 (Deagle Forecast 2019). …

    Fentanyl / opioids, contrived viruses & scariants, scam / plandemics, life-shortening, genetic therapies as antidotes, fanning divisiveness & racial conflict, rampant inflation and destruction of integrated economies, false flags, borderless countries, cognitively impaired leaders, sexual deviants / perverts promoted as normal, doctors without courage, religions without faith, untouchable tyrannical bureaucrats, misinformation is “truth” and “truth” is banned, …

    Many will be slaughtered, most by their own voluntary willful stupidity, or hand. Others because they chose to follow “orders” in a gamble to survive on the winning side. …

    What is apparently happening to humanity is incomprehensible, and thus considering the worst is the only way to gain perspective on how to preempt the future others have planned for us, individually and collectively. …

    Yet, I still pray that I might wake from this “reality”.

  • steveaz February 7, 2022, 8:29 PM

    Anyone else noticing the pattern here?
    First, identify a popular Commons. It may be Union Square in Seattle or SF, the Red Square at any university in America, or an essential freeway section.

    Second, occupy it. This is code for “make it impossible for Commoners to use it.” This force could be as extreme and overt as terroristic threats, or as subtle as “aggressive pan-handling” and open drug use. In both extremes, regular families and actualized citizens vacate the Commons in response.

    Last, having banished everyone to their private domains, use private monopolies to harass citizens at home.

    The end result is, we relinquish the skeletal Commons like elections systems, town squares, public schools, and even the Congress, to the Occupiers. And we retreat to our homes and bunkers while inviting further opprobrium to follow us over our cellphones, PC’s and televisions.

    If we could pull up the drawbridge behind us, retreat to our fortresses might be an option. But, perversely, we do not. Cannot.

    So it seems to be going with open air drug markets and the streets of our cities. Now that the endgame is obvious, we need to stand our ground and stop ceding the Commons to the vandals.

    • Lew February 8, 2022, 9:02 AM

      The same with the Public Gardens in Boston, Lincoln Park in Chicago, Central Park, NYC…endless.

  • gwbnyc February 7, 2022, 8:40 PM

    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?)

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/481444cf7ce2187eaf591d61eba9832a39970f5c0fa859486b48d3beac017d71.jpg

  • John A. Fleming February 7, 2022, 10:12 PM

    Having homeless is right now a grift and a luxury. When the next recession hits, that whole scene is going to go unstable. So far, California has been sitting pretty with their tax receipts these last two years. I remember the last recession in 2008/09, the local governments sent out the cops to write traffic tickets all day long every day, they were so panicked.

    Poor towns don’t have homeless and drug addicts, because they can’t afford them. Even the homeless know they stay there they’ll die, and right quick.

    When the governments are pulling in 80% of what they used to get in tax receipts, those homeless grifters are going to get the short end of the stick. It’ll get ugly. The Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith said “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. So too for cities. Nevertheless, it looks to be a downward spiral with no off-ramps in sight to climb back out. The 21Cen was not supposed to be a dystopia, that’s why we read all the speculative sci-fi in the 20Cen so we would be prepared and avoid this.

    I fooled myself. I had thought that by now Detroit and Venezuela would be ghost towns full of zombies and rats eking out an existence in the dusty ruins. Somehow, they are still hanging in there. The smart grifters will always get out before they are caught, leaving it to the next tier. There will always be another level of grifters who are satisfied with lesser amounts of loot. I first learned about this from Atlas Shrugged, where Taggart and Reardon met the heirs of the Twentieth Century Motor Company living in its ruin. It was the heirs that had done it with their collectivist ideals put into practice, but they remained true believers to the bitter end that their motives were always pure and just, it was the fault of those evil others who wouldn’t sacrifice themselves to the greater good.

    No matter how low SF can fall, it can fall a lot farther. No point crying about it. It’ll take a black swan singularity world-shaking series of events to even begin to turn it around.

    • nunnya bidnez, jr February 8, 2022, 6:07 AM

      The NYC subway system has about 6000 cars; in fact they’re in the middle of replacing all the existing cars with new ones at a cost of Six Billion Dollars. Each car holds up to 150 people during rush hour, but during off hours there might only be a dozen passengers.
      There are about 60,000 homeless people in New York.
      Do the math.
      ($100,000 per homeless person to provide them with a subway seat. That’s the capital expense, which might be amortized over the thirty year lifetime of a subway car; the annual operating expenses are another story entirely).
      NYC’s annual operating budget (police, fire, schools, garbage, streets, water & sewage, etc) is One Hundred Fucking Billion Dollars per year, four times higher than it was twenty years ago when Mayor Guiliani left. There are about three million people who pay taxes.
      Do the math.

      • ghostsniper February 8, 2022, 7:29 AM

        About $33k per year per taxpayer.
        How many people live there total? (Guessing, 6mil?)
        And only 3mil pay taxes?
        If so, that’s way upside down and can’t continue.

        • nunnya bidnez, jr February 8, 2022, 8:34 AM

          pre-covid there were ~8.5million people,
          several months into the pandemic it was reported that ~500,000 moved out of the city [in my building, 20 out of 200 tenants died in the past two years].
          There’s about 300,000 on The City’s payroll (45k cops, 60k teachers, ??fireman, the rest are bureaucrats), less than half of the residents work (over a million are students).
          Much of the annual budget is transfers from the State or Feds, not direct taxes.

  • Mike Austin February 8, 2022, 1:00 AM

    So this, then, is the culmination of Western Civilization? Forget 6000 years of History, for what does all that matter now? We have gone from Hammurabi to Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius to Thomas Aquinas to Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Voltaire to Beethoven to Goethe to Tolstoy to Camus, and all we have to show for it is public defecation and thousands of homeless occupying our streets and shooting heroin? That’s it? We have public officials who praise such behavior and pundits who write screeds about the goodness in supplying the drug addicted with all they need to commit slow motion suicide where all can see.

    What then has been the point of it all?

    • ghostsniper February 8, 2022, 4:20 AM

      As always, free money.

    • Joe Krill February 8, 2022, 7:22 AM

      You cannot make this stuff up…….Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To
      Advance Racial Equity

      • ghostsniper February 8, 2022, 9:33 AM

        Speaking of racial equity, ever been to a VA hospital?
        More than half the employees, maybe 75%, are negro.
        Probably the same with all fedgov and stategov jobs.
        No wonder everything the gov does is fucked up.
        It’s not about doing stuff properly, it’s about reparations.
        Remember that the next time you spend 3 hours in the DMV waiting on that 300 lb blob of surly negress with knotted hair and 3″ purple fingernails to grant you permission to live your life.

        • Gordon Scott February 8, 2022, 11:30 AM

          Ghost, perhaps that is the situation in your VA system. It is not in the Minneapolis or the Phoenix systems.

        • FLSTF February 8, 2022, 11:58 AM

          Sniper, so instead of using the VA or a VA Hospital, which healthcare system are you currently using? I’d imagine the Veterans here would appreciate advice on getting access to something better than what you described as a failed system with 75% black employees.

          And why not just do your DMV vehicular transactions through the mail?

        • Truther February 8, 2022, 1:33 PM

          Can’t fire em either

      • Mike Austin February 8, 2022, 1:21 PM

        It seems Hunter’s store of crack pipes is running low. So dad’s going to help him out.

  • KCK February 8, 2022, 5:48 AM

    Because of gross incompetence (don’t argue the morality or the policy goals; look at the shitty efficacy), the mayor of SF, each member of the city council, and half of the bureaucrats need to house the homeless (druggies) in their own abodes. I’ll bet the mayor’s pad will sleep dozens, if laid shoulder to shoulder.

    Where will the displaced officios go? Why, to jail, of course. If they can’t be shown as criminals, there’s always the street for them. Shove some fentanyl up their asses and toot.

    How can the businesses downtown survive with the Covids locksdown, the street people, the smash and grab crime wave? I’d love to get the manager of Nordstroms there, and ask him or her if they have a business model for the current shit show on Market Street. Lots of red ink, and lots of over/under lies in accounting. That’s the plan! Can he or she (or fucking whatever!) get some free meth off the streets? Because there’s no actual job to do.

  • Jack February 8, 2022, 6:49 AM

    I feel for these addicts. I truly do.

    But there is nothing that can be done for them because the greater majority are completely helpless, lost in addiction, disease and severe mental illness and they cannot and will not help themselves. A few might be saved but most have made the conscious decision to walk their paths to whatever end.

    • Gordon Scott February 8, 2022, 11:35 AM

      Read Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko. He’s a full blown lefty who looked at the European models that the enablers claim as their goals. Those Euro models are quite different form what the homeless industry claims. Those Euro models work because they demand better behavior from the addicts/mentally ill before they get any benefits.

    • Mike Austin February 10, 2022, 5:43 AM

      Every homeless addict is on a fast-track to an early death. He will arrive at the Styx toothless, filthy, smelling of urine, vomit and feces, and with a mind addled by years of neglect and abuse. One can babble away about hope and cures and such, but the grim reality is that hope and cures are in short supply these days. Every one of those wretches lying in the gutter with a needle in his arm got there because of choices he freely and willingly made. The same is true for every man.

  • MMinWA February 8, 2022, 6:57 AM

    My Give A Fuck meter is pegged at zero and it ain’t moving. San Fran is being duplicated in 100s of cities across the country. What can’t go on, won’t. Nothing will change for the better until TSHTF and millions die in the 1st wave.

    If you’re the least bit sane you’ve done some kind of prepping. If not, you’ll be gone in the longer 2nd wave.

    • ghostsniper February 8, 2022, 7:34 AM

      “My Give A Fuck meter is pegged at zero and it ain’t moving.”
      ==========
      Wanna bet?
      Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of negative numbers.
      Guess what?
      There’s as many numbers BELOW zero as there are above.
      You ain’t near pegged out yet.
      The only saving grace is if the system implodes and millions of tyrants and parasites are permanently destroyed. Then, it’ll be tough, but it will also be better for the rest of us, the producers, the creators.

    • Mike Austin February 9, 2022, 3:47 PM

      True that. The addicts, “homeless” and such riff-raff will be gone during the first week of SHTF. Their entire support system comes from a government that, when pressed for its very survival, will abandon them just like it abandoned Americans in Libya and Afghanistan. The US government exists only to exist, and wields power only to wield power.

  • Bob February 8, 2022, 8:35 AM

    It strikes me that the folks orchestrating this kind of behavior should not be on a city council, but rather facing a jury. They are using public money to pay for illegal drug transactions. Accessories or criminal co-conspirators…I’m not a lawyer able to make the distinction.

    The larger question is, “Could the RICO laws be weaponized against the city/state governments by declaring them a criminal enterprise?”

    • Mike Austin February 10, 2022, 5:52 AM

      You are asking a lawless regime to use the law to commit suicide. We are far beyond believing the law has any meaning whatsoever. It is nothing more that fancy words used to arrest, incarcerate and murder “enemies of the State”. Such corruption and depravity cannot be removed with pieces of paper.

  • Uncle Jefe February 8, 2022, 8:54 AM

    Let us not forget China’s role here…
    Besides the biological attack that they’ve unleashed via the Wuhan, for many years they’ve been waging chemical warfare against us as well. All of the pre-cursor chem is made in China, and mostly shipped to Mexico for the cartels to combine into the final forms, and then smuggle across our southern border and into our communities. You do not see this addiction problem plaguing the cities of China, killing their citizens, sapping their resources, demoralizing their country…they would eliminate any such threat to their country, but are actively and eagerly exporting anything that can destroy us.

    • ghostsniper February 8, 2022, 9:37 AM

      Fuk china.
      Their shit doesn’t get in unless an american gov’t criminal lets it in.
      Keep the blame where it belongs.

      • Uncle Jefe February 8, 2022, 12:29 PM

        That’s why I mentioned “China’s role”…
        If we had protected borders and enforced laws, much of this would be minimized.
        Not to mention the dysfunctional, if not criminal “governance” in our major cities…

    • Mike Austin February 10, 2022, 6:00 AM

      The reality is that we have no idea what is happening in China. What we see and know of China is what the Politburo allows us to see and know. One thing—and one thing only—is absolutely true about China: If she disappeared tomorrow the world would be a far better place. Vox Day, Fred Reed, “Spengler”—David Goldman—Thomas Friedman and the Biden Crime Family would weep bitter tears, but no one else would.

  • FLSTF February 8, 2022, 9:09 AM

    No news about the destruction and decline of San Franciscans and their worthless city bothers me any more. The same goes for all democrat run cities.
    They have made their deathbed, now let them lie in it.

    • billrla February 8, 2022, 9:36 AM

      FLSTF: I am at the same point as you. No more schadenfreude articles for me. If San Francisco wants to ruin itself, go right ahead. I’ve got my own backyard and my own block to care for. I’m keeping it local and taking action where I believe that my personal efforts can be most effective.

    • Mike Austin February 10, 2022, 6:05 AM

      Those San Franciscans who complain today are living in the society they themselves voted into power. What, me worry?

  • tallow pot February 8, 2022, 9:34 AM

    Whether by accident or intent, those dependent on that public teat will get euthanized some day.

    • billrla February 8, 2022, 9:37 AM

      tallow pot: They don’t realize that they are being euthanized right now. In most cases, slowly. In some cases, more quickly. But, they’re already dead.

  • captflee February 8, 2022, 11:44 AM

    At least in the mid-eighties the denizens of the Tenderloin demi-monde which I encountered on my midnightly uphill trudge from Powell Street BART to the Hotel El Cortez were relatively non-threatening, and to varying extents, trainable. The more experienced along my routes knew it was futile to simply beg for my hard won coins and took to heart my suggestion that street entertainment in exchange for lucre was, in the long run, a superior plan. There is nothing quite like al fresco and impromptu “Shakespeare in the gutter”, let me assure you.

    Prolly wouldn’t be the same these days…

  • Tom Hyland February 8, 2022, 1:32 PM

    Here’s some interviews from the gutters in San Francisco with real time crack heads. The first brief video, about 2 minutes long, this dude from Alabama describes how he’s making it and how it all works out. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1490130669875253250.html

  • TN Tuxedo February 9, 2022, 7:14 AM

    As true today as it was two centuries ago:

    I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

    There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them; so many hospitals to receive them when they are sick or lame, founded and maintained by voluntary charities; so many alms-houses for the aged of both sexes, together with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor.

    Under all these obligations, are our poor modest, humble, and thankful; and do they use their best endeavours to maintain themselves, and lighten our shoulders of this burthen? — On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent.

    … you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependance on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age or sickness.

    In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty.

    — Benjamin Franklin

    • Mike Austin February 9, 2022, 8:23 AM

      Jesus knew about the problem of the poor:

      “The poor you will always have with you”—Matthew 26:11.

      His solution:

      “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”—2 Thessalonians 3:10

      The best and most efficient welfare system known to man is an empty stomach.

      • FLSTF February 9, 2022, 1:00 PM

        Mike,

        It cannot possibly be made any clearer than that.
        Well done, sir.

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