hugopal
Very much so. SF has a number of issues related to drugs. The place was built on vagrancy, after all. It’s a port town so drugs are cheap and readily available (not to mention proximity to Mexico). The government also takes a strong harm reduction approach to use and abuse so one doesn’t have to worry about the police, really. Migration patterns typically move people west and you can’t get much further west than this. Other places have been known to give people (HIV+, opiate dependent, homeless) one way bus tickets to here. And then there’s the gay thing. SF is known as a welcoming place for gay men….but only if you’re good looking and/or have money. We get a lot of people coming here from middle America trying to escape homophobia only to find they’re not very welcolmed here either. That causes a lot of behavioral issues like substance use.
And then Covid. The mayor rolled out a plan to give hotel rooms to the most vulnerable homeless. We had a four-time increase in tents in a matter of a week with people coming from all over expecting a free hotel room. It was a disaster.
Heroin is also basically non-existant. Fentanyl is in everything and these friggin’ Mexican and Central American dealers have no idea what they’re doing. They’re not exactly Gregor Mendel so the quality and quantity of pills/baggies is all over the place. The fentanyl is also from China, smuggled through Tijuana….it’s not exactly medical grade stuff. Overdoses and deaths have skyrocketed. 75 pounds of fentanyl was busted yesterday. Counterfeit Oxycontin. Enough, in theory, to kill 15 million people.
Oddly, the rise of fentanyl has been good from a blood borne illness perspective. People can achieve the same high smoking it or railing it up. Apparently people don’t like IDU (stigma around trackmarks, safe needle use) so our HCV and HIV rates for IDU are way down.
All in all, yeah it’s a problem. Likely opening a safe injection facility very soon. Not to be a jerk, but I find it a bit hard to sympathize. This isn’t 15/20 years ago when we didn’t know better and Purdue flooded every community with mountains of opiates. You go down the opiate route today, you know how that story is going to end.
As for the tech exodus, that’s been a bit overblown as those companies and workers move around all the time anyway. And if we get less Twitter and Facebook workers around here, nobody will complain. Big tech has really done a number on a place that once had a pretty unique vibe and culture.
