SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS Radio) – Lawmakers in the city California Gov. Gavin Newsom once led have strong words for his veto of a bill that would have allowed San Francisco and two other cities to open up safe injection sites for opioid users.
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Scott Wiener, the San Francisco state senator who introduced the bill, called Newsom's decision "tragic." Assemblymember Matt Haney, who represented the Tenderloin on the board of supervisors before his special election victory earlier this year, told KCBS Radio in an interview on Monday afternoon that the veto saddened him.
"Well, it's brutal. It's sad," Haney told KCBS Radio's Patti Reising and Bret Bukhart during a Monday afternoon interview. "This is an intervention that's been used all over the world. There are over 100 of these sites, and not a single person has ever died in an overdose prevention site. They get drug use off our streets, and they save lives and they connect people to treatment."
The legislation, known as Senate Bill 57, would've given Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco the authority to create sites where drug users could inject them as staff members supervised. It passed the Assembly by a 49-29 vote at the end of June, then the Senate voted 21-11 in the bill's favor on Aug. 1.
Newsom wrote in a letter to lawmakers on Monday that he feared "the unlimited number of safe injection sites would authorize ... could induce a world of unintended consequences."
Fatal drug overdoses have skyrocketed since the end of Newsom's second term as San Francisco mayor in 2011, coinciding with the national opioid epidemic. Nearly 350 San Franciscans died of accidental overdoses through the first seven months of 2022, according to city data, and 1,366 died in 2020 and 2021.
Wiener, the bill's author, told KCBS Radio in an interview that he won't reintroduce the legislation unless "there's a path to getting the bill signed into law."
"This is a very, very hard bill given all the rhetoric around drug use and all the mischaracterizations of what these sites are," Wiener said in an interview with Reising and Burkhart. "And so it took an enormous amount of work and courage by a number of my colleagues to vote for this bill. I don't wanna put the Legislature through that again if it's just gonna get vetoed again."
Former California Gov. Jerry Brown, Newsom's predecessor, vetoed similar legislation in 2018 that would've allowed such sites in San Francisco. He said at the time that "enabling illegal and destructive drug use will never work."
Newsom, who has been floated as a possible presidential contender in 2024, said in Thursday's veto that the bill could "work against this purpose" if enacted "without a strong plan." Haney told KCBS Radio that he didn't necessarily think Newsom vetoed the bill with one eye on the White House, and said that leaders in Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco were ready to implement the bill with the appropriate safety measures.
"We're just overwhelmed by this epidemic, and it's really sad that we're gonna be denied that authority," Haney said.
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