San Francisco Mayor London Breed is hoping to launch the city’s first safe drug consumption area as soon as this upcoming spring, in an effort to curb the city’s growing rate of overdose deaths.
The program site is likely to be somewhere in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood already well-known for open-air drug consumption and dealing, according to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle.
The conditions of the neighborhood deteriorated even further at the height of the pandemic last year, leading some residents to go so far as to sue the city to get officials to clean up the area.
"I’m determined," said Breed Monday in an interview with the paper. But she’s not ignoring the controversy that might come with the project. "But it’s more complicated than that... I have to think about the people whose lives will be impacted if we do it."
A safe drug consumption site would allow individuals to consume narcotics while under the supervision of medical professionals, diminishing the possibility of an overdose. But these sites are still illegal on the state level and federal level.
Overdose deaths are at an all-time high across the country, as recently reported by the CDC, with around 100,000 deaths collated from April 2020 to May 2021.
San Francisco has dealt with some of the worst of it, with over 700 deaths in the last year, as reported in August by the city’s Paramedic Fire Captain Michael Mason.
The safe consumption site is just one option in helping mitigate the crisis.
The city also launched the Street Overdose Response Teams, or, "SORT," program in August, investing $11 million in the initiative for the next two years, as reported by KCBS Radio. The program involves two-person response teams equipped with Narcan and other harm reduction tools to help unhoused people dealing with substance use disorders.
A safe drug consumption site is a thornier prospect. Breed’s team is still considering the potential legal and financial ramifications.
But a possible location is a former Goodwill store at 822 Geary St. Breed proposed purchasing it at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting for $6.3 million.
The funding comes from Proposition C, and even if the site doesn’t become a safe drug consumption site, it will be used for mental or behavioral health treatment in some capacity.
"We have been wanting to do this for a long time, especially in light of the significant increase in the number of overdose deaths in our city," Breed told the Chronicle. "We have to get this site open."
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