More Black Americans Died from San Francisco’s Drug Experiment in One Year than Died from the Tuskegee Experiment in 40 years by Michael Shellenberger for SubStack
The progressive drug liberalization experiment is immoral and must end
For over a decade, the city of San Francisco has been carrying out an experiment. What happens when thousands of drug addicts are not only permitted to use heroin, fentanyl and meth publicly, but also enabled to do so? The results are in: hundreds of them die annually. Last year, 712 people in San Francisco died from drug overdoses or poisoning, and this year a similar number are on track to do so.
Worse, cities around the country, from Seattle and Los Angeles to Philadelphia and Boston, have been copying San Francisco’s approach. Partly as a result of these supposedly progressive policies, 93,000 people in the US died in 2021 from illicit drugs, a more than five-fold increase from the 17,000 people killed by illicit drugs in 2000.
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For most of my adult life, I was sympathetic to the progressive liberalization agenda. In the late 1990s, I worked with organizations funded by George Soros and others to decriminalize drugs, give clean needles to addicts to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS, and subsidize housing for the homeless. But as drug deaths rose, and the drug-fueled homeless problem worsened, I decided to take a closer look at the problem.
What I discovered shocked me. Rather than arresting hard drug users when they break laws, and giving them the choice of jail or drug treatment, the only strategy proven to work, the city of San Francisco provides addicts with the cash, housing and drug paraphernalia they need to purchase and use deadly drugs.
Former homeless addict Tom Wolf maintained his habit for six months by surviving on the city’s cash welfare payments. “I got $581 a month in General Assistance and $192 in food stamps,” he told me. San Francisco gives other addicts free hotel rooms without requiring that they stop using drugs while living in them.
While many people are able to end their addictions without external help, many others require multiple interventions by family, friends, and, if their addiction results in them breaking the law, the police. Many formerly homeless drug addicts, including Wolf, credit being arrested with motivating them to finally overcome their addictions.
This is hardly a new finding. Researchers have known since 1997 that “patients who have been forced to enter a substance abuse treatment have shown during and post treatment results that are quite similar to those shown by supposedly ‘internally motivated’ patients.” And in a major 2014 study of how five large European cities shut down “open drug scenes,” researchers concluded that “Prevention, harm reduction and treatment should be combined with law enforcement.”
Progressives justify their withholding of the best-available medical treatment of drug addiction in the name of reducing racial disparities in jails and prisons. But the result of the city’s hands-off policy is far worse: racial disparities in drug deaths. African American men in San Francisco were almost six times more likely to die from illicit drugs than the average city resident.
