GREENBERG: San Francisco’s Illicit Drug-Fueled Hellscape

San Francisco’s City Hall is peddling a dangerous fantasy. Claiming Harm Reduction is a shining success, a “compassionate” policy that’s saving lives isn’t a success—it’s a taxpayer-funded disaster. It’s killing addicts and turning many of our streets into a fentanyl and illicit drug-fueled hellscape. San Franciscans are forced to dodge needles and near-corpses. This radical sham must be shut down.

Harm Reduction, the city’s status-quo, long-standing policy claiming to allegedly “reduce harm”, does exactly opposite. Handing out nearly six million needles a year to junkies, as the city’s own Department of Public Health admits, isn’t progress; it’s enablement and a death warrant.

Overdose deaths hit 621 in 2020—triple that year’s COVID toll—and fentanyl is strangling San Francisco faster every day. And there were 810 ODs in 2023. Yet city hall officials and many nonprofits they grant money to tout “safe snorting kit” distribution and supervised dope dens like they’re miracles. Where’s the “reduction” when the Tenderloin is a zombie wasteland—users slumped over, sidewalks glittering with syringes, leading to families fleeing?

This is not harm reduction; it’s harm production—a sick game where taxpayers’ money supports addicts propped up just to die slower. This can’t be called a success. It’s a body count.

The “Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance” passed on February 4, 2025, grants San Francisco’ Mayor Daniel Lurie significant authority to bypass standard bureaucratic processes, such as competitive bidding for contracts under $25 million and certain zoning restrictions. While this is intended to speed up action on Fentanyl, it risks undermining transparency and legislative (Board of Supervisors’) oversight. It could lead to unchecked decision-making or favoritism in contract awards, especially given Lurie’s reliance on private fundraising ties from his previous nonprofit background. Although his ordinance’s duration was negotiated down from five years to one, skeptics remain wary that this precedent could erode democratic checks in a city already grappling with trust issues in governance.

Taxpayers’ money—our money— is torched via these programs year after year. Billions a year on “community health,” and millions funneled into needle handouts, syringe-chasing cleanup crews (only 60% collected), and “wellness hubs” that are glorified drug flops. Previous Mayor London Breed’s “emergency” 2022 brainchild “Linkage Center” turned into an illegal injection site virtually overnight—0.07% of 23,300 visitors sought treatment. That’s not a typo: seven-hundredths of a percent. City Hall built a taxpayer-subsidized opium den, not a lifeline, and patted themselves on the back while addicts OD’d. Billions wasted, and now San Francisco needs a bigger graveyard.

Harm Reduction is coddling addicts—locking them in a cage of despair. Reduction gospel, parroted by drug user activists, demands we “respect” addiction like it’s a career choice. Free vodka for drunks in “managed alcohol” schemes, safe-use kits, where’s the push to get clean? Nowhere.

Addicts don’t need hugs and handouts; they need tough love—merit-based recovery that says, “You’re better than this.”

Mayor Lurie’s approach has not been universally embraced politically or on the ground. Progressive supervisors and grassroots groups, while acknowledging the need for action, have critiqued his reliance on enforcement through the new Drug Market Agency Coordination Center (DMACC) as potentially overly punitive, echoing concerns from the Tenderloin community about criminalizing poverty and addiction rather than solving it. Conversely, many others as well as business leaders who back Lurie’s tough-on-crime stance feel he hasn’t gone far enough in cracking down on open-air drug markets. This straddling of ideologies risks leaving him open to criticism from all sides, with no faction fully satisfied.

Taxpayers have had enough. For years, City Hall knew this was a fraud and let it fester anyway. Clueless or complicit, either way, we can’t continue buying the spin. Dismantle this failure now. Redirect the cash to abstinence—methadone, buprenorphine, sure, but aimed at sobriety, not deadly stagnation. Bust the dealers, not taxpayers’ wallets. Bring back merit: reward recovery, not relapse.