Former Drug Users Condemn San Francisco’s “Harm Reduction” Services
Former drug users residing in San Francisco are calling out the city’s policies relating to “harm reduction” programs which provide addicts with needles, meth pipes, and various other supplies for hard drug use.
San Francisco local, Ricci Wynne, began dedicating his time to filming the hard drug use in the streets. As someone who has overcome drug addiction himself, he’s also been at the forefront of calling out the city’s effort to provide addicts free paraphernalia, which they defend by claiming it “reduces disease and infection” — but increases drug use.
“The neighborhood has taken a turn for the worse ever since the ‘fentanyl frenzy’ as I like to call it, this phenomenon has kind of come out of nowhere and took over for heroin” Wynne explained.
Wynne is currently living in the heart of downtown San Francisco, near Mission Street. Despite paying over $2,500 for rent, he shared that homelessness, theft, crime, and open drug deals are a regular occurrence outside of the property, where gangs of illegal immigrants control the corners surrounding his building.
“The Hondurans and Guatemalans are not too fond of cameras,” he said. “They control the corners of Mission and 7th and Mission and 8th, so I’m kind of sandwiched in between these two drug markets that have really flourished in the last couple of years.”
He explained how a combination of Proposition 47, the city’s sanctuary status, the city’s soft-on-crime policies, and “harm reduction” programs have left local shops abandoned to organized retail crime, homeless on every corner, and the streets filled with drug addicts.
“A lot of these people have mental illnesses and other things that they’re struggling with, and the city’s policies have made the problem worse in my opinion. It’s actually enabling some of the drug users as far as their stance on harm reduction,” Wynne explained.
To highlight this exact point, Wynne visited The Harm Reduction Center, a program of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, where in less than 10 minutes, he exited the holding two bags full of paraphernalia.
“I got so much stuff,” he shared, holding two black grocery bags, “they gave me a whole box of syringes literally for free, this is all on taxpayer dollars in these non-discreet black bags. You can’t even get a plastic straw in San Francisco, but they’re giving away as many needles as you want,” he explained.
After also pulling out tin foil, meth pipes, and straws for fentanyl use, he shared that before leaving with the bags of paraphernalia, he asked the volunteers where he could go for help in getting clean.
“At the end there, after I got all of this stuff, all of this paraphernalia that they’re basically giving away for free, the most alarming thing was, I asked where I could go to get some help to get clean — and they had no idea,” he finished.
The city claims that their “harm reduction” program lowers HIV rates and has been implemented to help lower overdose deaths. However, the recently closed Tenderloin Center gives us a real-time example of how millions of dollars in taxpayer funds are being spent to exacerbate the ongoing drug crisis.
The Tenderloin Center, essentially a “safe injection site” where addicts could be monitored while they used drugs, closed less than a year after opening because “less than one percent of visits ended in a ‘completed linkage’ to behavioral health programs,” per the Daily Mail. In essence: the program failed, and while operational, facilitated easy drug use for addicts.
After visiting the Harm Reduction center, Wynne walked over to Minna Hotel, which houses an abstinence-based addiction program run by former addicts. Many former drug users volunteer in an effort to help other overcome addiction.
“I couldn’t get clean like how it is now,” one volunteer began. He shared that seeing needles in the streets and people actively using drugs is oftentimes a trigger for those trying to stay clean and the current state that San Francisco is in makes it “extremely difficult for addicts to stay clean.”
The volunteer went on to explain how their program is “completely abstinence-based,” sharing that the Harm Reduction Center we had visited earlier often enables addiction as opposed to stopping it. He then pointed out that the drug-flooded streets of San Francisco are a direct representation of the harm caused by the so-called “harm reduction” policies enacted.
Supplying addicts on the streets are illegal immigrants from Honduras and Guatemala that are oftentimes selling heroin and fentanyl which has been smuggled across the border. They utilize the city’s sanctuary status as a way to illegally sell drugs without fear of deportation.
Couple that with an endless flow of drugs due to our open southern border, gang members selling on the streets, and Proposition 47 )which incentivizes crime in the city by lowering prosecution standards for shoplifting and petty theft), and you have the perfect recipe for crime, lawlessness, and drug use to prosper on the streets of San Francisco.
