The Battle For San Francisco
Having lived in San Francisco twenty years ago, I returned last month to report on the fentanyl crisis. The Tenderloin and much of SOMA have become an open-air drug market. The DEA Special Agent in Charge walks past dealing on his way to the office, and the drug bazaar sprawls into downtown tourist districts. In my long-form piece for SF Examiner I describe:
down-and-outers slumped over on the concrete; weathered men vaporizing fentanyl atop aluminum foil; recent arrivals from Santa Rosa or Monterey pulling cloudy smoke from glass meth pipes; young, predatory dealers distributing lethal packets by the Civic Center BART.
In Fentanyl, Inc. I made a strong pitch for harm reduction, and San Francisco has been at the vanguard of this philosophy, prioritizing care over incarceration. But, as evidenced by the recent recall of the city’s DA, Chesa Boudin, the pendulum may be swinging back.
[T]he new DA, Brooke Jenkins, has indicated her intentions to prosecute more drug cases, and Gov. Gavin Newsom just vetoed a bill that would have authorized safe drug use facilities.
The situation on the ground is a humanitarian and economic crisis that, along with Covid, has eroded tourism and fueled a tech exodus. Suddenly, there’s a race to the right among city officials, as epitomized by the District 6 race for Supervisor, between Honey Mahogany and Matt Dorsey. Considering she’s a former contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race and he’s an HIV+ gay man in recovery for meth addiction, it’s shocking to hear them using the language of law and order.
“People need to be held accountable,” [Mahogany] says. “People are looking for us to set boundaries. The situation where we feel so unsafe, where things seem so chaotic, that is real, and I understand why people are afraid.”
On the other side of the issue is Dan Ciccarone, the fentanyl epidemic’s most-quoted man, whom I visited at his home in Marin County.
He notes that the war on drugs, started by Richard Nixon, has had over 50 years to fail, and that harm reduction needs a longer runway. “If you fully fund it and it's robust and you've been doing it for 10 years, and good epidemiological data shows that it failed, then it failed.”
Do check out the story, and also this great Vice piece from Keegan Hamilton about the Chinese fentanyl kingpin I exposed, who accuses me of being a “secret agent.” (That, or working for Coke or Pepsi.) I also appear in this documentary about fentanyl in St. Louis that’s getting a lot of play.
UPCOMING APPEARANCES
*On Sept. 8 I’ll be in Santa Monica showing slides and reading from Little Brother. 6 pm at the Pico Branch Library, 2201 Pico Blvd.
*On Sept 13 I’m doing an online fentanyl talk, aimed at parents. You can get tickets here, which also include a digital copy of Fentanyl, Inc.