San Francisco has seen a 15% reduction in drug overdose deaths this year with 462 people dying in the first eight months of 2024. That is still an “alarmingly high” mortality rate and it may increase again, said Dr. Grant Colfax, the city Department of Public Health director.

Nevertheless, when asked at an overdose awareness day event in August what happened to the department’s plan to open safe consumption sites, Colfax said: “What our focus is right now is continuing to make sure that people have access to treatment.”  That’s despite research showing such facilities — also known as overdose prevention centers — save lives, reduce drug use in public, increase access to life-saving treatment and care and reduce public spending on emergency services.

Instead, the Department of Public Health is relying on a new 24-hour-a-day outreach initiative that provides unhoused drug users with the opioid dependency medication buprenorphine.

This “Civic” episode goes inside an overdose prevention center run by OnPoint NYC to hear from staffers and people who have received help with treatment for substance use disorders and other challenges associated with addiction.

Meanwhile, more cities and states are embracing overdose prevention centers. Last February, the Providence City Council in Rhode Island approved a state-sanctioned overdose prevention center. In April, Minneapolis nonprofit Minnesota Overdose Awareness opened a safe injection site thanks to legislation signed in 2023 by Gov. Tim Walz, presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ running mate. And in June, the Vermont Legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a bill to sanction an overdose prevention center in Burlington, an addiction hot spot.

But San Francisco appears to have abandoned the strategy, despite previously having the support of Mayor London Breed and city supervisors. Talk of overdose prevention centers has not come up in any meaningful way during election campaigning. And elected officials did not reply to calls and emails in August requesting an update.

At a mayoral candidate debate in June, Breed suggested city attorneys could face disbarment for enabling the launch of an overdose prevention center because of prohibitions under state law. But in New York City, the nonprofit organization OnPoint NYC worked with the city to skirt legal liability and opened two centers in November 2021. Their efforts have cleaned up surrounding neighborhoods and reversed more than 1,500 overdoses in less than three years with no deaths, according to OnPoint.

[Read and listen to our previous reporting on San Francisco’s overdose crisis and ongoing prevention efforts.]

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April found that the centers kept people alive and kept them from consuming drugs in public. And a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the centers did not increase crimes recorded by police or calls for emergency services in the surrounding neighborhoods.

OnPoint’s efforts are also improving lives, said Sam Rivera, the organization’s director.

“The anecdotal things around reunification with children and reunification with families and becoming employable again — these are things that would never have happened for these folks,” Rivera said.

The success is in large part due to OnPoint’s dedication to treating each client with dignity, said Susan Spratt, OnPoint’s associate director of clinical services.

“We’re seeing people who are often not seen, they’re stepped over, literally, in the streets,” Spratt said. “This has been said to me more than once, to me and to multiple staff members in our clinic: ‘I feel like you’re really listening to me. I haven’t been listened to in a long time. So, thank you.’”

The post Overdose Prevention Centers — Nonstarter in SF, Despite Success in NYC appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Lee esta historia en español.

Every Saturday, Aurelia Ramirez fills a tote bag with pamphlets about local social support services, buys a few dozen slices of sweet bread and a box of brewed coffee, and walks through her Mission District neighborhood connecting with people living on the street.

“Our job is to check the people if they okay,” said Ramirez, who moved to San Francisco from Mexico 23 years ago.

Ramirez is a community ambassador for San Francisco’s Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs. She said she wanted a job that allowed her to help the Latinx community — especially people of Maya descent from the Yucatán, like herself.

“It’s sad,” she said. “They don’t know what they can do. Especially Yucatán people.”

While offering coffee and snacks, she provides information about where to go for medical care, social services, shelter, showers and doing laundry. She said the pandemic caused deep suffering in her community and many never recovered.

“They lost a job, lost the house. They don’t have money. What they can do?” Ramirez said. “You know, people selling drugs — they give you free the first time but after, you need to pay. That’s the problem. And now some people, it’s not okay anymore.”

In fact, the rate of overdose deaths among Maya from the Yucatán living in San Francisco has risen enough since the COVID-19 pandemic to alarm San Francisco’s Mexican Consul General, Remedios Gomez Arnau, who processes death certificates of local Mexican nationals before they are repatriated.

[ Read also: “Service Providers Demand Access to Latinx Jail Inmates” ]

On an unseasonably warm and sunny day in February, Ramirez roused people from their tents, and they appeared grateful for the coffee, snacks and information about when a free dental clinic would be open.

She urged Yucatecans to call their families back home from an office in Daly City called La Casa Del Yucateco that was launched by Yucatán Governor Mauricio Vila Dosal last October to provide Yucatecans in and around San Francisco with government advice and services.

Several unhoused people told Ramirez that what they needed most was housing and going into a shelter was out of the question because they feared violence and theft. Ramirez explained that even when people she encounters are interested in accessing resources, they confront obstacles.

“Sometimes they have wait lists — wait lists for shelter, wait lists for help,” Ramirez said. “And they don’t want to wait. They want the help at the same time.”

Seeking a Better Life

In Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous Maya face systemic discrimination, limited access to education, health care and economic opportunities, and limited political representation.

The situation leads many to seek better opportunities elsewhere. And for generations, they have been immigrating to San Francisco and the Bay Area, according to Lydia Candila Chan, executive director of Asociacion Mayab, a San Francisco-based organization that offers cultural, educational and essential community resources.

Possibly as many as 70,000 Yucatec Maya live in and around the city, but there has never been an official count — it’s an estimate that Candila Chan gleaned from the Institute for the Development of Maya Culture based in Yucatán’s capital city, Mérida.

Candila Chan said Yucatec Maya come to San Francisco seeking financial opportunities “to give their families a better life.” But the language barrier can be a major hurdle to finding a job, since many speak Spanish as a second language and are not fluent. More than 500,000 Maya from the Yucatán speak the indigenous Maya language, according to the latest Mexican census.

Some Maya do achieve success, and for many, Candila Chan said, that’s thanks to their renowned culinary skills.

“They are the best cooks here in San Francisco,” she said. “Any restaurant that you go, you will see one person from Yucatan.”

The population’s extraordinary representation in restaurants made it exceptionally vulnerable during the pandemic, when the industry was shut down.

“The American dream sometimes become very sad for them,” Candila Chan said. “They became so disappointed that when friends say, ‘Let’s go drink a beer and talk,’ from that, they start more and more and more. Suddenly, they living in the street. Suddenly they die. I see so many.”

Candila Chan does what she can to help by offering programs that provide essential resources as well as cultural activities that bring the community together in a healthy way.

More than 250 families benefit from the Asociacion Mayab’s weekly food pantry. The center also offers classes and performances of jarana, the traditional dance of Yucatán; arts and craft-making; Maya interpretation training; and an amateur baseball league that has grown to include eight teams and 144 players.

Indigenous Population Missing Fentanyl Warnings

Gomez Arnau, San Francisco’s Mexican Consul General, asked community partner Jorge Zepeda, director of Latinx health for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, about the elevated rate of overdose deaths she was seeing among Indigenous Maya.

At the time, Zepeda was consulting with San Francisco’s Department of Public Health to assess the health of Latinx populations in single-room-occupancy buildings, commonly called SROs. He told Gomez Arnau he was seeing the same trend and he brought it up with the health department.

“I said, ‘Do you know how many people have died of overdose who are Spanish speaking and Maya speaking?’ They said, ‘Not sure,’” Zepeda said.

From January 2020 to last December, 2,955 people died of accidental overdose in San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Chief Medical Examiner’s Office. Of those, 456 were categorized as Latinx. But it’s impossible to get mortality rates of subgroups in the Latinx population since health authorities at city, state and federal agencies lump all Latin Americans together.

That neglects to account for the diversity of languages that exists within its subgroups, which means vital information, like warnings over the dangers of fentanyl and where to get help for substance use disorders, may not be reaching them.

Categorizing all Latin Americans together leads to other problems as well, according to advocates like Dr. Seciah Aquino, executive director of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, whose organization was part of a years-long campaign to get state departments to collect and disaggregate more detailed data for Latinx and Indigenous communities.

“We’re not a monolith,” Aquino said. “We need to understand and receive data back that drills down to those specific subgroups. If we don’t, then we’re losing quality data that could lead us to make better decisions in terms of funding that’s being allocated to the community, regionally, how it’s being spread out.”

State Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D- Long Beach) introduced a demographic equity bill to strengthen state data collection last year. The Legislature passed the bill but Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed it last October, saying it was inappropriate because the U.S. Office of Management and Budget was updating federal standards for collecting race and ethnicity information.

Updated federal standards announced on March 28 did not account for Indigenous Latinx populations. Gonzalez reintroduced her demographic equity bill on Feb. 27, and it is making its way through the state Senate.

Dire Need for Drug Awareness and Health Services

After discovering the gap in knowledge over Latinx and Indigenous drug use, Zepeda partnered with Laura Guzman, executive director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition, and Dr. Carlos Martinez, a public health and medical anthropology researcher from UC Santa Cruz, to conduct a study with funding from San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. The report of their study, “Unido/xs Contra La Sobredosis (United Against Overdose),” was published in September 2022.

They discovered that most Latinx and Indigenous people in San Francisco who consumed substances were trying to achieve a specific goal and had very little knowledge of risks associated with those substances.

“They knew the effect that they wanted, whether it’s keeping working, or relax, or going to sleep,” Zepeda said. “When we ask them, ‘Do you know the name of the drug?’ ‘No. But I can get it from a person that I know.’”

They concluded that to minimize overdoses and drug-related harm in the Latinx and Indigenous communities, the city must educate target populations on types of drugs, drug use impacts and awareness that drugs are often tainted with the opioid fentanyl, which can cause lethal overdose.

The study also revealed a glaring gap in the availability of treatment services. Zepeda said the majority of community-based providers serving the Latinx community “didn’t feel comfortable making a referral to a current substance use or substance health service providers in San Francisco because they were not in the capacity to engage with the Spanish-speaking or Maya-speaking communities.”

Zepeda said he’s seen some progress since the report came out — namely the public health department’s requests for proposals for behavioral health have recently included Spanish-speaking and Maya-speaking programs.

Department of Public Health officials declined requests for an interview. In an email, the department stated that it offers 10 beds in the Managed Alcohol Program for Latinx and Indigenous patients. And it just launched an initiative called Health Access Point, which provides harm reduction services to Latinx clients through a program led by the Instituto Familiar de la Raza, the Mission Neighborhood Health Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Also, the department anticipates that a planned, 33-bed expansion of a mental health and substance use treatment facility for women who have been arrested, charged, convicted or incarcerated will be Spanish-language competent.

Culturally Sensitive Programs Needed

Service providers say language competency is not the same as culturally sensitive programs, however, and those are nearly impossible to find for Latinx communities. The Latino Commission is the only organization providing that kind of residential treatment in San Francisco — and it only has 10 beds.

Latino Commission Executive Director Debra Camarillo said connecting with one’s own culture is fundamental to healing.

“We come into recovery, and we get to connect and find a sense of self,” Camarillo said. “And in finding that sense of self and building that self-esteem, then there becomes value that we understand at the end of the day, as humanity, as human beings we’re sacred. In that is sacredness.

“If I can understand that place, and I can live in that place, then my actions are going to be different. I’m not going to treat you like maybe I would treat you in the past. I’m not going to treat myself, and I’m not going to accept treatment that maybe I have done in the past.”

Increasing linguistically and culturally sensitive programs for Latinx populations will require more Latinx physicians, said Dr. Marlene Martin, a UCSF associate professor who co-authored a study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in January 2022, titled “Lack of Racial and Ethnic Diversity Among Addiction Physicians.”

The study’s authors concluded that diversifying the physician workforce would require increased funding for medical schools in under-served communities, financial aid for students without access to generational wealth, more comprehensive loan repayment policies, and programs to expose students to medical careers.

Martin is also director of addiction initiatives at the UCSF Latinx Center of Excellence, which is helping to fill the need for culturally sensitive treatment by partnering with the National Harm Reduction Coalition on new substance use education for Latinx community-based organizations in San Francisco.

Sylvie Sturm reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 Data Fellowship, which provided training, mentoring and funding to support this project.

The post Overdose Deaths Swell Among SF’s Maya Residents, Highlighting Urgent Need for Culturally Competent Drug Health Services appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

As I recently waited to get the latest COVID-19 booster and flu shots at my local pharmacy, I found myself thinking about how much has happened in the four years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

There was the lockdown in March 2020, the endless Zoom calls, then-President Donald Trump rambling about somehow injecting bleach or bringing sunlight inside the body to fight the virus, online conspiracy theories, political battles over masking mandates and many other jarring events.

I remembered my first COVID shot in a very quiet and solemn setting — then catching the virus months later but being down for only a couple of days as my vaccine-prepped immune system fought it off. 

“Are you Mel Baker?” a voice asked.

I snapped back to the present, in the Walgreens aisle next to the cough drops. The pharmacy technician escorted me quickly into a little side room, I rolled up my sleeve and he gave me the shots. Then he was done and gone, without even signing my vaccination card — such a vital document during the pandemic and now it was not even an afterthought. 

The card might be an apt symbol for how San Francisco, and possibly most of American society, is now treating COVID-19. It seems that we’ve pushed the pandemic into the collective “memory hole” — a place where those thoughts, feelings and traumas can be dropped, comfortably out of sight. We want to move on. That may help explain why only 69% of people in the United States finished their primary vaccine series, and just 17% got all of the boosters, according to 2023 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I think it’s important to look back and reflect. We have to reckon with the loss of life and the loss of trust in public institutions in order to prepare for the next pandemic. 

“Civic” and the San Francisco Public Press are working on stories about people living with long COVID.

Do you have a story to tell? Please contact us at radio@sfpublicpress.org.

It should not be so easy to forget that nearly 1.2 million people in the nation have died from COVID-19. Almost 7 million required hospitalization. Millions more live with the symptoms of long COVID. 

But this also wouldn’t be the first time that society has responded to great loss by putting something down the memory hole.

Survivors of the 1918 Great Influenza were quick to put it behind them, some historians say, and it is all but forgotten today. Only a tiny memorial in the Hope Cemetery, in Barre, Vt., marks the loss of at least 675,000 people living in the United States, when this country had about one-third of today’s population. Then, as well, there were fights over mask mandates and social distancing, though no vaccines to slow the flu’s spread. 

Many people also wanted to forget about the HIV/AIDS pandemic after new drugs made it possible for them to live with the virus. But some survivors want to remember, in order to heal from the trauma. 

In 2014, more than three decades after HIV and AIDS ripped through the country, Greg Cason started the program “Honoring Our Experience.” It brought together people who had lived through the pandemic so they could process the experience. 

“There was something powerful about creating a space for that community of people,” Cason told me. They realized the AIDS pandemic had given them “a unique and profound experience that only they would understand.”

Kristin Urquiza co-founded the group “Marked by COVID,” which helps people memorialize those who died so that society does not forget. The group is trying to have a permanent monument to the pandemic placed in Washington, D.C. 

Urquiza was inspired by activists who used the AIDS Memorial Quilt to personalize the dead and force a better government response. 

For her father, the desire to move on had deadly consequences. 

“He got sick early on in the pandemic, in the summer of 2020, right after the state of Arizona re-opened,” she said, referring to his COVID-19 infection. “The governor at the time was basically spreading misinformation that it was safe to resume normal activities.” 

“I think that the need to commemorate and memorialize allows us to move past the divisiveness and the politicization of COVID,” Urquiza said. She added that doing so is necessary to prepare for whatever comes next. 

Dr. Monica Gandhi agrees. She is the author of the book “Endemic: A Post Pandemic Playbook.” The term “endemic” applies when a disease becomes ever-present in a population. 

Today, the greatest threat to public health is the lack of trust in government institutions, she said. That’s in part a consequence of the shifting, confusing guidance that U.S. health agencies gave in response to COVID-19.

“We have the vaccine, take it, but you’re gonna need booster after booster,” she said, recalling the government’s guidance. “And oh, by the way, we’re not gonna let you go back to a normal life.” 

The U.S. government’s messaging was also in stark contrast with how it had handled the AIDS pandemic decades prior, when new drugs made the disease manageable for most people in the mid-1990s.

“We got these biomedical advances like protease inhibitors and life turned around” for the people who took them, Gandhi said. At the time, people celebrated a return to normalcy.

Her book contains a list of recommendations for the next major outbreak: 

• The government must spring into action to develop and distribute vaccines, especially to low- and middle-income nations. 
• Pharmaceutical companies should develop antivirals and other therapies to treat the infected, similar to the prescription drug Paxlovid and the infusions of monoclonal antibodies — laboratory-produced proteins intended to stimulate the body’s immune system — used to battle COVID-19. 
• Celebrate medical advances by easing restrictions, when possible. 
• Avoid what she calls “medical rituals,” like cleaning groceries with bleach or taking temperatures at airports. 
• Keep public parks and playgrounds open to avoid isolation and get people out of buildings where respiratory viruses are more likely to spread. 
• Re-open schools as soon as possible, especially after teachers have been vaccinated, to avoid learning loss and social isolation among children. 

“In this era of global warming and everything else, we’re going to get another pandemic,” Gandhi said.

Read a Q and A with Dr. Gandhi about how she and her colleagues reacted to the greatest pandemic in a century in our Reporter’s Notebook piece, “The Epidemic She Didn’t Expect to See.”

The post Reporter’s Notebook: To Prepare for the Next Pandemic, Let’s Not Forget the Last One appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

San Francisco again faced the specter of anti-Asian hate as two major cases captured public attention this month. 

On Friday, Asian American activists and community members rallied at the Hall of Justice against a judge’s decision to grant probation and mental health treatment, rather than issue a harsher sentence, to Daniel Cauich, who in 2021 stabbed Ahn “Peng” Taylor, a Chinese Vietnamese woman in her 90s. That was just weeks after the police department re-opened an investigation into the death of Yanfang Wu, an elderly Chinese immigrant who died after being pushed down on a sidewalk last year. 

The cases were reminders of why concerns persist over violence against Asian Americans in San Francisco — and of why the Coalition for Community Safety and Justice still exists. 

The coalition, a group of nonprofits serving the Asian American community, formed in 2019 in response to a wave of racially driven attacks. Its goals include increasing public safety through grassroots efforts like community-building and victim support, including for Taylor, Wu’s husband and about 80 other Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in this past year. The San Francisco Public Press accompanied staff from Community Youth Center, a coalition member, in the Richmond District in late 2023 during one of their frequent outreach events visiting Asian residents and businesses throughout the city.  

That day, outreach workers ducked in and out of various stores on Clement Street, home to many Asian-owned businesses. 

They tried talking to whomever they met: store owners, employees and sometimes people they passed on the sidewalk. They handed out flyers and small gifts like whistles and electronic keychains that played a siren with the press of a button. 

Outreach worker Lida Vatanadilogkul checked in with Thai merchants. “I would let them know that if they need any resources or if they know anybody who has been a victim of a hate crime or other incidents, we are here to help,” she said.  

Over the past three years, Vatanadilogkul and her colleagues have taken similar walks through commercial districts with significant Asian populations, acting as a reassuring presence and connecting people with services after harrowing encounters.  

“If something happens to you, we will be here,” said Henry Ha, the team’s leader. “We will follow up with you, we will walk you through the hard time to help you to recover and heal.”  

Recent data on hate crimes hints that San Francisco has become safer for Asian Americans. There were 60 incidents that merited anti-Asian hate crime charges in 2021 and 14 in 2023, police Sgt. Jamie Hyun said at a February committee meeting of the Board of Supervisors. But because those figures miss many types of potential bigoted behavior, they fail to represent the full public safety situation, Hyun said. Ha has found also that some victims, especially seniors, might not report incidents or seek help after being attacked. Many are immigrants who don’t speak English, which makes it challenging for them to file police reports or navigate the legal system. 

But if people don’t talk about what happened to them, Ha said, it could hamper efforts to prevent similar incidents. That’s why one of the team’s aims is to identify crime victims and help them report their experiences. Outreach workers speak many languages — Cantonese, Thai and Tagalog, to name a few — so that they can penetrate diverse communities. 

“If you speak the language, you will make a lot of elderly [people] feel more comfortable,” Ha said, “and they will share what happened with you.”  

Back on Clement Street, Ha met with Andy Wei, a locksmith whose store had been broken into and vandalized. He later helped Wei secure a $1,000 city grant to repair the damage. 

But the team’s work is about more than preventing and responding to crime. Members spend most of their time cultivating relationships. Their hope is that people will feel comfortable reaching out to them when facing situations they do not know how to handle. 

“We cannot do all the work by ourselves,” Ha said. “We also need to rely on the community to help each other look out for each other, to let us know who needs help.” 

The post As Attacks on Asian Americans Regain Spotlight, SF Group Seeks to Soothe Community appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

In California, the governor appoints superior court judges to fill seats across 58 counties. Terms are typically six years, and judges keep their positions unless they’re recalled, which happens rarely, or someone decides to run against them in a local election. Usually, judges don’t face challengers.

But a pair of San Francisco Superior Court judges are running to stay on the bench in the upcoming March 5 election. The last time sitting judges faced such challenges here was in the June 2018 primary election, and the challengers lost.

Voters might be wondering why they’re being asked to make this decision.

“What’s confusing is that we tend to think of the legal system and justices as being kind of impartial referees,” said Keally McBride, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. “That, and politics shouldn’t be involved in the selection of judges, and politics shouldn’t be guiding why judges make particular decisions. And so, in some ways, having any kind of judicial election goes against our notion of the judiciary as the third branch of government, which stands outside of the normal competitive democratic system.”

San Francisco voters are being asked to decide between incumbent judge Michael Isaku Begert and his challenger Chip Zecher, and between incumbent judge Patrick S. Thompson and his challenger Jean Myungjin Roland. (Read more about these four candidates and listen to the audio statements they submitted in response to Public Press questions in our voter guide.)

The incumbents have received campaign support from lawyers and other judges. The challengers call for holding more defendants in custody as they await trial and for tougher sentencing. They have received money from funders supporting campaigns for several ballot propositions and backing a slate of candidates seeking seats on the Democratic County Central Committee, the official leadership of the local Democratic Party.

McBride said that because of sentencing guidelines, judges have less discretion than they may appear to have: “I would argue that the D.A.’s office probably has more to do with who gets charged, and who does not get charged than your average superior court judge.”

“They are pointing to specific decisions that these judges have made, like, oh, this person who had this much fentanyl was let go, and therefore this proves that they are really not at all tough on crime,” she said. “But when you look at the overall judicial record, my understanding is that there’s nothing significantly different about these two judges.”

Listen to this “Civic” episode to learn more about voting for judges, how these contests reflect political trends on local and national levels, and how California sentencing reform initiatives are coming up against calls for increased policing and criminal prosecution. The episode is followed by audio statements submitted by each candidate in response to questions from the Public Press.

The post Election Money Pours in for San Francisco Judges’ Seats That Used to Go Uncontested appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

If you vote in San Francisco and you’re registered with the Peace and Freedom, Green, Republican or Democratic parties, you’ll get to make some extra choices in the March 5 election that only come around once every four years — the representatives who run your party at the local level. 

Voters registered with those four parties received ballots by mail that included candidates for their parties’ presidential primary and also candidates for their respective county central committees. The Green Party refers to its local entity as a county council.

Whether called committee or council, these are the people who officially run those political parties in San Francisco. They decide which local measures and candidates the party will endorse, and they support the formation of local political clubs. They also coordinate in various ways with their parties at the state and national levels.

For this “Civic” episode, we talked with representatives from the four parties. We also talked with Theo Ellington, vice president of Northern California for Strategies 360, a political strategy firm, to give a more general overview of the system. Ellington has also worked as a community organizer and on a variety of political campaigns in San Francisco, but he is not working on any campaigns for the March 5 election. 

Listen to our conversation with Theo Ellington and hear from Honey Mahogany, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party; John Dennis, chair of the San Francisco Republican Party and head of the California GOP; Meghann Adams of the Peace and Freedom Party; and Barry Hermanson of the Green Party.

Party members vote by California State Assembly district, and so voters see on their ballots the names of candidates associated with the district in which they live.

What is notable for this election is the amount of money raised for candidates running for San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee. As of Feb. 27, across both Assembly districts, candidates in those races had raised nearly $2.3 million. Fundraising limits that apply to other local candidates don’t apply to people running for seats on party central committees. In the past, these weren’t high-dollar campaigns.

Voting in the Presidential Primary

California voters who are registered with one of six parties — the American Independent Party, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, or the Republican Party — received in the mail ballots to vote in their parties’ presidential primaries. 

Voters who are not registered with a party received mail-in ballots that don’t have any presidential candidates on them, but can still request a ballot to vote in the presidential primary for one of three parties that allow “no party preference voters” to participate: the American Independent Party, the Democratic Party and the Libertarian Party. All other parties require that voters be registered party members to participate in their primaries.

The post What You Might Find on Your San Francisco Ballot: Party County Central Committees appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Numerous drug policy experts and addictions specialists from across the country — as close as UCSF and as far away as Rhode Island — publicly oppose a San Francisco ballot measure that would compel adult welfare recipients to undergo drug screening before collecting cash benefits.

And efforts to publicize the measure have brought specialists who don’t always agree about addiction treatment practices to the same side of the debate.

Keith Humphreys, Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, has said San Francisco has been too permissive with people with substance use disorder. 

That led a local Proposition F campaigner to believe that he was an ally, Humphreys said.

“It was sent to me by someone in politics in San Francisco asking me, you know, do I want to endorse this?” he said. “And the answer is no.

“Being poor is not a crime. If this is something that is important to do, we should be doing it with people who threaten public safety, and not people who need this money to eat and pay their rent.”

Mayor London Breed’s Proposition F — Illegal Substance Dependence Screening and Treatment for Recipients of City Public Assistance would require single adults aged 65 and under who have no dependent children and receive County Adult Assistance Program benefits to participate in drug screening, evaluation and treatment to be eligible for cash benefits.

Recipients who decline screening or treatment would be ineligible for monthly cash benefits of $105 for people experiencing homelessness and $697 for housed residents. Benefit recipients who lack housing would receive 30 days of guaranteed shelter access. Those in housing would receive 30 days of rent paid directly to a landlord, with potential extensions for eviction prevention.

Proposition F has the backing of some wealthy donors in the tech sector, most notably Chris Larsen, a tech billionaire best known for co-founding Ripple and a major donor to political groups Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, Progress SF and GrowSF. 

Larsen has spent nearly $1 million on this election, including $250,000 on Proposition F, donations to various Democratic County Central Committee candidates running against incumbents, and $100,000 in one San Francisco Superior Court contest to unseat an incumbent judge.

Larsen is also a personal champion of Breed and her agenda.

“You’ve got a Board of Supervisors that doesn’t work with the mayor, that’s a huge problem,” Larsen said in an interview with Bloomberg News last fall. “And unfortunately, that can only be addressed in the ’24 election.”

A Failed Strategy

Breed said threatening to rescind cash benefits would compel low-income residents with substance use disorder into treatment. She announced the strategy last September after a plan to coerce people into treatment through arrests failed.

“The arrests that we’re making for public intoxication, people are not accepting help,” Breed said. “And so now it’s time to make sure that we are cutting off resources that continue to allow this behavior to occur without the accountability, without someone involved in a treatment program that could lead to a better life.”

According to retired Redondo Beach Police Lt. Diane Goldstein, the mistake San Francisco’s and other cities’ leaders make is that they don’t adequately fund programs that would effectively support public health, public safety and mental health.

Instead, she said, they “wait until things are so bad that they call the cops to fix the problem with the wrong set of tools.” 

Goldstein is now executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a group of police, prosecutors, judges and other criminal justice professionals focusing on drug policy and criminal justice.

“Frankly, I just don’t know if the public is ever going to understand it,” Goldstein said. “Because they don’t understand that law enforcement should have never been tasked with enforcing a public health issue going back years. But the reason we do is, we’re the only people that answered the phone in the middle of the night.”

Goldstein said there are positive ways to involve police officers in helping more people access substance use disorder treatment programs. For example, the San Francisco Police Department was involved in a program in 2017 that brought law enforcement officers, street teams, case managers, public health clinicians and justice system professionals together to enroll repeat low-level drug offenders into community-based health and social services as an alternative to jail and prosecution. But that was short-lived.

The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion — aka LEAD and now called Let Everyone Advance with Dignity — was launched in 2011 by Seattle-based Purpose Dignity Action, then called the Public Defender Association, which responds to public safety issues by facilitating inter-agency coordination. It has since expanded throughout the country.

In 2017, San Francisco received $6 million to implement LEAD from the Board of State and Community Corrections. But it stumbled after two years despite showing significantly lowered rates of misdemeanor and felony arrests, and felony cases among enrollees. 

One of the main problems was getting buy-in from law enforcement officers, according to an evaluation by the California State University, Long Beach, School of Criminology.

It was a major shift to go from arresting people to diverting them into social programs, according to interviews with officers and court personnel quoted in the report. As one officer said, “I’ve been around…cops for almost 30 years, and it’s not going to be like — it’s not going to be, push a button or snap your fingers and everybody is going to go, ‘Okay, we’ll do it different.’”

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott expressed willingness to revisit the program at a Police Commission meeting last June, but it’s unclear whether there have been efforts to revive it. The Police Department did not respond to inquiries about this subject.

Lisa Daugaard, co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action, said leaders can no longer ignore the fact that coercing people into treatment for substance use disorders is counterproductive because it doesn’t address underlying circumstances.

“It comes from an understandable impulse to help people get better. That is not how people get better,” Daugaard said. “Imagine what happens if they don’t do that thing. So now you have people in an even more miserable situation than they are right now who definitely are going to be turning to the illicit economy to get their income. And that’s not good for anybody.”

She said she understands the pressures city leaders face regarding visible drug sales, use and addiction.

“The problem that we’ve got is that public officials under public pressure need something to point to that seems like action,” Daugaard said. “They don’t know how people get better, and that impulse to quick action can be very, very destructive.”

She said that’s why her organization “spends a ton of time” ensuring that their inter-agency approach visibly improves the situation on the streets for retail businesses and that police are satisfied with their recommendations.

Relapse Not Considered

San Francisco Human Services Agency Executive Director Trent Rhorer said last September that about 20% of the 5,200 people who collect County Adult Assistance Program benefits self-disclosed last year that they were suffering from substance use disorder. 

“It’s a population that has not availed themselves of treatment,” and this measure would lead to a “positive change” in their lives, Rhorer said.

Brandon del Pozo, an assistant professor of medicine and public health at Brown University, where he conducts research on the drug epidemic and its intersection with policing and criminal justice, said Proposition F does not account for the fact that addiction is an inherently relapsing disease, even among those who willingly enter medically assisted treatment. 

“The clinical odds of someone getting on the medication and staying on the medication are very low without repeated attempts,” del Pozo said.

He also applied his perspective as a 19-year veteran of the New York City Police Department and the former chief of police of Burlington, Vermont, where he organized the city’s response to the opioid crisis.

“The cop in me says that if you could get them to stay on for five years, and that’s the facts, try it. That is just not the world,” he said. “People will fail out of this and lose their assistance, lose what they need to survive.” 

Addiction specialists agree that the measure does not address the circumstances surrounding harmful substance use.

Dr. Marlene Martin, UCSF associate professor and founding director of the addiction care team at San Francisco General Hospital, was among four medical professionals who gathered for a Feb. 2 press conference to speak out against Proposition F.

She said her patients have told her they use substances because of housing instability, trauma, poverty, discrimination and untreated mental illness. She added that threatening to halt or cut city benefits will erode the trust it takes for recipients to disclose their substance use and seek addiction treatment.

“I have seen addiction and overdose worsen when people lose support systems, and that is what Proposition F threatens to do,” Martin said.

Laura Thomas, senior director of HIV and harm reduction policy at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said at the Feb. 2 press conference that Proposition F does not increase access to substance use disorder treatment. And while her organization provides a path to recovery for numerous clients every year, she said, the city is reducing its funding.

“If the Human Services Agency wants to connect people to treatment, I highly recommend that instead of putting this wasteful and cynical initiative on the ballot, that they add a couple of linkage counselors to connect people to medications for opioid use disorder including buprenorphine and methadone,” Thomas said.

Legal Troubles on the Horizon

The measure could bring the city legal troubles. Mission Local reported Feb. 20 that attorney Kerianne Steele representing Service Employees International Union Local 1021 sent a letter to the city attorney claiming that Proposition F violates the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, which mandates that an employer confer with union employees on matters related to employment conditions.

Steele says Proposition F would adversely affect employees since it would lead to increased workloads at a time when the mayor is calling for budget cuts despite staff shortages across the Human Services Agency. The letter states also that there could be an increase to threats against staff as recipients are denied benefits, yet the measure includes no provisions for increased security.

And, while the measure anticipates enrolling an estimated 1,700 new clients into treatment, the SEIU letter states that, as of its writing, San Francisco had only 46 treatment beds available, according to the city’s tracking system. Meanwhile, the mayor’s budget proposes to cut city funding for drug treatment and mental health services.

The letter demands that the Proposition F be removed from the ballot. But the deadline to do that passed in November, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.

The post Drug Policy, Addictions Specialists Oppose Prop F Tying Welfare to Drug Tests appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Experts in overdose prevention say many teen and adult lives could be saved if more people know how to identify and respond to overdoses. In San Francisco, an array of programs are providing overdose response training to teenagers, college and graduate school students, and residents in neighborhoods that have a high rate of overdose deaths.

Fentanyl-related teen overdose deaths nearly tripled nationally from 2019 to 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And two-thirds of those who died had someone nearby who did not provide an overdose response.

In Episode 6 of the podcast series, “The Grassroots Effort to Save Lives: San Francisco and the Overdose Crisis,” we find out why students are choosing to learn how to reverse overdoses. And we drop in on a training session to find out how it’s done. Read our previous coverage on this storyline.

Now, some San Francisco high school students are trying to help by volunteering for a program that trains them to recognize drug abuse and reverse overdoses.

Among them is 17-year-old Burton High School student Jennifer Mendoza.

“I think it’s really important, especially in our school and at my age, that we should be teaching our students how this is performed,” Mendoza said.

The program, called Public Health Youth Corps, is run by FACES for the Future Coalition, which offers underprivileged youth a pathway toward a career in health care. It includes a healthcare innovation called mental health first aid, according to coalition Deputy Director Brooke Briggance.

“It’s in some ways kind of like CPR,” Briggance said.

Addressing psychological health is a key part of mitigating drug-related deaths among teenagers since more than 40% of teens who died of overdose from 2019 to 2021 had a history of mental health conditions, according to the CDC.

Through the program, students learn the early signs of various mental health challenges, how to approach conversations with individuals who may be suffering, and how to follow a trajectory of de-escalation in the event of worsening stages such as a panic attack, non-suicidal self-injury or thoughts of suicide.

Briggance said the students who volunteer for the training are passionate about mental health and substance use disorder because they routinely encounter these challenges in their personal lives.

“Many of them have seen overdose on the streets, in the neighborhoods in which they’re walking to school or hanging out with their friends,” she said. “Some of them have lost family members to overdose.”

Mendoza said if she had learned these skills earlier, she might have been able to help a friend whom she fears may have died of an overdose.

“We’re not really sure where they are right now but we have a feeling that they’re not here because they did a lot of drugs,” she said. “I feel like if I was more educated at that age, I could have helped him or found help.”

Some local university students are also getting involved in overdose reversal training. This year, a new California state Senate bill required that all community colleges and universities provide opioid overdose education and distribute Naloxone. Maia Scarpetta and Rachel Murro, both PhD students at UCSF, organized drug reversal training for the UCSF community by enlisting the help of National Harm Reduction Coalition’s Drug Overdose Prevention and Education Project — aka the DOPE Project — a 20-year-old harm reduction organization that has been featured in CDC reports for its innovative research and practices in community-based naloxone distribution.

“I don’t think that anybody living in SF is not in the presence of drug use, whether it’s your friends, your family, your neighbors, folks that you interact with on a daily basis,” Murro said.

“And I think a lot of us kind of intellectualize it and focus on it from a research perspective, or we’ll learn all the facts we can, but it’s like, what would we do if somebody was actually standing in front of us and needed our help? Which is not out of the realm of possibility at all.”

The UCSF training event drew more than 150 people who packed an auditorium.

[ Learn how to reverse an overdose by watching “How to Use Narcan with the DOPE Project.”]

The DOPE Project is also spearheading a groundbreaking initiative that trains permanent supportive housing residents as peer overdose responders. When shelter-in-place initiatives were enacted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, people experiencing homelessness were moved into hotels and supportive housing where the risk of overdose increased significantly for drug users due to the decreased likelihood that an acquaintance or bystander could respond.

A San Francisco Chronicle analysis found that of the approximately 650 people who died of accidental overdoses in the Tenderloin and nearby Sixth Street corridor between January 2019 and August 2022, more than 40% died inside single-room occupancy buildings, also called SROs.

In response, the DOPE Project collaborated with the San Francisco Department of Public Health on an overdose prevention training program designed for people living in permanent supportive housing. 

In February 2021, residents of two single-room occupancy buildings participated in the pilot — the Cadillac Hotel and The Minna Lee — in cooperation with buildings’ service provider, Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing. The program installed inside the room of every resident an emergency button, which, when activated, sounded an alert on a peer responder’s phone so they could quickly respond and administer Narcan.

Responder Susan Lefever said the system works because residents tend to be distrustful of authority. So, if something goes wrong, they’re more likely to reach out to peers rather than building staff. She added that ever since she took on the role, she’s felt renewed pride.

“It feels like I’m useful, like I have a sense of purpose,” she said. “I’m not just one of the statistics in the SRO. I’m actually helping within the community.”

The post SF Students, SRO Residents Train to Reverse Drug Overdoses appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Several weeks after a crucial legal hurdle blocking safe consumption sites in San Francisco was seemingly resolved, proponents said they were dismayed that city leaders and public health officials were still not greenlighting centers that could reduce deaths related to drug use.

Overdose deaths have reached 620 this year — on track to have the highest annual tally since counting began, with fentanyl causing the vast majority of fatalities, according to the chief medical examiner’s latest report.

The Department of Public Health advocated for safe consumption sites — also known as overdose prevention centers or OPCs — in its 2022 Overdose Prevention Plan. These are places where people can consume drugs under supervision and get immediate help if they overdose, and where they can receive basic healthcare, hygiene services, food, and referrals to detox and treatment upon request.

But the department now appears to be hedging, said Supervisor Hillary Ronen.

“DPH gave us an initial timeline that had the first OPC opening in March of 2025,” she said. “Clearly, that’s not an urgent priority to deal with the fact that two to three people a day are dying of drug overdose.”

In Episode 5 of the podcast series, “The Fight for Safe Consumption Sites: San Francisco and the Overdose Crisis,” we investigate San Francisco’s long campaign for places where people could take drugs under supervision in case they overdose and how city leaders may be having a change of heart about supporting the sites, and we visit one such overdose prevention center in New York City. Read our previous coverage on this storyline.

Overdose prevention centers have operated in Canada and Europe for more than 20 years — and none of those centers has ever recorded a death, according to studies published in academic journals. Studies have shown that in communities where centers were located, their presence correlated with improved client health, reduced public nuisance, an increase in detox services, higher rates of long-term addiction treatment and, over time, reduced use of the sites for injecting drugs. And a cost-benefit analysis published in December 2016 in the Journal of Drug Issues showed that a single safe consumption site could save San Francisco’s public health system $3.5 million annually.

Mayor London Breed supported the 2022 plan and in the last two-year budget included $18.6 million for wellness hubs that would offer overdose prevention services. But City Attorney David Chiu warned that opening such sites could violate so-called “crackhouse” laws, federal statutes that, among other things, make it illegal to “knowingly open, lease, rent, use, or maintain any place, whether permanently or temporarily, for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance.” Last April, Breed and Chiu agreed that to avoid breaking the law, the city could fund a wellness hub with wraparound services like healthcare if the safe consumption portion of the center was privately funded.

One local organization appears to have solved that part of the puzzle. On Oct. 5, Gary McCoy, vice president of policy and public affairs for HealthRight 360, a nonprofit contracted by San Francisco to provide treatment services, announced that his organization had raised the funds needed to operate an overdose prevention center.

The San Francisco Examiner on that day quoted a health department statement asserting that it was unaware that a nonprofit had succeeded in raising funds. Five days later, in an email to the Public Press, the department provided the same statement: “We have not been informed that any nonprofit has succeeded in raising funds. However, once the funds are raised, there are a number of complex legal, procurement, location, and community factors that need to be addressed.”

[Double your year-end gift to the Public Press during NewsMatch, a national campaign that supports nonprofit newsrooms by matching donations dollar for dollar.]

McCoy said he has noticed a lack of urgency regarding overdose prevention centers, adding that the city is now “barely discussing” implementing wellness hubs. He said he also noticed the increasing politicization of harm reduction strategies, a collection of practices that address health needs without requiring that those receiving help abstain from drugs or alcohol, or that they enter treatment for addiction.

“There’s been a very vocal, small group of people that have been really hammering this messaging — that they’re condemning San Francisco for progressive policies and talking about ‘this is why the city has failed,’” McCoy said.

Among those speaking against harm reduction is a new political lobbying group called TogetherSF Action, which is campaigning against overdose prevention centers, arguing that they are an ineffective way to connect people to treatment.

“These people are somehow getting the ear of our policymakers over the dedicated staff that have worked in these departments, that have the medical training, that have the lived experience,” McCoy said.

San Francisco pioneered the harm reduction philosophy in 1967 when the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic provided healthcare to crowds of young people who heeded the call to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” It’s a healthcare approach that does not require people to stop taking drugs to get support. Instead, the goal is to help improve the health of people suffering from addiction by providing clean drug supplies, basic medical and hygiene care, some food and shelter.

But today, some local leaders, like Supervisor Matt Dorsey, are seeking to redefine those principles.

“We do have to take the principles of harm reduction seriously, in that part of it is reducing harms to the community,” Dorsey said.

Dorsey said the city’s permissiveness around drugs has resulted “in a level of drug tourism or San Francisco becoming a destination city for drug use.”He quoted a statistic from a report presented by Police Chief Bill Scott to the Police Commission last June indicating that 95% of people arrested for drug use that month were not from San Francisco.

Data from the chief medical examiner may challenge the drug tourism theory: A report released in October showed that 92% of people who died of overdose from January to September this year were from San Francisco.

Alex Kral, a San Francisco-based epidemiologist with expertise in substance use and overdose prevention centers, said the notion that harm reduction services encourage drug users to come to San Francisco “doesn’t really make any sense.”

“There’s no data showing this,” Kral said. “In general, the people who go to these types of services are people who’ve come to terms with the fact that they’ve been using drugs a long time, they’ve got a problem, and they need some help.”

Even though proponents fear that support for overdose prevention centers is waning among city leaders, they are not giving up. Activists have been running pop-up safe consumption sites in areas of the city where overdoses are most prevalent. 

Ronen participated in one such site on Aug. 31 — International Overdose Awareness Day. But she said that was an act of civil disobedience, not a replacement for the real overdose prevention model.

“Why the model is so wonderful is you can actually save people’s lives and do this really positive health intervention, and at the same time, address one of the worst things happening in San Francisco right now, which is the really chaotic streets conditions in certain neighborhoods,” she said.

Ronen said that when her office approached Breed’s office for a renewed commitment to overdose prevention sites, they were stalled yet again.

“I think there’s a good chance that HealthRight 360 is going to have to give back hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that we’re just going to see more and more people die of drug overdose in the city,” Ronen said.

Meanwhile, Breed and law enforcement officials have vigorously campaigned on a strategy involving arresting people under the influence of drugs, despite health department advice to the contrary. In its 2022 Overdose Prevention Plan, the Department of Public Health noted that punitive policies “have not been shown to be effective at reducing overdose deaths, while incarceration is known to significantly increase risk of dying of drug overdose.”

Ronen said the health department’s silence regarding the mayor’s approach is irresponsible.

“The Department of Public Health just does what she tells them to do, which is also a problem. Because in my opinion, they’re doctors, they have a duty to do everything in their power to save their patients’ lives,” Ronen said.

The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The post City Officials Lack Urgency to Prevent Overdose Deaths, Say Safe Consumption Proponents appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has frequently compared the sale of fentanyl to murder — most recently saying “the sale of fentanyl is equivalent to handing someone a loaded gun” during an Oct. 1 San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing.

As such, she has criticized and diminished the use of diversion programs that offer criminal defendants accused of selling drugs rehabilitation, counseling and training rather than jail sentences. Since taking office 15 months ago, Jenkins has reduced the number of referrals to the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project by 70%, according to its CEO David Mauroff.

And as San Francisco’s rate of overdose fatalities reaches more than two deaths a day, Jenkins is pushing for defendants accused of selling drugs to remain in jail. But some legal advocates say that’s a bad strategy both for the defendants and for public safety.

“Who’s deciding our strategies and our next steps around all these people that are in jail?” Mauroff said. “They’re going to be released, you can’t hold them forever. So, what’s the plan for when they’re released?”

In Episode 4 of the podcast series, “The War on Drugs Revisited: San Francisco and the Overdose Crisis,” we take a historical look at the justice system’s approach to drugs, its racial inequities, what has changed over the years, and which older policies may be making a comeback. Read our previous coverage on this storyline.

Alexandra Pray, a San Francisco deputy public defender, said Jenkins’ heavy prosecutorial approach undermines the possibility of helping people develop skills to lead better lives without selling drugs.

“It’s maddening to have a district attorney’s office who says that their goal is to clean up the streets, but we have this proven way to actually make substantive changes and not just temporarily fix the problem, and the DAs office is willfully avoiding it,” Pray said.

The district attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, told a California State Assembly committee dedicated to overdose prevention last May that arresting low-level drug dealers could undermine public safety by taking resources away from fighting violent crime.

“People at the bottom, you can punish them all day, and they’ll just be immediately replaced,” he said. “If you prioritize doing that, if we super criminalized low-level drug crimes, we effectively decriminalize going after rape, arson, murder, because there’s only so much resource in the criminal justice system. So, that I think was the big mistake of the 80s and early 90s that I would hope we would not repeat.”

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A Pew Research study from 2018 revealed that more imprisonment doesn’t reduce a state’s drug problems. The data showed no relationship between prison terms and drug misuse. 

The study’s authors concluded: “The evidence strongly suggests that policymakers should pursue alternative strategies that research shows work better and cost less.”

The San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project was established as such an alternative strategy in 1976. The board and staff are composed of San Francisco residents, members of the San Francisco Bar Association, judges of the municipal courts, and a former client and current clinical social worker, Philip Jones. 

Jones, who said he was in and out of the criminal justice system from an early age, said it wasn’t until he was connected with the pretrial diversion program that he was able to turn his life around.

He said that his Latino-African American heritage influenced the way people in authority responded to his needs as a child.

“From a young age, I was told in school by teachers, by doctors that my behavior wasn’t normal,” Jones said. “I wasn’t able to sit in the classroom and go through eight hours of school every day without some kind of disturbance. I benefited more from physical play art, things that kind of excited a different dopamine response than just like normal completion of tasks or mathematics or science.”

Attempts to discipline Jones escalated from sending him to the principal’s office to after school detention to juvenile hall.

“That, in combination with exposure to trauma, some violence in the home, experimentation with substances, addiction, mental health, just kind of fueled my engagement with the criminal justice system,” he said. “I started to believe that I was this person that was destined to be incarcerated over and over again, this person that was incapable of holding a job, of getting higher education, and in this category where I felt really lost.”

For six years, he was routinely arrested for non-violent offences, at one point facing warrants every other month. Then, through the pretrial diversion program, he was assigned a case manager who helped him navigate social services, secure a long-term shelter bed, enter substance use treatment and anger management programs, and access mental health, where he found out about his bipolar disorder and learned about the importance of taking regular medication. The case manager’s office was open whenever Jones wanted to check in — it even had a cot in a secluded corner if he felt like taking a nap.

Jones said the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Program helped his life “pivot from a cycle of arrest, jail, court into a cycle of healing.” Today, Jones has a master’s degree in social work and works as a therapist in a middle school and a high school.

“I see myself in the kids I work with every day, and literally in the neighborhood that I grew up in,” he said. “I love when clients feel that they can be comfortable with me when they feel they can talk to me, and they feel that I really see them on a level maybe others haven’t in the past.”

The post DA’s Opposition to Drug Diversion Programs Undermines Public Safety, Say Legal Advocates appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.