The hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers | Hacker News Reader

The hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers

sfchronicle.com

30 pointsgmays27 comments

I lived in a rented room on Minna street and 7th in SoMa for a year back in 2015. I drove by yesterday out of curiosity and the area has gotten much worse. Dozens of homeless, addicts and dealers have completely taken over the sidewalks and street into a skid row type scene. Obviously selling and using hard drugs. No police presence of course. No idea how any sane person could live there. The housing is starting to look like honduras with the cage bars and barbed wires, except it’s $3500/month for a 2bd apartment on the block. I drove away scared and sad. A terrible trajectory for the city, and perhaps for the whole country if we can’t significantly shift the culture and policies around addiction, housing, wealth inequality and societal values generally.

It's a slow-motion siege.

I frankly hope America gets real about drugs- treat their use and presence as a given, decriminalize them, regulate them like alcohol and marijuana, render drugs a public health issue and not just a way to fill prisons, and put this town out of business.

+1 to that. I worry it’s not possible because drug war allows political posturing that goes back from Nixon and hippies and the southern strategy, to the current talk about “inner cities” and Chicago, it’s all coded language because they can’t say what they want to say, but people who know to listen for it hear the words.

The stick hasn’t been working for anyone except the private prison investors. We should do exactly what you’re saying. I fear the unfortunate truth is that even those measures wouldn’t be enough, we need to fix the push toward this need to escape. Something like the changes you listed, and the new deal era public works projects paying a legit middle class wage.

It's notable to look to the experience of Portugal, recently discussed on HN, in fact. Their policy of decriminalizing all drug use was successful for over a decade, until they privatized part of it.

Would the US do this in a sensible fashion, or in a half-assed "public-private partnership" fashion?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36638752

It seems like we’re screwed either way. Reading and watching videos about Portugal, it does not look like it’s going very well. It seems like the experiment to decriminalize drugs there started out going pretty well but has turned ugly in recent years.

idk what we can possibly do. Drugs are already effectively decriminalized in coastal cities anyway and it doesn’t look like it’s doing good things for the population.

I read that Portugal derailed the program itself, underfunded and privatized it and it’s a shadow of what it was when it started.

I imagine it’s important to support the drug infrastructure so to speak - support for addicts, non-police-centric ways of dealing with the potential addicts etc. drugs are the devil, but they do come with their share of problems, which you can’t expect to just vanish upon legalizaton.

Government/ society gotta put in an effort comparable at least to that of the anti-tobacco etc.

It seems the liberalization approach is failing in a few places.

Part of me knows that it’s because only the most surface level feel good things are being done, and we are just helping addicts stay addicts (and alive!) instead of treating them.

On the other hand, I’m not holding my breath for “our current approach is failing, we need more of it” to get ANY political traction. Not these days.

Portugal tried it, and the number of addicts skyrocketed.

Some drugs are just so much more addicting than alcohol. I quit drinking a few years ago without any side effects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

IMO this will not work. Serious drugs are absolutely a public health issue, and some public health issues have to be solved through civil and criminal laws. Drugs have to be approved by the FDA to be allowed to be sold, and the ultimate enforcement for this is civil and criminal law.

If we regulated fentanyl and meth like alcohol, we would have an absolutely enormous population of addicts, and even in a legal, regulated market, those addicts would resort to crime to pay for drugs.

Perhaps there is a better solution, but the best solution I know if is simply to much more aggressively enforce drug laws. Dealers of serious drugs should be facing major jail time, and even personal possession should be punished with significant jail time.

Ah yes, the “trust me, this time the war on drugs will totally work” response.

How do you explain all of the first world asian countries where drugs are insanely illegal, there very much have a massive war on drugs, and yet they have an amazing quality of life there without meth head zombies roaming the streets? Where it's apparent their war on drugs has very much worked?

> Where it's apparent their war on drugs has very much worked?

I'd bet (but hopefully someone can link to research) that there are many contributing factors for why vast hordes of people don't feel the need to numb themselves to death with drugs in those locations?

Very few people voluntarily want to become addicts if they are having a happy fulfilling life. So why are there so many people in the US who see no other road to take?

There are plenty of people in these countries that have very difficult lives that might be prone to drug addiction if drugs were available, but they're not, so they aren't.

> if drugs were available, but they're not

That's wishful thinking, it can't be done. No human society has ever been able to supress something for which there is a huge amount of inelastic demand. It can't be done.

It's raw capitalism at its finest (maybe not finest, but most raw). If there is a huge demand, the supply will happen no matter what.

It's simplistic to think of the drug trade in terms of the good guys who are pure and looking to stop it and the bad guys trying to create and sell it. When there are billions of dollars involved, these groups infiltrate each other constantly and are quite intertwined.

You can find endless stories of how trafficking is done by the police themselves. No better way to avoid detection than by being there. One random recent example.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/bay-area-police-union-leader-alleg...

If you want to stop drug trade, the one and only way is to eliminate (or at least reduce to inconsequential levels) the demand for it.

How about we de-stigmatize its use so that an addict is able to tell their family members and friends rather than being silent about their addiction?

My best friend (and angel investor / VC) died of fentanyl in SF in 2018. At first I thought it was suicide because I had no idea he was on drugs. What ended up happening is he was prescribed legal opioids for legitimate reasons (he had brain cancer including surgeries), and then never got un-addicted to them when the refills ended, so he resorted to street drugs to avoid going into withdrawal. (and then "oops, fentanyl...")

And he couldn't tell anyone or share that he was going through this with anyone because he was extremely high functioning VC / angel investor.

At a minimum, we need to create a society where "an addict" doesn't immediately conjure an image of a homeless person with no teeth. Or come up with some new "branding" for it (for lack of better terminology). We need to normalize the concept of addiction so it can be discussed more openly and broadly.

Your friend's death is a tragedy. Preventing as many deaths like this as possible is what I hope for the future.

Suppose your friend were in a country like Singapore, where drug punishments are extremely harsh. When his prescription ran out, he would have been faced with the choice to either kick opioids or engage in serious criminal activity. Finding a dealer would be very hard, because dealers are executed if caught. Even if he found a dealer, he would know that, if caught, he would be facing jail time. There's a very good chance that someone in your friend's position would decide to go through the extremely difficult process of kicking.

In SF, even for someone who is trying to kick, it is so easy in a moment of weakness to just to go down to the Tenderloin and buy fentanyl, like your friend did. Buying fentanyl there is pretty easy, not too expensive, everyone knows where to go, and there is zero chance of being arrested. The only problem is that you might get more than you bargained for and overdose and die.

I also have a friend who got addicted to stimulants and was going insane from them. I tried hard but ultimately wasn't able to help him. I talked to a lot of people who deal with addiction professionally, and what I kept hearing was that in this situation someone has to hit rock bottom before they can start to recover.

In the end, he was arrested for forging prescriptions and had to spend some time in jail, where he didn't have access to drugs. He would say that this was the first step towards his recovery and the best thing that ever happened to him. He got clean and went on to get a master's degree, get married, and now has a good job and a couple of kids.

Rock bottom in San Francisco though isn't a jail cell, it's overdosing on the sidewalk and dying.

Wonder if anything can be learned from the gambling industry.

Gambling is a vice and can be a damaging addiction. Yet it’s legal in many places and while there are stories of people gambling their life away, society doesn’t seem to see it as a major problem (and in fact is promoting its use via legalization of online gambling)

Personally I think that legalizing online gambling will prove to be a huge mistake. 30-40 years ago the national strategy was basically to confine it to Vegas and Atlantic City, and most people live far enough from those places that the inconvenience keeps the vulnerable from developing a full blown addiction. Putting this in every smartphone is going to lead to many destroyed lives.

The one good thing that the gambling industry has is the ability to add yourself to a self exclusion list.

Gambling and alcohol are different though from Fentanyl in that the large majority of people who gamble or drink alcohol don't become addicted. Fentanyl though is just such a strong stimulus that it exerts a nearly irresistible pull for too many people.

Drug use was decriminalized in Portland OR by ballot measure, and it is not going well. Open air drug use, coupled with an increase in violence and crime have made being in large parts of downtown quite unbearable.

Filling prisons with drug users is probably not the answer, but just letting people do as they please because they are addicts with issues doesn't guarantee great outcomes either.

You're never going to get mass public support to decriminalize heroin and other hard drugs.

And if the mayor mentions this reality, she is forced to apologize.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Mayor-Breed-...

> Like many other U.S. cities, San Francisco shifted years ago to treating drug use more like a disease than a crime. The heavy policing approach of the War on Drugs era failed to slow dealers or decrease demand while overcrowding jails and disproportionately punishing people of color, studies show.

How much do you want to bet that these studies are completely fraudulent? Looking at the alzheimers research debacle academia has completely lost credibility. There are thousands of overly political and overzealous academics willing to lie or fudge the numbers to achieve political goals.

We really need to use the Grandma test for these things, does making something illegal make people do less of it? Yes, my grandma could have told you that. Guess what, we decriminalized drugs, users arent being punished. The users are now dying at record rates and more people are doing the drugs than ever!

One huge issue of our age is blindly calling any research study “science” and ridiculing people who don’t accept the results.

Thanks for this, this narrative is being repeated a lot and should be challenged more: "The WAR on drugs failed so therefore we must totally 180 on everything."

Obviously being very hard on drug dealers didn't eliminate drug usage, however we are not comparing it to the counterfactual of different drug strategies. Maybe the war on drugs did save people's life and prevented a large amount of drug usage.

OR "disproportionately punishing people of color" Are they also disproportionately affected by overdoses or as victims?

If we spent half as much money helping people with recovery as we spend incarcerating them, there would be a lot of improvement. There are addicts that are tired of being addicts but can’t get help. I’m talking about in patient treatment plans where they can be monitored and assisted with various methods to deal with withdrawal.

Continued US intervention in Honduras for over a century has turned it into a wasteland. We've been involved in setting up puppet governments there and knocking them down when they seemed inconvenient since the US fought wars over fruit instead of oil. We're "spreading democracy" by denying the results of democratic elections (which we do abroad more than we do at home!). And then we turned Honduras into a CIA-backed narco-state.

If Hondurans happen to do the same to admittedly sketchy parts of the US, it's reciprocity at worst.

Want to keep that from happening? Maybe reign in foreign policy. And maybe start supporting local people's choices and helping them toward liberty and prosperity instead of treating them like others to be exploited for yankee dollar.

The Chronicle finally notices SF's drug problem, only to point the finger of guilt somewhere else! Look in the mirror, Chron.

There isn't a "good" answer to dangerous drugs. Fighting a drug war is the worst solution, except for all the others.

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