Opinion: Sorry, SF activists; public drug abuse is “very literally” trashing downtown
Image by Thomas Hawk
Local org Drug User Liberation Collective has sparked controversy with its “DOWNTOWN IS FOR DRUG USERS” signs, posted in San Francisco's Tenderloin to protest Mayor Breed's initiative against public drug intoxication. The signs claim SF's open-air drug market is “very literally not hurting you, your business, or the economy”—though businesses big and small, like the extolled Gump's, beg to differ. An SF Standard excerpt.
A group representing drug users in San Francisco has posted signs promoting drug use and criticizing law enforcement across the Tenderloin neighborhood, the center of the city’s open-air drug scene.
Created by an entity called the Drug User Liberation Collective, the signs, measuring approximately 8 inches by 11 inches, aim to counter a recent initiative under Mayor London Breed to arrest people who use drugs in public, according to Nova Schultz, the creator of the campaign.
The signs blame Breed’s recent drug-enforcement measures for last year’s record-breaking number of overdose deaths. They argue the negative stigma of drug use is responsible for problems in the Tenderloin—rather than drug use itself.
“Downtown is for drug users,” one sign reads. “Yea we buy drugs and do drugs here. … It’s very literally not hurting you, your business or the economy.”
“Anti-drug user culture and laws = white supremacy,” reads another sign, citing data that shows Black people die from overdoses at a rate five times greater than white people in San Francisco.
Black people made up 31% of the city’s fatal overdoses last year, despite accounting for only 5.7% of the local population.
Between January and November 2023, 752 people died from drug overdoses in San Francisco, more than any year prior, according to preliminary data from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.
San Francisco police made 788 arrests for drug use and 556 arrests for drug dealing between May 29 and Dec. 12. Very few of those individuals entered treatment after their release, according to data released in September.
This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Standard. Read the whole thing here.
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