About 2 people overdose in San Francisco a day. The wait list for treatment is too long. People die on that wait-list. They are begging us for help.

But instead of helping, we promise rich people that step past them on the way to our luxury lives, that the city will arrest them.

@griff @mekkaokereke I maintain it’s not a drug crisis so much as a poorly managed pain (physical and emotional) crisis.

So a public health crisis, but one we can’t solve so long as we’re facing the wrong direction.

One of the moments that sticks with me was turning a corner in Lucerne, Switzerland ~30 years ago and seeing a needle exchange with a few people using. Clean, calm, and utterly unlike US cities.

@deirdresm @griff @mekkaokereke yeah forget trying to get people off drugs, do what Portugal (I think?) pioneered and Switzerland adopted as one of the first, simply because it's cheaper

free prescriptions for addicts. then put competent social workers at the same place addicts get their daily shot, to help them fix their lives: housing, job, life stability in general. convert your addicts into tax payers!

treat the addiction like any other medical condition that requires life-long medication

@deirdresm @griff @mekkaokereke for the really hard drugs most never mange to get off them. some try, when they're in a really good spot in their life overall, but it stops being the primary goal

which also means your backlog wait list for treatment facilities becomes a lot less of an emergency issue. since you fixed the OD issue already by giving addicts high-quality long acting substances that they consume with emergency help right there

oh also crime disappears