San Francisco Sobers Up

San Francisco Sobers Up

Credit...Taylor Johnson for The New York Times

When I visited San Francisco in 2023, parts of the city looked like open-air drug dens. Users made homes in tents that lined block after block. They bought, sold and smoked fentanyl, crack and meth in public. They used drugs in front of a police station, visibly undeterred by the threat of the law. I once saw four people hunched over, in what’s called the “fentanyl fold,” along a sidewalk in sight of City Hall. It was a startling vision of what had gone wrong with West Coast progressivism.

This year, I went back to find San Francisco in the early stages of recovery. The tents were gone. I spotted public drug use much less frequently. Officials didn’t ignore the remaining addicts. Community ambassadors, as the city calls them, patrolled the streets and tried to persuade users to get into treatment. At a minimum, they made sure that people didn’t treat sidewalks as campgrounds. I could move through the city without having to walk in the road — something most of America mercifully takes for granted.

After the failures of the 1980s and ’90s, when lawmakers responded to a crack epidemic with mass incarceration, progressives united around an approach that decriminalized drugs, either literally (as in Oregon) or effectively (as in San Francisco). The change was well intentioned, grounded in the reasonable view that addicts need help, not punishment. The government’s role was to make treatment available and keep people alive, but not force them to stop. Eventually, people would seek out help on their own. That was the theory.

In practice, drug users didn’t get help. Free of serious consequences for even public drug use, they took over urban neighborhoods across the West Coast and injected, smoked and snorted more freely than ever before. Fentanyl’s spread turbocharged the problem. By the time I visited in 2023, drug users and their tents clogged city streets, and overdose deaths reached a record high for San Francisco (in a year when national overdose deaths declined).

San Franciscans grew fed up. One of them, Daniel Lurie, ran for mayor. Mr. Lurie was not a politician before his campaign; he was an heir to the Levi Strauss clothing fortune and founded and ran a local anti-poverty nonprofit. He said he changed tack because of the slide into disorder.

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German Lopez is a writer for the editorial board. @germanrlopez

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