It has taken a long time but some modicum of common sense seems to be making its way back into San Francisco. It started when the city ousted woke DA Chesa Boudin and continued when it elected a slightly more moderate Mayor in Daniel Lurie. Yesterday, Mayor Lurie took a step that is long overdue. He announced the city would end the free distribution of drug paraphernalia for addicts, at least not without some counseling.

Mayor Daniel Lurie today announced a major policy shift in San Francisco’s response to the fentanyl crisis, focused on getting people off the streets and quickly into treatment and care. Under new guidelines issued by Department of Public Health (DPH) Director Dan Tsai, individuals must now receive treatment counseling or be connected to services to receive safer drug use supplies. 

“We can no longer accept the reality of two people dying a day from overdose. The status quo has failed to ensure the health and safety of our entire community, as well as those in the throes of addiction. Fentanyl has changed the game, and we’ve been relying on strategies that preceded this new drug epidemic, which ends today,” said Mayor Daniel Lurie. “Our new policy will connect individuals to treatment quickly, and that is a big step toward reclaiming our public spaces. I thank Director Dan Tsai for meeting the moment with this evidence-based approach.”

This policy goes into effect April 30 and applies to all city-funded public health programs distributing drug use supplies, including sterile syringes and smoking kits. The new approach mandates that any distribution of supplies be paired with proactive treatment counseling and connections to care, requiring distribution programs to provide treatment referrals and on-site engagement to enable entry into services. The policy also prohibits the distribution of smoking supplies in public spaces.

Mayor Lurie has some allies in making this change including one city supervisor who has a history of drug addiction.

[City Supervisor Matt] Dorsey is a recovering addict himself, and he believes that the harm reduction effort is being driven by activists with a political agenda.

"What I have seen too often in recent years is people are giving out drug paraphernalia and saying, 'Good luck, go use your drugs more safely. And we don't want to say that you shouldn't use drugs because some people view that as stigmatizing,'" he said...

Dorsey said he only got help after people cared enough to make him face some hard truths about himself.

"Thank God that happened. If somebody had offered me a hotel room and a little money and said, 'Go use your drugs,' I might have taken that deal. And had I done that, I might not be alive today."

But of course, Lurie also has plenty of critics, including "harm reduction" advocates who have contracts with the city.

Laura Guzman, executive director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition, called the rule change “moronic and antithetical to what we know works.” Guzman said many harm reduction nonprofits already offer treatment along with smoking supplies, but making that a requirement could limit the number of people they are able to help.

“If you’re pushing this forward and you don’t already have an array of treatment, it’s disingenuous,” she said. “The question is, is this just going to hinder the ability of certain service providers to actually engage with populations that nobody else is able to engage with?”

The coalition holds contracts with the city to distribute Narcan, an overdose reversal antidote, and to train people to administer it.

Lots of voices like that in San Francisco but it's nice to see the city finally telling them it's not taking their advice anymore.

Mr. Lurie’s rollback was the latest sign that San Francisco was moving away from the far-left ideology that had made it a target of late-night comedians and conservative politicians. In recent years, voters have signaled a political shift by ousting a progressive district attorney and electing more moderate city leaders, including the new mayor and Board of Supervisors.

“We’ve lost our way,” Mr. Lurie said on Tuesday as he walked around the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, where fentanyl use and open-air drug markets have proliferated. “We are no longer going to sit by and allow people to kill themselves on the streets.”...

Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who served as a drug policy adviser in the Obama administration, said San Francisco’s change in paraphernalia distribution is another example of West Coast cities — including Seattle; Portland; and Vancouver, British Columbia — rethinking their near-total reliance on harm reduction and focusing on treatment and law enforcement as well.

“The populace has risen up and said, ‘Enough already,’” he said.

And again, even some former addicts don't like the harm reduction approach with no strings attached.

Cedric Akbar, a former heroin addict who runs a recovery program in the city, said that he has seen nonprofits handing out packs of supplies without ever mentioning treatment options or asking for any information — including the user’s age. He said that he is certain people as young as 16 have received free smoking supplies.

“This is ideology gone crazy,” he said, adding he would like to see Mr. Lurie take even stronger steps to curb drug use.

Mayor Lurie stopped short of banning the distribution of drug supplies, saying he still supports harm reduction, but he is at least demanding more from the groups that distribute these supplies and also from the addicts who receive them. That's not much, in my view, but in San Francisco even a tiny bit of common sense is viewed as tantamount to right-wing extremism.