Somebody tripped over one corpse too many, I guess, and decided it was time to talk a little tougher?

“As overdose deaths hit a record high in San Francisco, the city’s health department has a message: Stop or reduce drug use by seeking treatment.”

SF Health Department Changes Its Tune as Overdoses Surge https://t.co/tPJW38GBn7

— StepUP (@StepUPnow_ca) July 19, 2023

That must have been it.

As overdose deaths hit a record high in San Francisco, the city’s health department has a message: Stop or reduce drug use by seeking treatment.

…At a Friday press conference, Department of Public Health Director Grant Colfax and Behavioral Health Director Hillary Kunins stood next to a picture of a penny dwarfing a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl. The picture, which the department later posted to its Twitter account, is stamped in the bottom right corner with the letters “DEA,” an abbreviation for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

…Drug recovery advocates noted an apparent change in tone from top health officials, some calling it a welcome pivot from prior advertising around drug use.

Fentanyl drives approx 80% of overdose deaths in SF. It is undetectable by sight and smell when mixed with other drugs, putting drug users at a higher risk for death from overdose. Just a small amount can kill. pic.twitter.com/6d12EpuLUQ

— SFDPH (@SF_DPH) July 15, 2023

As warnings go, it’s not exactly scary or intimidating, but at least it’s accurate. That’s a start, and basically a sea-change for San Francisco.

For too long the touchy-feely approach has been sacrosanct among the advocates for the addicts in the city. Ever worried about someone being stigmatized rather than worrying about them potentially ruining their lives or flat out killing themselves, the trendy sophisticates of the Golden Gate City were determined to go in a different direction. Not only did the city not warn against drug use, they actively encouraged it.

…For over a decade, the city of San Francisco has been carrying out an experiment. What happens when thousands of drug addicts are not only permitted to use heroin, fentanyl and meth publicly, but also enabled to do so? The results are in: hundreds of them die annually. Last year, 712 people in San Francisco died from drug overdoses or poisoning, and this year a similar number are on track to do so.

And cities around the country have been copying San Francisco’s approach. Partly as a result of these supposedly progressive policies, 93,000 people in the US died in 2021 from illicit drugs, a more than five-fold increase from the 17,000 people killed by illicit drugs in 2000.

Rather than arresting hard drug users when they break laws, and giving them the choice of jail or drug treatment, the only strategy which has proven to work, the city of San Francisco provides addicts with the cash, housing and drug paraphernalia they need to purchase and use deadly drugs.

Former homeless addict Tom Wolf maintained his habit for six months by surviving on the city’s cash welfare payments. “I got $581 a month in General Assistance and $192 in food stamps,” he told me. San Francisco gives other addicts free hotel rooms without requiring that they stop using drugs while living in them.

That was 712 people dying from overdoses in all of 2020.

"It’s a strange city that bans plastic straws but permits plastic needles. Yet that’s San Francisco today. Between 2020 and 2022, 1,985 people here have died from drug overdoses compared to 1,143 from…" https://t.co/SnEEkn9CTS

— Stephane P. | personal account (@StephaneKensho) July 20, 2023

As of this month, San Francisco has already wracked up a hair over 400 overdose corpses. They are way ahead of the curve.

More than 400 people in San Francisco have died of drug overdoses during the first six months of this year, according to preliminary data released by the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office on Friday.

In June alone, an estimated 53 people died from overdoses, and the city is on pace to lose a record number of lives to narcotics in 2023. Overdose deaths in the city spiked to a record 725 in 2020. The death toll dipped to 640 in 2021 and then climbed to 647 deaths in 2022.

January was the deadliest month of the year for overdoses, with 83 people dying that month. In total, 406 people have died of overdoses in the city this year.

“Gosh – why won’t anyone ride our beautiful BART?” the city fathers whine.

Oh, I don’t know. Any guesses?

OH.

7 Dead on BART in First Quarter as System Struggles With Drugs, Overdoses #SanFrancisco https://t.co/E3atekwhTw via @sfstandard

— pixzen (@pixzen) July 25, 2023

Perhaps it’s that there are also so many avenues to substance abuse now, with so many of those being more addictive and potentially deadlier than the last. The health department, at its press conference, called out one of the latest overdose drugs of choice: a veterinary tranquilizer called xylazine, which is being used in conjunction with fentanyl. It’s already being seen in over 2% of their overdoses.

Who thinks of using these things? I guess this is being cut with the other drugs. Good Lord, what a mess. And what a game of Russian roulette – what are you buying on the street?

As if the fentanyl crisis wasn’t bad enough on its own, a new improved variant has also made it to the streets. As these are all synthetics, I guess it’s relatively easy to whip up a batch of something new in China or Mexico and ship it here. It’s fiendish.

A new strain of fentanyl called flurofentanyl has been found in dozens of overdose deaths studied by local officials in San Francisco.

According to the Journal of Analytic Toxicology, fluorofentanyl began appearing in the U.S. in 2020. “Fluorofentanyl has three positional isomers (para-fluorofentanyl (p-FF), ortho-fluorofentanyl (o-FF) and meta-fluorofentanyl (m-FF)), with the most predominant isomer that has recently emerged in the USA being p-FF,” the journal reported last year.

…A dangerous new strain of fentanyl — fluorofentanyl — was found in dozens of overdose deaths in San Francisco last year while a concerning new street drug called xylazine — commonly known as “tranq” — was present in more than a dozen cases, according to a new report from the medical examiner.

Fluorofentanyl, which can range from half to five times as powerful as prescribed fentanyl, was found in 45 deaths, while xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer not intended for human consumption, was identified in 15 cases. Different kinds of fentanyl were found in 12 cases. All tranq cases also contained fentanyl.

This is not the romanticized peace, love and happiness squalor of Haight-Ashbury in late 60’s newsreels, and it’s about time the city started to come around to dealing with it vice coddling the afflicted.

…Tom Wolf, a local recovery activist who was once addicted to drugs on the city’s streets, argued that the prior ads had given the impression that being homeless and addicted to drugs is fun.

“It actually created division between people who support recovery and those who support harm reduction,” Wolf said.

And there is huge division still. Even with the carnage of failed permissive drug policies laying in the streets for all to see, the apologists and bleeding hearts are out in force raising a hue and cry against the repressive message of the health department’s new tone. What’s killing people, they insist, are “policies of absolute prohibition.”

I Schlitz you not.

Yeah. Because, in Lefty Land, what you can’t get can still kill you.

How do they dig themselves out of this hole?