More African Americans died from San Francisco's drug experiment in one year than died from the Tuskegee experiment in 40 years

The progressive drug liberalization experiment is immoral and must end. Now.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/more-black-a…
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.

sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F…
Worse, 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 five-fold increase from the 17,000 people killed by illicit drugs in 2000.
For most of my adult life, I was sympathetic to the progressive drug agenda. I worked with groups funded by George Soros to decriminalize drugs, give clean needles to addicts to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS, and subsidize housing for the homeless.

But as drug deaths rose, and the drug-fueled homeless problem worsened, I decided to take a closer look at the problem.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…
What I discovered shocked me. Rather than arresting hard drug users when they break laws, and giving them the choice of jail or drug treatment, the only strategy proven to work, San Francisco provides addicts with the cash, housing and paraphernalia they need to buy & use drugs.
Former homeless addict @Twolfrecovery maintained his habit for 6 months by surviving on cash welfare payments. “I got $581 a month in General Assistance and $192 in food stamps,” he said. SF gives addicts hotel rooms without requiring that they stop using drugs.
While some are able to end their addictions without help, many others require interventions by family, friends, and, if their addiction results in them breaking the law, the police. Many former addicts, including Wolf, credit being arrested with motivating them to quit.
Researchers have known since 1997 that “patients who have been forced to enter a substance abuse treatment have shown during and post treatment results that are quite similar to those shown by supposedly ‘internally motivated’ patients.”

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK23039…
And in a major 2014 study of how five large European cities shut down “open drug scenes,” researchers concluded that “Prevention, harm reduction and treatment should be combined with law enforcement.”

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
Progressives justify their withholding of the best-available medical treatment of drug addiction in the name of reducing racial disparities in jails and prisons. But the result of the city’s hands-off policy is far worse: racial disparities in drug deaths.
African American men in San Francisco were almost six times more likely to die from illicit drugs than the average city resident.

sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F…
According to @DrIbram Kendi, whose views are shared by San Francisco’s leaders, policies that result in racial disparities are themselves racist.

As a result, they should view harm reduction-only policies, including Housing First, as racist.

sfbos.org/sites/default/…
Indeed, San Francisco is engaged in an unethical refusal to mandate proven medical treatment to drug addicts that is no different from the denial of medical treatment to syphilis sufferers by US government researchers in Tuskegee, Ala., between 1932 and 1972.
In those infamous, racist experiments, US health and medical professionals denied penicillin to African American men long after it became clear, in 1947, that the antibiotic saved lives.

tuskegee.edu/about-us/cente…
It’s true that, in Tuskegee, officials denied treatment in service of the experiment — they wanted to be able to prove penicillin worked — while in SF, officials deny medical treatment out of the belief that doing so is more ethically justified than jail and prison.
But the experts who oversaw the Tuskegee experiment similarly also claimed what they were doing was “ethically justified” since they believed it would give the government the proof that penicillin worked and save more lives in the long run.
Progressive officials have refused to mandate treatment, and enabled addiction through welfare, harm reduction-only, and Housing First policies, for nearly as long as Tuskegee officials denied penicillin to syphilitics, despite overwhelming evidence against these policies.
In 2002, the director of the famously progressive San Francisco Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic said, “It is not only clinically incorrect but almost sadistic to give money on a regular basis to people who have a demonstrated inability to handle cash funds.”

latimes.com/archives/la-xp…
In 2009 a team of scholars and doctors warned, “One potential risk [of Housing First’s harm reduction approach] would be worsening the addiction itself.”

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
And in 2016, a major scientific literature review found that making abstinence a condition of housing had an effect size that ranged from moderate to large, a vastly superior result to the addiction-enabling Housing First policy.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Of the approximately 600 men enrolled in the Tuskegee experiment, 128 died of syphilis, over a 40 year period. Six times more people died of drug overdoses and poisonings in San Francisco last year alone; 178 of them were black.
There is a better way. San Francisco and other progressive cities should arrest addicts who break the law, offer drug treatment as an alternative to jail and prison, and make cash and housing for addicts contingent upon drug treatment.
It is high time that San Francisco and other progressive cities started using proven strategies for saving lives and ending addiction, and ended their deadly and immoral experiment on vulnerable people.
This article was adapted from an article published in The New York Post, “Progressive drug laws in cities like San Francisco are killing people,” October 10, 2021.

nypost.com/2021/10/09/pro…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @ShellenbergerMD

13 Oct
A lot of people believe that the reason for the global energy crisis, which is threatening economic recovery, is because we didn’t do enough renewables, but the opposite is the case. Nations overinvested in weather-dependent renewables & under-invested in reliable power sources
Renewables will constitute 70% the $530 billion spent globally on new electricity generation capacity in 2021

It’s been that way for years. Had that money gone to reliable energy sources, there would be no global energy supply shortage ImageImage
Climate activism helped create the energy supply shortages directly through pressure on companies and indirectly through policies that subsidized unreliable renewables and disincentivized reliable power.
Read 14 tweets
10 Oct
Swords up

Let's go

#SanFransicko
“You have heard it was said, ‘Love your neighbor & hate your enemy. But I tell you: love your enemies & pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven." Matthew 5:43

beautyofbaroque.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/st-…
It's time to treat and shelter the sick

It's time to restore civic order from mass illness

It's time to rescue human dignity from depravity

Read 11 tweets
8 Oct
On Tuesday, HarperCollins will publish my new book, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

I wrote it to expose the system's role in perpetuating a sinister situation

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/my-moment-in…
Interest in the book is high. On Monday I recorded interviews with @JordanPeterson & @RubinReport
Yesterday I recorded a three hour-long interview with @joerogan
And @nytimes has told HarperCollins that it will publish a review of it.
Pre-publication sales of San Fransicko are 4x higher than the ones for Apocalypse Never, but that is no guarantee the book will become a best-seller, so please take a moment now to pre-order a copy for yourself, and a few copies for friends and family.

amazon.com/gp/product/006…
Read 25 tweets
18 Sep
Top German newspaper @handelsblatt blows whistle on renewable energy scam

- wind & solar energies have massive environmental footprint

- "ESG" eco-criteria = greenwashing

- "Now the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating"

handelsblatt.com/finanzen/anlag…
- "This is a wake-up call for the entire industry" says former head of German pseudo-sustainability fund turned whistleblower.

- "Former head of sustainable investing Blackrock, Tariq Fancy, calls ESG boom a "dangerous placebo"
"Sustainable investments make investors feel like they can invest in something 'good' while earning attractive returns. The industry had a lot of leeway to define the ESG criteria in such a way that they fit the respective providers."

Background:

Read 13 tweets
18 Sep
High energy prices force factories to close in UK, exposing its over-reliance on gas & renewables

“There is a way out of the bind. Yes, it is expensive, but the alternative, as we are seeing now, could easily be far more costly. We need to go nuclear.”

telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/…
“Even when things do improve, businesses have now been alerted to the fact that the UK is more susceptible to big price spikes than other countries. Wholesale prices have quadrupled, according to UK Steel”
“On Wednesday, CF Industries Holdings, a big fertilizer maker, said it is shutting down its plants in Billingham and Ince because of high natural gas prices. It couldn’t say when production will resume.”
Read 9 tweets
15 Sep
When I was in the in UK 2 years ago the country’s leading experts assured me that Britain didn’t need another 2 GW nuclear plant because wind energy was cheap and, in a pinch, they could just import power from France. Now, the wind’s barely blowing & the interconnect has failed
Happily, the French government has decided to bring an end to the nightmare of 75% cheap, reliable, pollution-free power and increase the use of stochastic wind energy and natural gas. Impeccable timing!
With winter coming, natural gas prices at historic highs, and fuel supplies running low, December will be a perfect time for Germany to shut down 4.2 GW of advanced nuclear reactors. France may be the birthplace of the Enlightenment, but Germany appears set on being its graveyard
Read 6 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(