Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Progressives are attacking the plan by SF Mayor @LondonBreed to use police to shut down drug dealing, but the evidence is overwhelmingly on her side. Why, then, are they so dogmatic in their views? And what must moderates do to support her?

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-progress…

San Francisco’s District Attorney, Public Defender, and a member of the Board of Supervisors are attacking Mayor London Breed’s plan to crack down on crime and open air drug dealing as wrong-headed.

sfchronicle.com/sf/article/D-A…

DA @chesaboudin said “75% of those booked in jail are addicted or mentally ill” and called for a non-law enforcement approach. “More resources for policing & punishment,” said the public defender have “never been the solutions” And @shamannwalton called her to be “evidence-based”

But the Mayor’s plan is evidence-based. Many addicts require the threat of jail or other coercion to stop breaking the law and get their lives together. The approach to breaking up open drug scenes, treating addiction, and providing psychiatric care is the same everywhere

Progressives are right to worry about over-incarceration. Addicts and the mentally ill need treatment, not time in jail or prison. Simply arresting addicts and dealers and not helping them overcome their addiction, and find a new way of life, will not solve the problem.

But law enforcement is also necessary for shutting down open drug scenes. Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna, and Zurich all closed their open-air drug scenes using a combination of law enforcement and social services.

Miami over the last 20 years reduced its “homeless” population by 57 percent, despite skyrocketing rents, by closing open drug scenes and providing free psychiatric care and drug treatment and basic shelter.

The same approach has worked in other parts of the United States. In High Point, North Carolina, police targeted three neighborhoods with persistent crack cocaine dealing. There, police officers, accompanied by local community workers, met with dealers in person.

They asked them to stop, and offered job training, tattoo removal, and help restarting their lives. The officers gave the dealers unsigned arrest warrants, three-ring binders of the evidence against them, and video proof of their crimes.

If you asked most progressives if they'd be okay with having a highly-profitable, multi-billion dollar foreign corporation sell on their sidewalks a highly addictive product, which kills two people a day, most would say "no,” and yet that’s what progressives are allowing.

Why is that? Why do people who claim to care so much about addicts, human dignity, and city life oppose shutting down the open drug scenes that are destroying them? To answer that question, we first need to take a closer look at what has worked in the past.

In the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. Homeless squatted in abandoned buildings. And addicts came from all over the world.

At first the city tried just providing services, like San Francisco does, such as housing, clean needles, and giving people methadone, a heroin substitute, without any strings attached. It didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said a Dutch social worker.

“We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We had to learn the hard way.”

The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users.” The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter.

The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators and if users did not pay fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to treatment plan or face incarceration.

“For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said the social worker. Plans are overseen by a caseworker, psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, & parole officer. "You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said

What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services.

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

“We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” he said. “Many died. Today we have 500 hundred people addicted to methadone and 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them."

The Netherlands just happened to be one of the first nations to realize that it needed to use both law enforcement and social services because either one alone was insufficient. In other words, a balance of carrot and stick are needed. Why are progressives so opposed to that?

Could it be that San Francisco’s progressive policymakers are simply ignorant of what worked in other cities including in Europe? Policymakers, advocates, and journalists are surprisingly ignorant of what European cities like Amsterdam and Lisbon actually did.

They are also overly reliant on what advocacy groups tell them, and provincial in their outlook. While progressive Californians may vacation in Europe, they don’t understand how it deals with addiction and homelessness.

But the progressive decriminalization and harm reduction advocates who provide talking points and briefing materials for progressive policymakers don’t have the same excuse.

The leaders of groups like the Harm Reduction Coalition and Drug Policy Alliance have gone on delegations to European nations and have published reports on their trips. They acknowledge but play down the role of law enforcement. They know the real situation and misrepresent it.

Enforcing the law contributes to further victimization, says Boudin. “Jails do nothing to treat the root cause of crime,” he said. Boudin called “open-air drug use and drug sales… technically victimless crimes.”

When Boudin announced that he was not going to prosecute street-level drug dealers he said it was because they are “themselves [are] victims of human trafficking.”

In fact, there is little evidence to support Boudin’s claim that the fentanyl dealers in San Francisco are dealing drugs against their will. “These guys would show me pictures of the houses they were building back home in Honduras” said @Twolfrecovery a recovering homeless addict

When people with good intentions are doing something unethical, e.g. letting a multi-billion foreign corporation kill two people a day, and chemically enslave thousands of others, it's worth understanding the morality upon which they're operating. In this case, it's victimology.

San Francisco progressives oppose enforcing laws when addicts and mentally ill people break them because, at bottom, they believe our system is fundamentally racist, wrong, and that more of it is bad and less of it is good. They view “the system” as the cause of social injustice.

This also explains why progressives are narrowly focused on black people killed by the police even though 30 times more black people are killed by civilians.

It doesn't have to be this way.Rising crime and violence are snapping people out of their trance. But for them to have any impact, San Franciscans will need to speak up to support Mayor Breed’s efforts to shut down open drug scenes, rebuild the police department, and reduce crime

Opposition by Boudin, Walton, and Raju is not surprising, but it still needs to be countered. Progressives have rallied against Mayor Breed. It’s time for moderates to rally around her and help her make big changes upon which she’s staked her future and ours.

/END