Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

A government insider says that San Francisco's supervised drug site may worsen drug dealing, crime, and open drug use, and that in other cities, activists have used them to advance a radical de-policing agenda that hurts communities and worsens addiction

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/insider-warn…

A senior government official who oversees health and medical care for homeless drug addicts says San Francisco’s sanctioned drug use site could worsen the existing open drug scene around it.

“As drug consumption sites go in,” said the person, “activists and advocates fight to beat back law enforcement in the neighborhood. The addicts learn that it’s okay, that you don’t need to go into the site, and just be around it, since the police aren’t around.”

The person, who has studied supervised drug sites around the world, requested anonymity. The person is in a senior government role and is not authorized to speak on behalf of their government agency.

However, the person said they felt morally obligated to reach out to me given news of San Francisco’s experimental and illegal drug supervision site as part of its homeless Linkage Center.

The official stressed that they view addiction as a medical problem, support palliative care for older drug users, and accepts a role for supervised drug centers, in the right circumstances.

“I don’t disagree with European model and don’t dismiss that the overdose prevention sites may have utility for a particular population,” said the person, who has worked on the issue in official capacity for two decades.

“And there is no question in my mind that there is a very small subset of the addicted/using population whose needs are palliative in nature.”

But the official said San Francisco is not doing what Europe did. “These guys point to Europe as these fabulous utopias of using drugs safely, but when European officials visit they are horrified by what they see.

"They say to us, ‘We require the addicts to maintain their obligations as citizens. You let them off the hook. You don’t require them to take responsibility for their health and their obligations as a member of a community. That’s where you’re going wrong.’”

In Europe, police and medical professionals put pressure on law-breaking addicts to quit. “If you look around the world, in boutique European and Scandinavian towns, the way they do [supervised sites] is intensely-medicalized,” said the official.

“It’s not just a little hole in the wall where addicts can come and inject freely as they please. It’s a very medicalized system. You can’t let consumption site operators make the police go away and let it become a freewheeling injection site.”

The official said the heavy focus on overdoses distracted attention from the negative impacts of the supervised drug sites on communities. “The activists like to keep the argument narrowly focused on the addict and overdose deaths,” said the person.

“The don’t want to look at the impact of the sites on crime or their devastation on communities and small businesses. It’s folly to think you can attract all those users without attracting all the problems of concentrating addicts. You will see drug traffickers in control.”

Progressives may be seeking to establish a national precedent. “They’ve set up a trap line of a [supervised] drug site [in San Francisco] and are waiting for someone in state or federal government to shut it down....

"Then they will make a court challenge claiming that shutting down the site is a violation of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They’ll tell the court, ‘This is an attempt to keep people alive.’ And in a California court, they’ll win.”

Why is that? And what if anything can be done about it?

Answers here:

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/insider-warn…