Drugs and Deals

Maurice Byrd, LMFT, Director of Training and Business Operations

On August 31, 2022, National Overdose Awareness Day, San Francisco will see the preventable overdose deaths of 2 of our residents. The City’s response: arrest everyone in sight that is involved with drugs in the Tenderloin. Never mind that the arrest of street level, low-level drug dealers and users has been a failed tactic for years and has not had any measurable impact on drug use. Never mind that instead our jails and prisons are overcrowded and those arrested are released within days. Or that these arrests bring chaos to communities as well as the drug supply and result in additional overdose deaths. And it certainly doesn’t matter that these practices disproportionately target Black and Brown people and poor people (despite the known fact that white people and people of means use drugs at the same rates). To be as fair as one possibly can be, this racist and failed policy does not lay in the hands of any individual; it is the outcome of systems that have existed in this country for hundreds of years. Racist systems that span the spectrum from outright hatred to more covert, institutional tactics.

The new District Attorney of San Francisco is promoting and installing the very systems and interventions that are the most extreme, dangerous, and negligent in what now feels a renewed War on Drugs in San Francisco. Let’s be very clear, this is not a personal attack on her or the fact that she is also a BIPOC person. This is not an attempt to question her fidelity, love, or membership in the BIPOC community, period. The author of this piece is a Black man that was born and raised in San Francisco. This is instead a call for all who have grown up, live, work and are deeply invested in the people of San Francisco, including our new District Attorney, to join together in the refusal for our City to recycle the same failed tactics from the drug war. We cannot sit by and watch as we continue to lose 2 San Franciscans daily to preventable drug overdose. Because we are arresting people instead of helping.

Read the full article and Newsletter HERE