Barry Zevin, MD & Patt Denning, PhD.

Dead people can’t recover…

We are two recently retired medical and mental health clinicians who have cared for thousands of individuals on San Francisco’s streets and in public health programs since the 1980’s. We have witnessed the extreme suffering caused by substance use disorders; and we have seen the damage done when “addiction” is treated as a moral failing and criminalized. We have seen hundreds die. We have seen more recover through respectful and timely treatment of their multiple mental health, medical, drug, and socioeconomic problems. Learning from these experiences,learning from our patients, we created a low-barrier multi-disciplinary model of care  based on harm reduction precisely for the people the ordinance is targeting.

We are alarmed by mandates that people must choose treatment or jail. The assumption that we can coerce people to change complicated behaviors by arresting and threatening them is ridiculous. We can’t; we can only punish them when they don’t do what we think they should. Four decades of research on motivation and change has proven that external control (coercion) actually diminishes motivation to change.

We know that co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders are the rule, not the exception, with childhood trauma being the most common factor behind substance use

disorders. Homelessness adds trauma and it exacerbates all other medical, psychological, and substance-related conditions. It is cruel and inhumane to intensify criminal legal tactics to respond to people who are ill and suffering…[to read the full letter, click HERE]