Tag Archives: drug addiction

San Francisco – Slouching Toward Gomorrah

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Drug injection needles on the street

San Francisco, once a lovely city, is now a poster child for urban decay. The Drug-Homeless Complex rules this once home to strong retail stores, industry, and port activity. What San Francisco has now is a cadre of tax-benefitted app makers, a gargantuan government bureaucracy, and Poop Patrols tasked with washing human feces from sidewalks. What happened?

The Just Vote No Blog recommends a beautiful opinion piece by Lee Edwards, Heritage Foundation Fellow, that appeared in the Washington Times on October 14, Is San Francisco the Future of America?  In this piece, Dr. Edwards speaks of visiting The City after some time of absence. He vividly describes a society that no longer believes in right or wrong, accepts a premise that the purpose of government is to rectify every injustice, and that disdains the universal benefits of the limited government our Founders envisioned.

The vividness of Dr. Edwards’ opinion piece is enhanced by his alluding to the fact that in an uncontrolled spiral, things fall apart. Also, the whole of America might have plunged into the spiral.

What has happened? Why is America slouching like some rough beast — not toward Bethlehem, but Gomorrah? Beyond dispute, things feel as if they are failing apart, and the common rules of a civil society no longer seem to apply.

So true that once civil society starts disintegrating, salvaging individual liberties, personal privacy, private property, and opportunity for upward mobility of all people becomes increasingly challenging. At this point halting and reversing San Francisco’s march towards Gomorrah – as well as halting the national tendency to march along – will require that responsible people pay attention to another admonition in W.B. Yeats often quoted poem The Second Coming.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a limited government hopefully free of special interests such as San Francisco’s Drug-Homeless Complex. Halting the slouching away from such a vision will require responsible people to acquire conviction and the same passionate intensity as those who espouse anarchy and decay.

Cities, Hostage to the Drug-Homeless Complex

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Drug injection needles on the street

Today’s guiding principles in the purported War on Homelessness are remarkably similar to those of the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs. Unsurprisingly, the result of all three responses to challenges is the same – homelessness, poverty and drug use flourished.

When a significant number of people stand to benefit from “fighting” a particular challenge, that challenge will grow. Think of the army of bureaucrats employed by the countless government agencies and government-enabled non-profits that make up these three Wars. They need their jobs to feed their families just like the rest of us.

So, they develop policies divorced from realities. The War on Poverty ignores the fact that people respond to free services by decreasing remunerative efforts that once enabled them to pay for those services. The War on Drugs ignores the insidiousness of the underground market. Today’s War on Homelessness, especially in populous progressive cities like San Francisco, ignores the principal reason for homelessness.

As the article posted on the Just Vote No Blog a few weeks ago, Homelessness: Is Housing the Problem? pointed out, most of today’s homelessness is a product of drug abuse, not a product of lack of affordable housing.

An informative website, The City Journal, in its Autumn 2019 publication carried an article by Heather Mac Donald entitled, San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless. The Just Vote No Blog recommends this article.  Although Ms. Mac Donald’s suggested solution could be interpreted to mean it’s a good thing for cities that act irresponsibly to spread their costs regionally, she reports in excellent details what the homeless interviewed on the streets are saying. They readily admit that “Everyone is on drugs here.”

An inadequate supply of affordable housing is not the first thing that comes to mind when conversing with San Francisco’s street denizens. Their behavioral problems—above all, addiction and mental illness—are too obvious.

Yet, as Ms. Mac Donald points out, the City continues to spend millions of taxpayers’ cash on condoning and normalizing drug use. San Francisco supplies thousands of free injection needles that are openly used in vast homeless encampments. Police are discouraged from interfering with drug sales visible to all passersby. Taxpayers are saddled with funding Poop Patrols the sole function of which is scooping human feces from sidewalks.

This scenario, although painfully entrenched in San Francisco, is supported in many other cities in the U.S. and abroad.  The enabling policies are advocated by the principle of “harm reduction,” a strategy largely funded by George Soro’s Open Society Foundations.  “Harm reduction” in this case applies to those addicted to drugs, not to the sober.

As long as “compassion” dictates everyone live under such conditions, and as long as speech and thought enforcers are at the ready with invectives as soon as anyone objects, the homeless, in the midst of their own misery, will continue to hold cities like San Francisco hostage.