Blue city achievement: San Francisco hits its highest overdose count in history

Despite claims to having its homeless situation on the mend and under control, San Francisco is a bigger hellhole than ever. 

According to Fox News, overdose deaths have hit a historic record high:

The San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) showed in its latest report that the city had the most accidental drug overdoses ever recorded in a single year, many of which involved fentanyl.

The report — released on the OCME’s website Thursday — shows the city had 752 accidental overdoses recorded during the first 11 months of 2023. The highest number of accidental overdoses recorded for an entire year was in 2020, with 726 reported by the OCME.

With a little more than two weeks left in 2023, the number of accidental overdoses is expected to rise by the end of the year.

Seems the situation is not under control, it’s worse than ever, and all those “support” groups for the homeless and all those “services” for the drug-addicted that the city has laid out billions for, have brought more overdoses than ever.

As Lee Ohanian at the Hoover Institution has noted:

 

Since fiscal year 2016–17, San Francisco has spent over $2.8 billion on homelessness, and the city’s politicians remain seemingly baffled, year after year, as the number of homeless in the city skyrocket, as opioid overdoses kill more than COVID-19, and as the city has become nearly the most dangerous in the country. 

Since 2016, the number of homeless in San Francisco has increased from 12,249 to 19,086, which comes out to about $57,000 in spending per homeless person per year. With a total population of about 860,000, roughly 2.2 percent of San Francisco residents are homeless, which is over 12 times the national average. There is little doubt that as San Francisco spends more, homelessness and its impact on the city worsens.

More overdoses mean more drug usage is going on, and more usage means more deaths, as these numbers indicate, which suggests that these fentanyl deaths reported now are a function of all the additional cash spent on supposedly fixing homelessness and drug addiction, as well as the failed criminal justice system which refuses to deport Honduran drug dealers who control the fentanyl trade there, owing to the negative impact a felony conviction for drug trafficking would have on their deportation prospects. I wrote about the whole doom loop here.

The results aren’t just in the human costs but in the knock-on effects seen here:

Another San Francisco building which is now 75% vacant being returned back to it’s lender. The “doom loop” continues.

If “AI” is so hot and going to “save San Francisco” how come this building is 75% vacant?

Hint: it’s the drugs. It’s all the drugs. Businesses don’t… pic.twitter.com/Sz4449h2Em

— Thomas Hawk (@thomashawk) December 14, 2023

Which suggests that whatever they’re doing to ‘solve’ homelessness and drug addiction that is dismantling the city itself — and something they need to do less of.

San Francisco is a one-party blue city run solely by Democrats, but it’s got more than one type of Democrat. On the one hand, there is Mayor London Breed, who views the problem as a matter of throwing more money at it, with some inadequate effort at tough-love solutions that tend to boost the homeless-industrial complex further. On the other, there’s characters like Supervisor Dean Preston, who says capitalism did it, so no responsibility of his, other than to target capitalism, not the actual problem. There’s the do-it-over-and-over left and expect a different result, or the lunatic left, that blames free markets. That’s not much to leave anyone optimistic. Update: Which may be why even blue cities are throwing out their progressives. Joel Kotkin, writing at UnHerd, has an excellent piece on that today.

For now, with these fentanyl deaths reaching apex levels, both sides can content themselves with the news that they now hold the U.S. title for what not to do.

Unless San Francisco defunds its homeless-industrial complex, the biggest expense in the city and roughly equivalent to what the city spends on cops, the bad numbers will become worse numbers.

They sure aren’t solving this based on what they are doing. They need to scrap the homeless programs, enact forced treatment for addicts, end their sanctuary city status, and spend big on law enforcement of the hardest kind to get to any sort of return from the pit they’ve dug for themselves.

Image: Twitter screen shot