I’m so proud of San Francisco Mayor London Breed for her sane response to rampant public drug use in her city. She’s heeded the pleas of the people and vowed to arrest drug users, who are ruining wide stretches of the city. The good citizens of San Francisco want these lowlifes off the streets. Any normal city would long ago have scooped them up and thrown them in jail. But San Francisco, like Oakland, isn’t a normal city. The wokes, or “progressives,” with their Utopian fantasies, have far too much influence. For once, a Mayor is standing up to them.
The amazing thing isn’t that Breed is calling for the arrest of these drug pests. It’s that anyone opposes her. As the Chronicle reported yesterday, Breed’s “crackdown has generated a mix of fierce opposition…from health and criminal justice experts who said pushing people who are struggling with addiction into treatment using law enforcement repeats decades-long harmful and ineffective policies.”
I could not disagree more strongly. I’m sick and tired of these “experts” whose job is apologizing for, and enabling, drug addicts and other criminals. San Francisco has had extremely soft policies toward drug addicts for decades, and the result is what we now see: entire neighborhoods like the Tenderloin turned into hellholes of skanky addicts. Ever before Gavin Newsom’s day, the city had decided to be tolerant of public drug use, in the name of what some call “compassion.” Now that the situation has spiraled out of control, Breed’s pro-drug opponents are calling for even more tolerance. Well, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and hoping for a different result. This is precisely the right time for Breed’s crackdown, and we can only hope she’s serious and has the spine to follow through.
We’re fortunate in Oakland that we don’t have rampant public drug use in the streets. Sure, we’ve all seen the occasional hophead shooting up, passed out or raving, but it’s nothing compared to the Tenderloin, Civic Center and SOMA in San Francisco. I’m not entirely sure why that is, although I welcome it. But we should decide now how we’ll react if and when downtown turns into fentanyl city—and it’s really a question of when, not if. The leftist politicians who run this town are doing their best to make Oakland a haven for drug addicts, as they did for the homeless and criminals. When a city puts out the welcome mat, it has to accept whatever trash the tide washes in.
I’m not looking forward to the fight that will ensue if we start to see more public drug use in Oakland. The wokes—people such as Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks, Nikki Bas and the rest of their radical cabal—will demand “treatment” not jail for these people. They will be supported by “progressive” voters who don’t have a clue to how to run a city, who feel sorry for drug takers and reassure themselves how virtuous they are for feeling that way. Personally, I don’t feel sorry for druggies. Nobody forced them to stick a needle into their arm. They can’t say they weren’t warned. They went ahead and decided to live their useless, drug-addled lives anyway, and now they’re suffering the consequences.
I don’t see why cops can’t simply throw them into paddy wagons and take them straight to jail. I don’t care how “painful” withdrawal is. Not my problem, not society’s problem. I don’t have an iota of sympathy for these people. I don’t care if they refuse treatment. If they do, they’ll just stay in jail that much longer. In the end, these addicts have free will. It’s up to them to decide how to deal with their problem. Jail or abstinence—that’s pretty much the choice before them.
Critics of this approach say that these addicts need treatment. What does that mean? Psychotherapy costs, what, $180 an hour? And I don’t think psychotherapy even works with brain-damaged drug addicts, who will lie in order to get their fix. As a taxpayer, I’m not ready to spend my hard-earned money on therapy for drug addicts. They didn’t care about me when they resorted to their vile lifestyle, and now, I don’t care about them. As a matter of fact, I can’t say I feel bad when some fentanyl freak dies in the streets. One less troublemaker to worry about.
It’s terrible that these drug addicts have so divided our society. But they have, and we, the People, have little choice but to get tough with them. Thank you, London Breed, for setting an example of responsible governance. I doubt if our own Mayor, Sheng Thao, will follow Mayor Breed’s example, but when the Recall Thao movement really takes hold, at least Thao will understand why. She’s on fair warning, starting now: Clean up Oakland, or make way for someone who will.
Steve Heimoff