Scourge of syringes
Safe injection sites offer hope as public health hazard grows
San Francisco has earned many nicknames over the years: the City by the Bay, the Paris of the West, the City That Knows How.
Here’s a new suggestion: Needle City.
As San Francisco politicos inch ever-so-slowly toward opening a safe-injection site where intravenous drug users can shoot up legally, the scene outside City Hall and beyond grows more dire.
In March, the Department of Public Works collected 13,333 syringes left on the streets — an average of 430 every day. That’s 10,465 more needles than the crews collected in March 2016, a shocking rise that could be attributed to better collection efforts but also probably to simply more drug use in a country facing a growing opioid epidemic.
The figures come only from the department’s hot spot crews, which mostly clean homeless tent camps. Even more needles were found by regular cleaning crews, though those aren’t tracked. And the totals don’t count all the syringes discarded on port property and in parks.
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen a man passed out and contorted around a bike rack in Civic Center Plaza, needles spread on the ground all around him. A man shooting up between his toes near Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. A man passed out with his head in the murky water of the gutter outside the Main Library.
A Chronicle reporter’s car was recently stolen from Civic Center Plaza and recovered a block away the next day — with two men shooting up inside and 15 needles strewn around. An addict was found dead in a Main Library restroom in February.
Bevan Dufty, a member of the BART Board of Directors, tells me 40 to 50 needles are picked up at each entrance of the Civic Center Station every day. We already knew human feces was mucking up the BART escalators, but Dufty says syringes are a big factor in their breakdowns, too. Syringes contributed to the total failure and yearlong shutdown of the escalator at the entrance by the Burger King at Hyde and Market streets, he said.
On a Facebook group for San Francisco moms, a woman recently shared a picture of her baby at Ocean Beach “right before she found a used needle in the sand.” Another mom responded,
“Happened to us at Dolores Park.”
But until recently, politicians dismissed the idea of a safeinjection site as being too controversial. More controversial than people dying in libraries and babies picking up needles on the beach? Please. San Francisco has essentially become one big unsafe injection site.
If San Francisco wants to reclaim that old nickname the City That Knows How, it needs to try something new. It sounds like the always deliberate Mayor Ed Lee is realizing that, too.
“The current situation on the street is not acceptable. I’ve seen needles (sticking) out of people’s arms when they’re shooting up, and of course it’s a horrible situation,” he said, adding he calls the Homeless Outreach Team when he sees that.
Lee said he’s open to a safe injection site but doesn’t want to call it that. He wants a “harm reduction center” with social services on-site.
“We’ve got to be aspirational about this,” he said. “We can’t be selling this as just someplace to do drugs.”
Barbara Garcia, the director of the Department of Public Health, said it’s unlikely an injection site will open in a new location. Instead, several nonprofits that already offer services for intravenous drug users have said they can incorporate supervised drug use into their sites.
“Part of bringing people inside to shoot up is also providing support to them to reduce their harms,” Garcia said. In the meantime, she sends two-person patrols around Civic Center Plaza to administer overdosereversing drugs. A separate medical team patrols the streets offering health care and services.
Board of Supervisors President London Breed has become a supporter of the safe-injection site idea after visiting one in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“The intent is not to promote or encourage drug use,” she said. “The intent is to provide a site that’s not out on the streets, where people more than likely will just throw their needles on the ground.”
At Breed’s urging, the supervisors have approved a safeinjection site task force, which will have 90 days to meet, gather data and offer a recommendation, at which point a safe injection site could finally become reality in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in Sacramento, including state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, are pushing a bill to remove the state’s prohibition on safe-injection sites so long as they are supervised by health care professionals.
For Breed, the devastation wrought by drug use is personal. More than a decade ago, her younger sister, Chantiee Breed, died of an overdose the day before her 26th birthday, alone in her public housing unit in Potrero Hill.
“You think about what could have been done differently,” Breed said. “Could she have been helped?”
Public health officials estimate there are 22,000 intravenous drug users in San Francisco, and many of them choose to shoot up in public so somebody will help them if they overdose. Public health officials believe 85 percent of intravenous drug users would use safe-injection sites, and that could save the city $3.5 million a year in medical costs.
You know a once-wild idea is becoming more mainstream when even the police chief is open to it. Police Chief Bill Scott called it “one of many opportunities to make this situation better.”
Scott said that currently, open-air drug use is handled on a case-by-case basis. Police try to connect the user with services, but sometimes arrests are necessary.
“I don’t think this is one size fits all,” Scott said.
Maybe the city can agree that the status quo fits nobody. And maybe this issue won’t follow the mold of so many other ideas at City Hall — lots of meetings, lots of hand-wringing and no real action.
Everybody — from the babies finding needles in the sand to the drug users themselves — deserves better.
“The intent is not to promote or encourage drug use. The intent is to provide a site that’s not out on the streets, where people more than likely will just throw their needles on the ground.” London Breed, Board of Supervisors president, on safe injection sites