Any solution to the drug scourge in San Francisco — principally the fentanyl infestation of our people and neighborhoods — can only succeed if paired with a severe supply side suffocation. You cannot find a path to health and prosperity by self-admitted treatment — bell hops attending sober breath upon strung out breath.
How do you bring someone without self-agency to sobriety if not by force? That question answered solves this behavioral science crisis. But it’s a hard question to answer. Not for its complexity, mechanically or physiologically — treatment drugs work — but because of what it asks of those of us that will effectuate the solution.
Because of “body autonomy” (Term used widely in this context for the freedom one has to live and use where they please, that also encapsulates notions of individual space, safe from harassment, and within which to express one’s self). It’s sewn in our legal fabric in the Fourth Amendment and habeas corpus even for those adequately suspected of having committed a crime.
Further, or foremost, because of our natural aversion to putting our hands forcibly on others, or handling a person against their will. “Conservatorship” has an inherently humanistic complication, in that corporal compulsion is something we as people are not disposed to do. Despite our vast history of being driven to violence, we do not want to use physical force, unprovoked or non-consensually. Even less so in a communal society, that thrives on the autonomy of people to pursue their interests, but close together.
Corporal compulsion of seller-distributors is more easily affected than the same for the afflicted. Principally it overcomes the psychological impetus — human emotional constraint to passing to the act — presented above. More plainly: pinning and detaining a dealer, on site, is more easily put in practice, from thought to act, by our most trained and trusted, than pinning and detaining an intoxicated person minding their person, perhaps breaking no law.
With sustained enforcement on the dealer side, you create the environment that drives the afflicted to treatment, from their own will, but likely from necessity. Where no alleyway leads to a fresh dose, seeking the next best treatment is inevitable, however painful. Buprenorphine is considered the next best step for the strung out. Taken in a safe and restful, if need be, guarded environment, it invites addicted people starved of supply. If the real junk is still readily available on the street, elective treatment will remain near zero.
San Francisco and California leadership appreciates the dearth of voluntary treatment admission, and uses euphemistic language like “reach” (below) to bring policy to a direction of compelled treatment, of the longer term kind:
“The law as it is is preventing us from helping those most in need.” But human rights law is a counter force based on human sensibilities — we don’t want to force someone, by nature.
At the same time organizations advocating from those sensibilities make what non-corporal methods of forced mobilizations that have been attempted very difficult to sustain. See Coalition of Homelessness vs. City of San Francisco — encampments cannot be dismantled, packed, or moved by others. While the population represented by the plaintiffs do not wholly overlap with the opioid sick, if these city sanitation efforts are mired in the courts on account of human rights, for understandable reasons explored above, the same should be expected of efforts to physically push or corral users.
You have to cut the heads off the drug hydra.
The war on supply has been waged, on a whole-of-America scale, since before many of today’s afflicted where out of grade school, perhaps before most were born. Lucratively for the actors and stakeholders, but bearing little relief for society, or periodically at best. Sustained, deliberately, for the benefit of both adversaries — Product allowed into the market until law enforcement “judiciously” (“” for effect) checks it to maintain its role as protector of the people, preserving its costly existence, funding its weaponization. A relationship Tyler Sheridan expresses so sharply in the Sicario series, films that take place on and across hundreds of miles of our southern border, not an inner city.
On a localized, city level, stamping and chocking supply is not the logistical impossibility the anti — war-on-drugs argument hinges on.
Work your way from the street dealer on up, to whomever they are buying or taking orders from. Do that over a dozen channels and a few dozen more, and identify the common points they lead to. Governor Newsom enlisted the National Guard and Highway Patrol to pursue this strategy in April. It has since lead to results exhibited by citizen observers, and the responsible departments:
Increased arrests in the time since have adverse effects of their own, that weigh on the justice system. But that is a system for which we have outlets to relieve backlogs and miscarriages. On the streets, there is no system.
The approach to our city’s opioid emergency this piece elaborates on precedes any benefits the heavily funded — and capable — legal, health, and social services complexes can deliver. For their patients and clients must be willing, and the fewer options they have, the more they remain so.
Keep on the beat officers.
