San Francisco rethinks its free documents for drug accessories

Plastic straws are prohibited in San Francisco, at least if you want to drink a soda or a lemonade. However, those who smoke fentanyl were able to obtain them for free, at taxpayers’ costs.

It is also time ago five years ago, when the city helped pay a billboard that showed smiling and sparkling revelers. “Do it with friends,” said the message of the public service, urging drug consumers to consume with others so that they can treat a potential overdose.

For decades, San Francisco was a liberal city where those who consume drugs have found easy access to their substance of choice and a government generally willing to tolerate dependence. City leaders highlighted a harm reduction approach, believing that more lives would be saved by helping users to consume in complete safety than by punishing them.

But Daniel Lurie, the moderate democrat who became the new mayor of the city in January, said this week that things had gone too far. He told the New York Times that he would announce a new policy on Wednesday which would return to the free distribution of clean aluminum foil, pipes and plastic straws in the streets of San Francisco. The supplies were generally used to smoke fentanyl or methamphetamines, and the city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The decline of Mr. Lurie was the last sign that San Francisco was moving away from the distant ideology on the left which had made it a target of late evening actors and conservative politicians. In recent years, voters have pointed out a political change by ousting a progressive district prosecutor and electing more moderate city leaders, including the new mayor and the supervisors’ council.

“We have lost our way,” said Mr. Lurie on Tuesday walking in the city net district, where the fentanyl and outdoor drug markets have proliferated. “We are no longer going to sit down and allow people to commit suicide in the street.”